Los Osos sits on the southern shore of Morro Bay, in the coastal zone of San Luis Obispo County. It is the ancestral home of the Northern Chumash people (yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini) whose tribal council is still headquartered in town. Portolá's soldiers named the valley for the grizzly bears they found there in 1769. Today Los Osos is a Census Designated Place of 14,465 people across 12.8 square miles: a few blocks of business along Los Osos Valley Road, a bayside village at Baywood Park, and the rest almost entirely residential, hemmed in by Montana de Oro State Park, the El Moro Elfin Forest, the Audobon Society's Sweet Springs Nature Preserve and the eucalyptus groves of the Coastal Access Monarch Butterfly Perserve where the monarch butterflies overwinter.

San Luis Obispo County has seven cities. Los Osos is larger than three of them: Grover Beach, Morro Bay and Pismo Beach. Each of those three cities has a Mayor and a City Council. Los Osos has neither. The Los Osos Community Services District supplies water to part of the community, along with drainage, street lighting, parks and contracted fire and emergency response. Everything that shapes the town's future, though, such as land use, planning, roads, or law enforcement through the County Sheriff, rests with a five-member Board of Supervisors.  Los Osos voters are permitted to vote for just one Supervisor. Within that Supervisor's District, Los Osos holds about one third of the electorate.

Redistricting made the disadvantages of that arrangement plain. The map the County adopted in 2021 moved Los Osos into a district that would not elect a Supervisor until 2024, leaving the community represented for 3 years by someone it had never voted for and, realistically, could not vote against or recall. The map was later set aside in litigation and redrawn, but the lesson held: a town of 14,000 people with one-third of one vote on the Board of  Supervisors - its municipal governing body - is governed at the convenience of others. Los Osos has spent four decades learning that fact through a septic discharge prohibition, a building moratorium, and a wastewater project that was started, halted, litigated, bankrupted and eventually handed to the County, with the treatment plant finally coming online in 2017.