In a graduate public policy class at USC, Kody Christiansen watched as a Los Angeles County official talked about the specifics of Measure A, a half-cent sales tax issued to address homelessness countywide. A week later, Christiansen attended a West Hollywood City Council meeting where they happened to be discussing how the city could use Measure A funds.

Christiansen, a master’s student studying public administration, spoke during public comment, asking city council members if they could also look into using some of the Measure A funds for visible community outreach. A city council member responded, saying that outreach did not fall under the possible uses for the funds.

After that exchange, Christiansen made a rebuttal on Instagram, in which he said that he learned from the official who manages Measure A funds that the money can be used for visibility purposes.

“In that moment, my USC education helped me immeasurably,” Christiansen said. “I knew something a current council member didn’t know.”

On top of being a student, Christiansen is now running for West Hollywood City Council. From experiencing homelessness in New York, to going to Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, to participating in student government and now to studying at USC as “job training” to become a city councilmember, Christiansen is looking to represent a city that is important to him.

“West Hollywood was a refuge for me from Fort Worth, Texas, where being a young gay man is not easy,” Christiansen said. “West Hollywood just became this safe place, this sanctuary, and so I want to make sure that it’s still that for decades and centuries to come for people who need it.”

On Nov. 3, West Hollywood residents will see 14 candidates on their ballots for three vacant seats of the five-member City Council. West Hollywood City Council members are elected at large for a four-year term, so voters will not be voting for one candidate in a district, but instead are choosing three.

Christiansen said one of the most inspiring classes he took at USC was taught by Sergio Gonzalez, the City of Azusa’s acting city manager. Gonzalez taught his first class at the University last semester, where he taught students, including Christiansen, how to run a city at the Price School of Public Policy.

One of Gonzalez’s class sessions focused on one of the biggest topics for cities right now: how cities are managing the homelessness crisis. So, he brought in a county official from L.A. County’s Department of Homeless Services and Housing as a guest speaker to talk about the magnitude of the problem and how the county is addressing it.

“Kody was able to take that information and sensitize it and say, ‘Okay, how do I apply it to the city that I live in, and the city that I’m going to run for council?’” Gonzalez said. “It got him to hear from the horse’s mouth of how the county deals with these issues and how they work with local cities to help them face the problems.”

Mirka Vargas, a master’s student studying public administration who became instant friends with Christiansen during convocation, said that he is well suited for the city council member role, but admitted that she is a little biased.

“He made sure to, [in] every single class, relate all of his questions to West Hollywood,” Vargas said. “It didn’t matter where the guest speaker was coming from. He was genuinely like, ‘How do you think I can do that in West Hollywood?’”

Navigating the complexities of homelessness isn’t new to Christiansen, who has both experienced it himself and has made programs to assist those experiencing homelessness. Eleven years ago, Christiansen lived in multiple homeless shelters in New York over the course of two years, where he would be kicked out and have to find new shelters because of his alcohol and drug addiction.

He said that it was easy to “get stuck in a loop” when he was depressed, leading to him living with gang members and addicts who offered him drugs.

“When you have no money, when you don’t have your own sense of self, where you can’t, like people always say,: ‘Pull yourself up by your bootstraps,’” Christiansen said., “If you don’t have boots, how are you going to do that?”

But, after he escaped the haze of addiction, Christiansen said he saw how many people in the New York City shelter system had cared for him. After he left New York, Christiansen acted in Hollywood, wrote a book, received degrees from New York University, Harvard and Cambridge, all where he was involved in student leadership.

At Harvard, Christiansen worked at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter where he started a program called I Deserve ID to help people experiencing homelessness obtain IDs in order to access SNAP benefits and cash assistance.

Christiansen said that renewing a driver’s license or getting a new Social Security card is “tedious,” and his program made it easier so people had a chance to break out of the cycle of homelessness. He said he hopes to bring programs like that to West Hollywood.

“We have a great library in West Hollywood, and they offer some services weekly for our unhoused neighbors,” Christiansen said. “We’ll do something like the I Deserve ID, but you can get it at the library. We have a couple days a week where you can come and get your service. We’ll help pay for it, and we’ll fill it out with you, and really support you through the process.”

Christiansen also has ideas for programs to help businesses in West Hollywood. One of them is a WeHo legacy business program, where the city would put businesses that have been registered for 10 or more years into a registry, and the city would help those businesses if they were to struggle, like if a landlord were to raise a business’s rent.

He also suggested a civic credit program, which would give exchangeable credits to residents who participate in civic activities to spend at local businesses.

Some of Christiansen’s inspirations have been students in Trojan Democrats, Gonzalez and West Hollywood Mayor John Heilman.

“I kind of want to be like Mayor Heilman, who was on the first city council of West Hollywood, and now he’s in his last term — 40 years,” Christiansen said. “He’s been taking care of our city, and that’s what I strive to do.”

Disclaimer: Kody Christiansen formerly served as a staff writer at the Daily Trojan in Fall 2025 and Spring 2026. Christiansen is no longer affiliated with this paper.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the election was for three of five vacant West Hollywood City Council seats and that the candidate’s business programs were intended for Hollywood. The article was updated Aug. 27 at 5:51 p.m. to reflect that the election is for three vacant seats on the five-member City Council and that the programs are intended for West Hollywood. The Daily Trojan regrets these errors.