Meet Andrej Selivra, Candidate For Los Angeles Mayor

LOS ANGELES, CA — Andrej A. Selivra, 40, is vying to be elected as the Los Angeles mayor.

In the June 2 primary, incumbent Mayor Karen Bass will face a challenge from 13 other candidates as she seeks a second term. Among them is Selivra.

Learn more about Selivra's goals for Los Angeles, with answers submitted by the candidate:

What is your educational background?

Despite experiencing foster care and teenage homelessness, Andrej put himself through community college and transferred to UCLA where he graduated near the top of his class with a degree in political science, while working full time to pay for his education. He's since gone on to become one of the top systems engineers in his field, dedicated to helping teams and organizations improve their tools, resources and processes to get things done.

What is your professional background?

As a technical architect and systems engineer, Andrej has spent the last 15 years developing enterprise-grade project management and communication tools for several Fortune 500 companies including Macy's, Costco, Home Depot, FashionNova, and UPS Logistics among others.

His expert proficiencies in improving the operational processes and workflows for thousands of employees and cross-functional teams across the globe make him a uniquely well-positioned candidate to improve the city of LA.

Have you ever held public office, whether appointive or elective?

While Andrej has never held elected office, he's been a strong, unpaid volunteer political organizer in California for the past six years as one of the founders of the Forward Party of California, promoting multi-party democracy Llegislation throughout California, as well as local legislative initiative advocacy regarding police reform, housing, and civic infrastructure in Los Angeles.

What are the top three issues facing Los Angeles right now?

Andrej's top 3 Priorities for LA are

1. Housing and homelessness
2. Public transit
3. City improvement via community jobs programs to prepare Los Angeles for the upcoming 2028 Olympics and beyond

Andrej plans to implement DORMITORY Style housing for the homeless, repurposing under-used commercial and office buildings throughout the city, to house 300-500 people at a time with, using the per-bed cost saving to fund wrap-around social services (mental health, substance abuse, jobs training, medical and meal services), to prioritize treating PEOPLE with PEOPLE.

The 2028 Olympics are fast approaching and we NEED public transit. Andrej has a plan to create a city-wide Sprinter van shuttle express service (MetroX), transporting 8-12 passengers across town in 25-35 minutes, even during heavy traffic.

Additionally, to promote tourism revenue in 2028, Andrej has a plan to employ working-class Angelenos to help beautify and improve our city via $25-35/hr community jobs program.

What is one specific policy you would implement in your first 100 days?

Mayor Andrej plans to immediately identify under-used commercial and office spaces eligible for retrofitment into public dormitories for the homeless, while coordinating efforts to prepare the city for MetroX transit shuttle services to get LA moving.

Additionally, Mayor Andrej will work on police reform, with new culture and professional conduct guidelines to restore public trust in LAPD and make sure our police force is prepared for the 2028 Olympics as public servants for ALL residents and visitors in the City of Los Angeles.

He will BAN THE USE OF RUBBER BULLETS AND PROJECTILES in police crowd control measures, and make new requirements for LAPD to learn the communities they police by incorporating minimum monthly hours of foot patrol.

Andrej also believes that change should start in our backyard first, so he will prioritizing the revitalization of downtown LA, working outward from City Hall, El Paseo and Alameda Street, Union Station, and OVERHAULING the Broadway Theater District and Hollywood to showcase LA to visitors as the birthplace of modern American television and entertainment while revitalizing our entertainment industry and creating NEW JOBS for entertainment workers.

What is your plan to reduce homelessness, and how would you measure success after one year?

Los Angeles doesn’t have a money problem when it comes to homelessness; it has a systems problem. We funnel billions to unaccountable contractors for temporary motel rooms, only to see a massive percentage of individuals return to the streets.

Andrej's plan is a pragmatic, engineering blueprint: city-operated public dormitories. Instead of relying on expensive developers, we will convert unused commercial spaces into dormitory style social housing. This drops the cost from $200,000+ to $15,000-$25,000 per bed. We will take the massive financial savings and invest them entirely into on-site, wrap-around services — mental health care, addiction treatment, and job training etc.

