Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman is expected to lose her leadership role on the L.A. City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, which she has chaired since 2023, according to people familiar with the situation.
Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson is planning to announce this week that the committee will be split into a housing committee and a homelessness committee — neither of which will be led by Raman, the people said.
Harris-Dawson is a close ally of Mayor Karen Bass, whom Raman is challenging for reelection. He declined to comment.
“It’s hard to imagine that it’s not related to politics. The timing of it would be too much of a coincidence,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a former Los Angeles City Council member and Los Angeles County supervisor who now serves as chair of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
In a video released Monday afternoon, Raman said that she was being “punished” for mounting a campaign against the incumbent mayor.
“Mayor Bass and her allies are protecting what we all know is a deeply broken status quo, one that is not serving any person here in the city of Los Angeles,” she said.
Alex Stack, a spokesperson for Bass’ campaign, said that Raman’s signature program out of the committee — to get homeless individuals off the streets by housing them through time-limited subsidies — had been a failure, costing more than $60 million and filling just three apartments so far.
“Nithya Raman canceled committee meetings for weeks, didn’t show up to votes, and failed to deliver on building more housing or getting people off the streets,” he said in a statement.
The Raman campaign called Stack’s claim inaccurate and said that the money for the program is not spent until the people served by it have leases and that $60 million hasn’t yet been spent.
Plans to take away Raman’s leadership role, reported earlier by the California Post, come at a pivotal moment.
The city’s unsheltered homeless population increased this year after two straight years of decreases, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported last month.
While the citywide number has increased, the number of homeless people living on the street in Raman’s district decreased by 49%, a fact she has touted as she challenges Bass.
Raman and Bass have presented starkly different takes regarding the situation citywide and in Raman’s district.
The mayor has posited that her signature program, Inside Safe, which addresses homeless encampments by moving homeless individuals into temporary housing, was largely responsible for the drop in Raman’s district and that federal and state budget cuts partially led to the increase citywide.
She also attacked Raman’s performance as the chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee.
“While Raman takes credit for the City’s work in her district, ignoring the fact that she’s the Chair of the Homelessness & Housing Committee for ALL of Los Angeles, Mayor Bass is working to move our city forward and address years of neglect,” Stack said in a statement last month about the homeless numbers.
Raman asserted that there have been only three Inside Safe operations in her district and that her committee has been stifled by inaction from the mayor.
“Council can pass legislation … move motions forward, but it is the mayor that has charge of the implementation and outcomes,” she said at a news conference last month.
