NIthya Raman
is running for Mayor of Los Angeles.
“I don’t think I am alone in feeling that our city is falling behind. Housing costs are rising and LA has become a difficult place to live. The city’s failure to prepare for last January’s tragic fire, a too-expensive and fractured mismanagement of homelessness, slow 911 response times, entire neighborhoods left in the dark by broken streetlights, a $1 billion budget deficit, and a lack of action against an adversarial federal government sending ICE agents onto our streets show that LA is not being led with the clarity or accountability this moment demands.
I’m running for Mayor to make LA more affordable and to meet this moment with honesty and urgency and hard work.
Los Angeles is the most incredible city in the world. This campaign is about honoring what this city has given us - and giving back to this city what its people deserve. The political establishment will spend millions in this election to maintain our broken status quo - but with your help, we can build a more hopeful LA.”
What we’ve done
Capped the rent after 40 years
Passed the strongest renters’ protections in Los Angeles history
Expanded Just Cause protections to all rental units
Required landlords to file an intent to evict with the City within 3 days
Made it unlawful to evict tenants who owe less than one month fair market rent
Strengthened the Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance
Improved code enforcement to ensure units are habitable and in good living condition
Passed Right to Counsel and increased tenants ability to access a lawyer when facing an eviction
Passed stricter regulations for illegal home-sharing
First council office to launch a dedicated team for tenant casework
What we’ve done
Led efforts in our district that produced some of the largest declines in unsheltered homelessness across the entire city, and brought hundreds of people indoors into safety.
Created the Bureau of Homelessness Oversight to manage homelessness spending and hold the system accountable.
Created performance data on city investments for the first time and used it to drive real results: city-funded shelter beds went from 80% to 94% occupied, and all new permanent supportive housing is now over 90% occupancy.
What we’ve done
Increased housing in Council District 4 by over a thousand units
Streamlined affordable housing projects
Created a single portal to search for affordable housing citywide (launching soon!)
Passed the Hollywood Community Plan Update and the passage of the Housing Element to create new housing capacity citywide
Passed programmatic and expenditure plans for Measure ULA and LACAHSA that will invest more than $1 billion of city and county funds to support affordable housing production, unit preservation, and eviction defense services
THE PLATFORM
As mayor my commitments to the city are:
Make sure Angelenos have a home they can afford.
Fix the city: fill the potholes, pave the roads, plant trees, turn on streetlights, and put a park near where you live.
Protect Angelenos: from ICE, from harassing landlords, from unsafe streets, from fires and natural disasters. I’ll make sure when you call 911, someone actually shows up.
End the pay-to-play politics that have dominated the city for decades. I will not make political decisions. Only the best decisions for Angelenos
Bring the jobs back. I’ll make it easier to start and run a business. We’ll revive small businesses, support restaurants and bars, and bring the Hollywood jobs back home.
HOUSING for all
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The inability to equitably and affordably house all of our residents is the compounding moral crisis of our time. It has driven our homelessness crisis, deepened segregation, and pushed working families out of the city they built.
The worst part? This crisis is almost entirely self-made. Thanks to land use policy that sharply limited where new housing can be built, and a bureaucracy that rewards indecision and delays, Los Angeles now has the fewest homes per adult of major US cities, and has the largest percentage of households who are rent burdened.
We must build much more housing to reduce housing costs. This includes housing at all income levels, everything from deed-restricted affordable housing to market rate housing to social housing to homeless shelters.
Our plan will triple annual housing construction, and allow Los Angeles to remain a city of opportunity that welcomes people looking to build their dreams here.
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The goal
A city where it takes weeks, not years, to get permission to build housing during a housing shortage. Where the process is transparent, predictable, and the same for everyone.
The problem
There is currently no deadline by which the city must approve or reject a permit to build housing. You can submit plans and the city can sit on them indefinitely. Even well-intentioned processes designed to ensure fairness have turned into a system that paralyzes progress — 175 separate condition types, departments that contradict each other, inspectors who add new requirements mid-project. The result is an 18-month average permitting timeline that makes building in Los Angeles slower, more expensive, and less predictable than almost anywhere else in the country. We can ensure fairness and accountability without paralyzing progress.
Our plan
We will issue an executive directive establishing a “shot clock” — 60 days or less to approve zoning-compliant projects, 120 days or less for discretionary ones. No more indefinite delays.
