Adam Miller is a tech entrepreneur and nonprofit leader. (photo courtesy of Adam Miller)

Adam Miller is one of 14 candidates running for mayor of Los Angeles in the upcoming June 2 primary election. A tech entrepreneur and nonprofit leader, Miller hopes to unseat incumbent mayor Karen Bass and find new solutions to the problems facing Los Angeles – a city he says is broken.

“Unlike some of the other candidates, I am not a career politician,” Miller said. “I have not spent my time in politics. I have spent my time getting results, building businesses, building nonprofits and leading organizations to have social impact.”

Miller founded Cornerstone OnDemand, an education software company, in his apartment in 1999. He led the Santa Monica-based tech company until 2021, when it sold for approximately $5.2 billion, and has also founded several nonprofits with myriad mission statements. His nonprofit work includes leading groups dedicated to humanitarian aid, connecting people from underserved backgrounds with internship opportunities in the tech industry and accelerating development of new treatment for people with food allergies. Perhaps Miller’s area of expertise with the most transferable skills to City Hall, however, is homelessness.

“When Cornerstone was taken private in 2021, I started with my wife to work on intractable problems. And obviously the intractable problem in our city is homelessness, so we did about a year and a half of research, and ultimately started an organization called Better Angels, which I run, which is taking a completely different approach to the homelessness epidemic,” Miller said. “It has been extremely successful thus far in really transforming the way we deal with the problem – focused on prevention, more efficient service delivery and a different approach to affordable housing. In just a couple of years we have kept thousands of Angelenos off the streets who have already received eviction notices … We provided services to over 12,000 unhoused neighbors who were not getting the kind of services they needed. We’ve provided a broad range of services through a big coalition of service partners that we work with, and we have begun development on what will be hundreds of affordable housing units that are not being funded by the public sector but rather are getting equity financing from the private sector and building ultimately in a third of the time and a third of the cost of what we on average are doing today in affordable housing.”

Miller, a lifelong Democrat, said in order to provide long-term solutions for the homelessness crisis as mayor, he would put more allocation toward prevention and increase awareness for services already in place for people at risk of losing housing due to eviction. He said that people who are often at risk of becoming homeless don’t receive help from the city until it’s too late.

“They’re not aware of the assistance they can get,” Miller said. “The way the city has been operating, when we do try to tell people, we do it way too slowly. These are people that have, typically, three to seven days to get assistance or they’re going to be evicted. They don’t have months of time. So this idea that we’re going to mail them something eventually is just absurd.”

He added that the city should be more efficient in terms of service delivery for homeless people. He argued, for example, that there are services currently provided by the city of L.A. that L.A. County should pay for, and there are overlapping and redundant services for which the city spends far too much money. He also said the city does not do an adequate job of keeping track of which interim housing is available, and is excessively spending on housing solutions.

“We take things that should cost $10,000 and make them cost $100,000 per unit,” Miller said. “We take things that should cost $300,000 and make them cost $800,000 a unit.”

Overall, he characterized Bass’ approach to homelessness as ineffective, inefficient and financially wasteful, and the current city government as lacking transparency and accountability. He said under his leadership, the city of L.A. will see better results in terms of homelessness for “98% cheaper.”

“The results that people are saying are effective, like the mayor, have not been effective at all. We have six people a day dying. Some of the numbers that we’re saying are reductions in the homeless count can be attributed just to death of people living on the street,” Miller said. “We can do so much better in this area, and we’ve proven it at Better Angels. I mean, we’re actually doing this stuff more cheaply, more effectively, more efficiently and those programs and others can be expanded throughout the city and the county to be much more effective and really solve this epidemic.”

He cited a balanced approach to homelessness – one that continues to enforce the laws in place while maintaining an ethical and compassionate framework to help people get off the streets.

“It’s not an either-or. You don’t have to be unfeeling and uncompassionate and jail people who can’t help themselves,” Miller said. “But at the same time, we have to protect the rights of our residents. This is a quality of life issue. This also has major implications on other services in the city … The fire department spends over 60% of its time on dealing with issues related to homelessness.”

Miller also said that a key element of solving homelessness is increasing the city’s housing stock at every level – affordable, workforce and market-rate housing – and bringing down excessive rents.

