Is LA Under Assault From AirBnB?
01 Monday Jun 2026
Written by redqueeninla in AD55 Newsletter, COLA, Follow The Money, June 2026 Primary, Los Angeles County
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AD 67, AirBnB, Independent Expenditure Committees, Independent Expenditures, June 2 2026
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The amount of money AirBnB, Inc. has been dumping into the City of LA (CoLA) and its city attorney’s race in particular is eye-popping in volume and velocity.
As a lobbyist in California, AirBnB, Inc expended $18.5m in 2025.
What catches the eye is $3.7m spent on the LA City Attorney (CA) race, half of which dropped in the last three weeks.
From AirBnB’s candidate PAC (“Committee to Expand the Middle Class” – can’t make this stuff up), $5.8m has been expended in the LA basin in the past three months.
What Is Going On?
Because beyond Cerritos is the new AD67 where $1.3m was dumped into a PAC for AD67 candidate Mark Pulido from {AirBnB, Laborers, JobsPAC, Pechanga, OpEngineers, AptAssoc} in the past three months, and $1.7m was spent on expenditures directly and indirectly to his campaign, including in opposition to opponent Briceño.
Can you say The Olympics?
The incumbent CoLA attorney is Hydee Feldstein Soto. She has tangled, apparently, three times too many with AirBnB: (1) over party houses which she shut down, (2) over price-gouging for which she sued and (3) incipiently to better-regulate vacation rentals, a move which is on the Olympic-saturated horizon.
AirBnB seems to be looking for more sympathetic shoulders in its explosive support of the Republican DA Hochman’s deputy, running now for CA. And presumably in the largely Orange County turf just south of the CoLA. Challenger Briceño ranks $21K in negative campaigning and $1.6m spent on expenditures directly and indirectly to Pulido’s campaign.
So AirBnB has spent $10m through a candidate PAC apart from the $1.7m on the independent expenditures in AD67, including money laundered through the downtown development “Central City Association”, and it put $2.5m into an “issues” PAC in 2025, $1.2m of which was mostly spent outside of LA and indeed even the state.
I don’t know what’s really going on here but it sure seems as if something is, and it’s likely to be an investment in improving the business climate for AirBnB electorally. When revenues exceed $11b, peddling influence to the tune of <0.1% is a good return on investment.
Buyer Beware.
Please vote to keep our City Attorney, the one who has been going after this racket for years now, Hydee Feldstein Soto.
All data extracted from California’s campaign finance website on 5/31/26, Cal-Access