To ensure speed doesn't compromise oversight, we will require coordinated intake meetings with all departments early — identifying all project requirements, resolving conflicts upfront, and issuing binding determinations to avoid late-stage surprises.
Create a “single-inspector” model, one person from pre-construction through final occupancy, to improve accountability and reduce contradictory directives.
Develop a citywide self-certification program to expedite permits for straightforward projects.
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The goal
A Los Angeles where housing is built across the entire city, creating walkable, beautiful neighborhoods. Where zoning codes no longer determine who gets to live where. Where the patterns of segregation written into our laws are actively dismantled.
The problem
The geography of Los Angeles was shaped by a history of explicit segregation: redlining and restrictive housing covenants concentrated Black, Latino, Asian and Jewish communities into select neighborhoods. Even after the Civil Rights movement made these kinds of restrictions illegal, new zoning and land use laws prevented apartments and low-income housing from being built in other parts of the city. Indeed, more than 70% of Los Angeles' land is zoned exclusively for single-family homes, the most expensive and least attainable housing type.
New plans and policies to address our housing shortage have largely added density where multi-family housing already exists. This means that existing apartments – which are mostly rent stabilized units – are most at risk for redevelopment, and that most new affordable housing is being built in lower-income neighborhoods: only 14% of affordable housing permitted in the last decade was built in high-resource neighborhoods. This is segregation by zoning code, written into our laws and repeated for decades.
Our plan
Update the Citywide General Plan Framework, our citywide smart growth strategy, with a focus on rezoning high-opportunity corridors and regional employment hubs near transit for by-right housing. The city’s community plan updates are decades behind schedule.
Allow gentle density (duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes) in single-family neighborhoods near transit hubs, creating mixed-income, walkable, and aesthetically welcoming communities across the city.
Ensure predictability in rezoning efforts, by using new and simple tech tools to enable neighborhoods to visualize the impacts of changes in zoning law before they are implemented. No more surprises!
Create high-rise zones in select areas to enable many more homes to be built by well-paid union labor.
Rightsize parking requirements for commercial establishments in high-walkability and transit-rich areas.
Convert empty office buildings into homes by cutting the fees and red tape that make it too costly to attempt, and ensuring that the new adaptive reuse ordinance is easy to use.
Legalize the building methods and housing typologies our outdated codes currently block, including mass timber, factory-built housing, single-stairwell buildings, and other faster, cheaper ways to build.
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The goal
A city whose institutions are genuinely organized around building housing, not finding ways to say no. Where accountability is public, visible, and real.
The problem
A $200 appeal against a housing project triggers more than $20,000 in city staff time to respond. Projects have to get approvals over and over — ping-ponging between city departments and the City Council, sometimes relitigating the same decisions. Meanwhile LADWP imposes rules and requirements that no other major city requires, reducing the land available to build on, adding cost, and slowing projects down. The city loses credibility and the housing doesn’t get built.
Our plan
Create an independent professional board to manage land use disputes, removing routine housing decisions from the political process.
Raise appeal fees for non-neighbors and reduce the number of allowable appeals for approved residential and mixed-use projects so obstruction carries a real cost.
Provide delegated authority to departments so that decisions already made don't come back to the Council for another vote.
Create a dedicated LADWP Housing Strike Force to align utility operations with the city's housing goals — streamlined permits, faster approvals, and power connection timelines guaranteed at the start of the process.
Direct LADWP to revise the rules and requirements that no other major city imposes (e.g., power line setbacks and transformer staging requirements) that reduce buildable land and add unnecessary cost.
Make BuildLA into a single public portal tracking every project submission, approval, permit, and response time in the city. Proposed two administrations ago and never delivered, BuildLA’s true functionality is long overdue. It is a simple but powerful way to hold the city accountable and bring real transparency to how housing gets built.
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The goal
A Los Angeles where the public dollars committed to affordable housing actually produce new units quickly, at reasonable costs per unit. Where developers and nonprofits are truly set up for success by a city that has finally simplified and unified its financing process.
The problem
The money to build affordable housing in Los Angeles exists. It sits across multiple public funding sources, each with its own application, its own timeline, its own requirements, and its own politics. To build a single affordable housing project, a developer or nonprofit has to chase each source separately, piece them together carefully, and hope nothing changes before the deal closes. The resources exist but too many projects die in the financing stage because the city has never properly set up the people building affordable housing for success.
