Nithya’s approach is aggressive in a different way: it is detailed, hands-on and focused on lasting results. Her office maps every encampment in her district (something that doesn't exist citywide) and creates an individual plan for resolving each one. 

The mayor’s Inside Safe program relies heavily on temporary motel rooms that can cost taxpayers as much as $100,000 per person each year. Nithya prioritizes moving people directly into apartments for a fraction of the cost, while connecting them with the mental-health care, substance-use treatment and other services they need to remain housed.

Just look at her district. While unsheltered homelessness rose roughly 8 percent citywide this year, it fell 49 percent in Nithya’s district. That wasn’t an accident. It was the result of her meticulous—and frankly ruthless—approach to making government work. 

As mayor, Nithya will replicate this model and these results citywide.  She has pledged to make all homelessness funding performance-based—so programs and contractors are paid based on whether they actually move people indoors and keep them housed. She has pledged to cut encampments in half by the Olympics and eliminate them by the end of her first term.

NO! This could not be further from the truth and as the mother of 10 year old twins who walk to school every day, keeping our streets safe is incredibly important to Nithya. That’s why in Nithya’s district, her team has eliminated every tent and encampment in front of a school. 

This attack comes out of context from Nithya’s vote against an ordinance called 41.18. Nithya opposed it because it can spend significant resources moving an encampment from one block to another without actually resolving it. Analysis has found that 81% of cleared sites using 41.18 experienced repopulation and only 2.3% of the people affected reached permanent housing.

If we want to end street homelessness in our city we need to stop this shuffle and actually address homelessness, like Nithya has done in her district where she has reduced tents, RVs and encampments by 70% over three years. 

As mayor, she has pledged that no child will have to pass an encampment on the way to school—and that Los Angeles will address every encampment, not merely move it somewhere else. And her record shows that she knows how to make this a reality.

Nithya used her leadership position to bring accountability to a fragmented homelessness system. She created the Bureau of Homelessness Oversight, established the city’s first performance measures for homelessness programs and repeatedly pressed for failing contracts and programs to be reformed. 

The data and oversight she demanded exposed why newly built supportive-housing units were sitting empty and helped cut the time required to fill them by more than half. She introduced motions, held oversight hearings and sent the mayor detailed memos identifying problems and proposing specific solutions.

But a councilmember cannot direct city departments or force the mayor’s administration to implement reforms. Nithya reached the limits of what she could accomplish without a Mayor willing to act – this is exactly why she decided to run for mayor.

And where Nithya had the greatest ability to coordinate the work—in her own district—street homelessness fell 49% last year, while the combined number of tents, encampments and RVs fell 70% over three years.

No. Nithya does not want to ban BBQs.

After the devastating wildfires, she co-introduced a motion asking city agencies to consider temporary safety restrictions on certain open-flame activities during the most dangerous Red Flag conditions. These conditions occur, on average, just 4 to 7 days a year, when extreme wind and dryness create the greatest risk that one spark could become a fast-moving wildfire.

No. This is an attack line from Mayor Bass’ campaign aimed to distract from Mayor Bass's own record. Mayor Bass was absent during some of Los Angeles’s most devastating emergencies, missed more than half of LAHSA’s homelessness meetings, missed nearly 40% of Metro Board votes and had one of the worst attendance records in Congress. 

Nithya ranks 8th out of 15 councilmembers in missed votes this year — right in the middle of the pack — and that's before you count meetings she was excused from to represent LA on the regional Air Quality board.

These attacks are a deliberately misleading way to make a normal record sound scandalous.

Did she really miss 3,000 meetings?

• No. That figure deliberately conflates meetings with individual agenda-item votes. It refers to approximately 3,000 votes accumulated across nearly six years—not 3,000 meetings. The Council can cast dozens if not hundreds of votes during a single meeting. An independent LAist analysis found that Nithya ranked eighth out of 15 councilmembers in missed votes this year, putting her squarely in line with her colleagues—even before accounting for excused absences to represent Los Angeles on the regional Air Quality Management District Board.