“The only way to solve that, the only way to reverse that is supply and demand,” Miller said. “Last I checked demand is not changing, so we have to increase supply. If we have more housing, of all types, then the cost of rent on average will come down.”

As with homelessness, Miller emphasized a holistic approach to increasing housing that includes transforming and streamlining many different parts of the development process.

“That’s permitting, that’s entitlements, that’s predictability around inspections, that’s urgency around how we’re doing our housing, that’s fixing laws like ULA which dramatically deter housing production and it’s the attitude we have towards real estate developers,” Miller said. “We have made L.A. one of the hardest places in the country to build, and so it’s not surprising that we have a massive housing shortage.”

He said Los Angeles has failed to create a viable housing plan, and called Senate Bill 79 – which allows higher density residential buildings along transit stops – a consequence of the city’s failure.

“SB 79 is the state saying, ‘We’re not going to sit by while you abdicate your responsibility to build housing. We’re going to force you to build housing.’ We need a real housing plan,” Miller said. “We absolutely should have local control over where and how housing gets deployed. The truth is we need housing everywhere, but the way we’re doing housing and the type of housing should have neighborhood input and be based on the uniqueness of the 99 neighborhoods that we have here today.”

Miller, a Brentwood resident who has lived in different Westside neighborhoods, said that in areas like the Miracle Mile, Mid-Wilshire and Hancock Park, he supports the “livable communities initiative,” which advocates creating more walkable areas by building 3-5 story housing on commercial corridors that line the perimeter of single-family residential communities. Miller suggested converting existing single-story retail spaces into buildings that include ground floor retail space and four floors of housing, similar to parts of Koreatown and cities in Europe.

“What makes no sense is putting an eight-story building in the middle of a neighborhood with single-family houses,” Miller said.

In terms of transportation, Miller said the city has a lot of catching up to do to put Los Angeles on par with other cities.

“No. 1, we’ve got to finish the [LAX] People Mover. It’s already over a billion dollars over budget and three years delayed. That would never happen if I was mayor. I know how to run things and how to operate. I know how to manage budgets,” Miller said.

He also criticized the $1.5 billion project to build elevated roadways for LAX Airport traffic, which is expected to increase the amount of total drivers entering and exiting the airport.

“I certainly would not be starting a highway restructuring project by the airport that nobody wants, that nobody thinks is going to solve the traffic problem and is potentially starting right before the Super Bowl and the Olympics, which makes absolutely no sense,” Miller said.

He said the city needs to continue to connect existing Metro lines, including the finishing the K Line.

“We need to get the K Line done. It’s 60,000 commuters a day on that line. We need to do it in a way that is not going to disrupt the people that are living by the line, and that’s why it’s going to go so deep in certain sections, but we have the technology to do that and we have the ability to get it done,” Miller said.

Miller also said the city needs to do everything it can to bring film production back to Hollywood.

“It’s disastrous. Let’s call a spade a spade. The new film permits are down 40% since 2019, that translates to about 120,000 jobs. This is disastrous for our city and for Angelenos throughout the city. We need to bring Hollywood back to Hollywood,” Miller said. “We need to create a much more business-friendly environment here. For some reason, we treat both real estate developers and businesses – our top employers – like they’re the enemy. We need to be much more business-friendly and we have to advocate for the industry. We have to make permitting easier, we have to speed things up for the entertainment industry, we have to get incentives back here, whether they are city-based or state-based incentives, and we have to make L.A. competitive again for the entertainment industry. We have the talent, we have the companies, we have the sites and the equipment. We should be doing filming here, not elsewhere. Not in other countries, not in other states, not in other cities. We should be doing it in L.A., and the talent would rather stay here … We need to bring Hollywood back home.”

Miller believes his experience leading teams large and small, managing thousands of people across different industries and delivering results makes him well-qualified to lead the city of more than 3.8 million people and solve the issues he sees as most pressing.

“The city is broken. There are many, many problems in the city. People don’t feel safe, we have broken streets and sidewalks and streetlights, we have homeless encampments everywhere,” he said. “There’s not enough economic opportunity in the city. The city has become extremely expensive, and affordability is a real crisis here, mostly driven by the cost of housing and rent, which is way too high, and it’s just become a difficult place to live. There’s trash everywhere, the city’s lost its vibrancy, and it’s not the L.A. that I love and I think most people really love to be here for.”