Our plan
Launch a "Super NOFA" (Notice of Funding Availability) — a single, coordinated funding window that bundles all available public dollars for affordable housing, public housing and social housing. The Super NOFA would open once a year and align as closely as possible to funding from other levels of government, so that developers and nonprofits know exactly what they have to work with.
Waive the fees charged on new development for projects that include affordable units for lower-income residents and working families.
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The goal
A Los Angeles where working families can realistically plan to own a home here. Where belief in homeownership is restored not by rhetoric but by building the homes they can afford to buy.
The problem
Los Angeles has made it functionally illegal to build the housing working families could actually afford to buy. Outdated lot regulations, expensive subdivision fees, and condo liability rules written for a different era have all but eliminated the homes first-time buyers can actually afford. Too many working Angelenos have stopped believing homeownership is possible for them. That resignation is not a personal failure, but the direct consequence of policy choices this city made and failed to fix.
Our plan
Streamline small-scale housing and ADU approvals so that a homeowner who wants to build a backyard unit can actually do it quickly and cheaply.
Bring starter homes back by allowing for ADU’s to be sold separately from the main home (ie, opt in to AB1033).
Fight at the state level to change liability laws for condos that have made building for-sale condominiums so financially risky that developers stopped building them, taking away one of the most affordable paths to homeownership
Simplify the condominium approval process and cut city fees that drive up costs.
PROTECTING RENTERS
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Nearly two thirds of Angelenos rent their homes. Nearly 60% of them are rent burdened, which means they pay more than 30% of their income toward housing, a larger percentage than any other major city in America.
Let’s underscore what that really means: every month, a larger percentage of Angelenos choose between paying the rent or paying for groceries, healthcare, school costs, childcare and other necessities than in any other city in America. And for 80% of the lowest-income Angelenos, more than half of everything they earn goes to rent before a single other bill gets paid.
That burden can tip into crisis with one bad month. From 2023 through 2025, the Housing Department received 245,599 eviction notices. Ninety-three percent were for non-payment of rent. The average amount owed: less than $4,000. This is a burden that falls hardest on the same people every time: renters with children, renters of color, renters with disabilities, renters in low-income communities, older renters.
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The goal
A Los Angeles where you can rent with dignity and the laws protecting you are enforced. Where one tough month doesn't cost you your home. Where rent controlled units are for Angelenos, not for tourists.
But passing strong policies is not enough: the enforcement of these protections has significantly lagged behind the law. Out of 21,402 TAHO complaints received by the Los Angeles Housing Department from August 2021 through August 2025, only 35 cases were referred to the city attorney’s office. And the city took almost no action on thousands of reported cases of rent gouging after the Palisades fires. We need a city that is organized around a mandate to protect renters and to protect rental housing.
Our plan
Launch an Office of Tenant Protections to protect renters through comprehensive case management, policy enforcement, and legal representation – strong laws mean nothing without the institutional muscle and organizational mandate to enforce them. City Attorney staff must sit side-by-side with Housing Department staff to break down the departmental silos that have let too many renters fall through the cracks. Ensure that every city program is tracking outcomes so that investments can be redirected to our most effective interventions that keep communities intact.
Partner with the Superior Court of LA County to keep families in their homes. Share eviction filing and unlawful detainer data between the city and the court to make sure city policies are being followed before cases are taken up. Provide support for mediation, creating payment plans, and access to city-funded rent relief before a case goes to trial.
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The goal
A Los Angeles where affordable housing is protected from corporate buyouts, illegal short-term rentals, and bad faith evictions.
The problem
Los Angeles is losing its affordable housing stock faster than it can be replaced. Private equity firms and corporate landlords have been systematically buying up single-family homes across the city, treating them as investments rather than homes for working families. Rent-controlled apartments that should house tenants are being illegally converted into short-term rentals, and bad faith evictions are being used to clear out long-term tenants and permanently remove affordable units from the market.
Our plan
Launch a new Office of Home-Sharing dedicated to administering permits and enforcing regulations, launching investigations and inspections for compliance, ensuring primary residence, cracking down on rent-controlled housing being used for tourist accommodation, and issuing fines to deter bad behavior.
Champion Ellis Act reform at the state level closing the loopholes that allow bad faith evictions and the permanent loss of affordable housing.