We cannot just put a roof over someone’s head and leave them isolated; that leads to substance abuse and despair. My motto is "treat people WITH people." These supervised environments will provide a tiered system where individuals can earn more independence at an affordable rate (~$450/month) as they stabilize.

We will measure success through tools that Mayor Andrej will PERSONALLY oversee with his professional technical experience to make sure city employees and taxpayers have DIRECT insight into the progress that we're making as a city to address our homeless.

What is one specific change you would make to improve public safety?

The most impactful structural change I will make to public safety is implementing a dual mandate: requiring professional liability insurance for all LAPD officers to ensure absolute INDIVIDUAL accountability, while simultaneously removing the burden of the homelessness crisis from their shoulders.

Right now, bad police costs taxpayers millions in settlements and destroys community trust. By requiring individual liability policies, we make it financially impossible to be a bad cop. If an officer repeatedly violates the public trust, their premiums will skyrocket until they are priced out of the force. The market will naturally filter out the bad actors.

But we must fiercely support our GOOD officers. Currently, the LAPD is forced to act as the city’s default social workers, responding to mental health crises and encampment disputes instead of stopping real crime.

My administration will deploy city-operated public dormitories with on-site wrap-around services to get the unhoused off the streets and into supervised care. This instantly reduces neighborhood chaos and drastically cuts the volume of non-criminal emergency calls.

By freeing the LAPD from managing the homelessness crisis, we can redirect their full bandwidth toward violent and property crime, which will dramatically reduce response times. Public safety requires trust and resources; my blueprint delivers both.

How would you improve transparency or accountability at City Hall?

City Hall operates as a black box where billions of taxpayer dollars vanish into unaccountable contracts and bureaucratic bloat. Transparency isn't about releasing a buried PDF report a year after the money is spent; it requires engineering a culture of continuous, public accountability.

As a systems engineer, I build transparent audit trails for a living. I will bring that exact technical rigor to Los Angeles. My administration will implement real-time, publicly accessible financial dashboards. Every Angeleno will be able to see exactly where their money is going, which outside contractors are failing to deliver, and where the operational bottlenecks are.

But technical transparency must be paired with direct human accountability. Currently, politicians hide behind closed doors and backroom deals. I will institute a mandatory, monthly "State of the City" address at Gloria Molina Park, combined with a community festival. Instead of one highly scripted, self-congratulatory speech a year, I will stand before the public every single month to provide direct updates on our progress, explain our setbacks, and answer directly to the people.

True accountability starts with how a campaign is funded. I am running a grassroots campaign and refusing corporate or special-interest money. I don't owe favors to developers or city contractors. My only stakeholders are the hardworking Angelenos who fund this city, and they will finally have a mayor who reports directly to them.

Why are you a better choice than your opponents?

Los Angeles is failing because we keep handing the keys to career politicians and expecting different results. We don’t need more rhetoric; we need a systems engineer.

The establishment, led by Mayor Bass and defended by insiders like Nithya Raman, has normalized incompetence. They funnel billions to unaccountable contractors while our street crisis worsens. When the mayor’s inner circle faces scandals — like a deputy mayor faking a bomb threat to skip a meeting — it proves this administration is fundamentally unserious. Meanwhile, challengers like Adam Miller offer empty rhetoric without a single concrete blueprint.

I offer a completely different paradigm. I didn't learn about LA's broken safety nets from a policy paper — I lived them. I survived the foster care system and teenage homelessness right here in this city. I know what it means to fall through the cracks. I fought my way from sleeping in my car, through community college to UCLA, and built a career fixing complex, failing systems for massive organizations.

While my opponents offer platitudes, I offer costed, actionable blueprints: city-operated public dorms to humanely end street encampments, the MetroX shuttle system to bypass gridlock, and total financial transparency.

I am unbought by special interests, and I am the only candidate treating LA's crises as engineering problems with real, immediate solutions.