‘These Are Our Neighbors’: Long Beach Mayoral Candidate Lee Goldin Fight to End Homelessness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGX4ukNTkMk

Lee Goldin didn’t decide to run for mayor of Long Beach in a strategy meeting or at a donor luncheon. He decided while looking out his front window at a city‑owned lot in North Long Beach that everyone knew for the same reason: human suffering the city seemed willing to tolerate. 

For years, the lot functioned as a de facto encampment where people slept in cars, cooked meals, and tried to survive, even as others with worse intentions drifted in once it was clear no one in power really cared what happened there.

When Goldin’s young children asked about the people living on the street, he and his wife made a deliberate choice in how they answered: “These are our neighbors.” That language became the foundation of his politics. 

Goldin made it a point to get to know people in the lot. He helped a former port worker who had lost his job and home get into housing, and watched the site pick up a new name: “Lee’s Lot.” 

For Goldin, those relationships cemented his belief that the city can’t “use the police to solve social problems” and that “the first human right is to be treated with dignity.”

The breaking point came when he witnessed a young pregnant woman, born homeless and trapped in an abusive relationship, being beaten in that lot. He called police, and no one came. 

Months later, when she was eight months pregnant and defended herself, officers did respond—after her abuser called—and he watched them shove her into the back of a patrol car as agencies still failed to track where her child ended up. Goldin says he realized this wasn’t an oversight but a de facto policy: let people suffer and let the fallout “terrorize the neighborhood.”

Shut out of city boards focused on homelessness and technology, Goldin adopted what he calls his “backup plan”: run for mayor on a simple message—“End homelessness”—even after learning it would cost nearly $8,000 just to print a ballot statement. Operating on a few hundred dollars from family and friends, he’s leaned instead on deep dives into the city budget and long, candid conversations with residents about homelessness, policing, ICE, Palestine, and the role of local military contractors.

Goldin is unusually blunt about race and power for a white candidate. He describes his campaign as “a master class in white male privilege,” arguing that America functions as different countries depending on who you are, and that many non‑white politicians are punished as “angry” when they speak as plainly as he does. 

“I’m part of the problem here, essentially,” he says, “but I’m at least trying to take a step towards recognizing the problem and kind of unlocking some pathways to solving it.” In a race he believes is drifting toward “tough on crime” politics and greater surveillance, he’s asking Long Beach voters to judge him on whether they share his core conviction: that the city’s first obligation is to protect its neighbors’ dignity, not its own comfort.