Support small landlords through robust repair, maintenance, and rehabilitation programs for those with financial difficulties.
Stop the corporatization of rental housing by prohibiting private equity firms from systematically buying up large numbers of single-family homes.
Preserve at-risk units by creating strong incentives for owners to extend or renew their affordability covenants, providing gap funding for repair work, and purchasing naturally occurring affordable housing to keep rents low.
ENDING HOMELESSNESS
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Every time we see one of our neighbors living and dying on the streets, we should be shocked. Instead, in Los Angeles it has become routine. The desensitization to homelessness is a moral failing and a stain on any leadership that would call itself progressive. Angelenos have voted three times in the last decade to tax themselves to respond to our city's most serious problem with housing, services, and care. But City Hall has not done nearly enough with this investment, allowing inhumane suffering to continue in one of the wealthiest cities in the world.
Los Angeles is spending hundreds of millions on homelessness every year, but we have not applied the rigor or accountability that this money demands. 40% of people moved indoors through the Mayor's signature program have returned to the streets. By failing to use our dollars, staffing, and infrastructure as efficiently as possible, we are failing the people we promised to help and squandering the compassion of voters who believed something could change. We must earn back the trust of both. If Los Angeles is going to spend real resources on this crisis — and it should — the problem must be solved. -
The goal
A city utilizing every resource and innovation available to get people into homes they can stay in.
The problem
New York has more people experiencing homelessness than LA, but because New York has been mandated to produce adequate shelter beds for decades, they have very few people on the streets experiencing unsheltered homelessness – just 3-4% of their total homeless population. Los Angeles only has a third of the shelter beds we need. As a result, 27,000 people are sleeping on our city’s streets – 61% of our homeless population – and more homeless people die in Los Angeles than in NYC, despite better weather here.
To make progress on reducing unsheltered homelessness, we need to significantly expand our capacity to shelter and house people. With the potential for less federal and state money coming into LA for homelessness response, we also need to stretch every dollar as far as possible and make sure we are investing only in what works.
City Hall is not doing that right now. Just one example: despite repeated efforts from the City Council to reduce costs in the program, Inside Safe costs an average of $85,000 a year for a motel room and services, and some rooms go as high as $100,000 per year. It is the most expensive temporary housing program in the city by far, and people are staying in the motel rooms for close to a year. For the same amount of money, we could rent three apartments using a short-term rental voucher and provide intensive services – housing more people in a program that has delivered much better outcomes.
Inside Safe is also the only citywide strategy that the Mayor’s Office is coordinating right now. But we desperately need other citywide interventions: we need a real plan to address the over 6,500 people living in cars, vans, and RVs; we need to help the over 1,500 young people aged 18 to 25 who are currently homeless; and we must immediately address the over 7,000 family members – including nearly 4,000 children – sleeping in shelters and on our streets.
We do not need to accept mass unsheltered homelessness. As Mayor, Nithya will look at everything the city invests in, direct our dollars to the programs that will get us the best housing outcomes for the least money, and actively redesign programs that are not working.
Our plan
Reorganize our shelter interventions to quickly shelter and house the largest number of people with the same dollars.
Maintain our capacity for encampment resolution by investing in a smaller number of rooms or units that offer privacy and dignity to people transitioning from the street.
Offer intensive case management services, including connections to mental health and substance use care, that help transition people within 90 days into appropriate long term options: short- and long-term rental vouchers, family reunification, acute care beds, board and care facilities, permanent supportive housing, and more.
Significantly expand our investment in Time Limited Subsidies, a short-term rental voucher program with case management support that has the best outcomes of any temporary housing intervention, and costs significantly less than motel programs.
Use performance data and active oversight over our investments to improve outcomes at every point of engagement, to ensure that the system is working to move people into safety and ensuring that they have the support to stay housed. Thousands of people are currently staying for more than a year in our most expensive interventions, without getting access to case management and care.
Expand investment in low-cost, innovative, and successful shelter and housing strategies – like shared housing, or low-cost modular housing – so we have many more ways to help low-income Angelenos find and stay in homes.
Audit every stalled homeless housing project and use the power of the mayor’s office to push projects forward.
End the city's haphazard and ineffective approach to vehicular homelessness, bringing clear strategy to respond to the over 6,500 people living in cars, vans and RVs within City limits and better addressing neighborhoods’ calls for support.
Create more safe, temporary housing for families, so we no longer have over 1,000 children sleeping on streets across our city.
Do not leave a single federal, state, or private dollar on the table to address youth homelessness, and use our resources to scale evidence-driven, low-cost models like flexible cash assistance that help transition-age youth avoid homelessness.
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The goal
A City Hall committed to the difficult work of ensuring people who are sick are getting the care they desperately need.
The problem
While some unhoused Angelenos are simply priced out of housing, some people experiencing homelessness are also dealing with untreated health conditions, substance use disorders, and mental health challenges. Many people on our streets need immediate support and the government has largely failed to provide it, an outrageous dereliction of responsibility. Angelenos who witness someone in crisis have nowhere to turn. Too often, calls to the police or fire department are met with the same answer: there is nothing we can do. This leaves both the person in crisis and those trying to help alone and frustrated, a failure of basic civic duty that cannot continue.
Currently, only the County of Los Angeles has the funding to provide this kind of care, but the city can do much more to fill in the gaps and to advocate more effectively with the County for those on our streets and shelters who need help. As Mayor, Nithya would put an end to the finger pointing and blame shifting to other levels of government, work with the County to maximize the care they provide within city limits, and step up to fill the gaps by delivering immediate treatment on our streets.
Our plan
Immediately deploy street medicine teams citywide. There are teams that can deliver health and mental health care right on our sidewalks and our streets. These teams will operate proactively, visiting encampments and providing the kind of life-saving treatment that can stabilize individuals and help them move off the streets into safety, and continuing their care in shelters – and can be largely funded through Medi-Cal.
Ensure full, accountable delivery of County services. Measure A, the sales tax that funds the County’s homelessness response, requires coordination between the City and County and mandates data collection on a range of indicators. Based on the limited data we have, only a small fraction of those in shelters and on our streets are getting the care they need. In October 2025, the County’s Department of Mental Health reported that there were just 882 active clients in their program that provides physical and mental healthcare to people in interim housing – just 4% of the over 20,000 people in interim housing across the county. The city must demand data on referrals and care provided at encampments, shelters, and PSH units, and use this data to advocate vigorously for much more.
Establish a citywide system of unarmed crisis response that can respond to mental health and substance use related calls for service quickly. Unarmed crisis response programs and emergency homelessness response programs currently exist in parts of the city, and have proven to be effective – and can take people in crisis off the streets and into sobering centers.
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The goal
A homelessness system with the accountability infrastructure and the expertise to match the scale of the crisis. Where Angelenos have reason to trust that City Hall is spending their money wisely, measuring what matters, and being honest about what's working and what isn't. Where changes are being made every day to ensure the system is working.
The problem
Though spending has significantly increased over the last decade, Los Angeles has never built a real system for homelessness response. Instead City Hall has put together a patchwork of programs, agencies, and dollars that were never required to prove they work together, or work at all. No agency or program has been required to demonstrate results. No department or office has been put in charge of monitoring the spending.
In fact, efforts towards accountability and oversight are ignored or slow-walked. For example, despite the Council establishing a Bureau of Homelessness Oversight a year ago, not a single staff member has yet been hired.
The lack of staffing means the city is simply unprepared for current and impending challenges. Two major challenges are ahead of us. First, the city lacks staff capacity to contract directly with service providers for homeless services, and instead runs all city contracts through the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), a regional body which has been plagued with scandal and may be on the verge of shuttering. Secondly, as federal and state funding has expired or been withheld, our region will have much less money for homelessness response in the next few years -- we must plan for the inevitable funding cliffs ahead, and make every dollar go further.
We simply cannot afford a patchwork that runs on faith. Only the Mayor’s Office has the authority to create this system with the scale and urgency required. Nithya will mandate that the city build a real system, one that runs on data, that is backed by expertise, and delivers better outcomes for every neighborhood.
Our plan
Fully and immediately resource a single point of accountability for homelessness within city government with the staffing and expertise to collect and analyze performance data about and improve operational performance of homeless service providers, track homelessness funding in real-time, oversee all contracts, and ensure contractors are paid on time. Ensure that the city has the expertise to oversee the impending transition away from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA).
In the short-term, immediately mandate that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) hire an expert accounting firm to oversee the city's spending.
Implement performance-based budgeting for every program in the city's homelessness budget.
Publish a real-time public dashboard tracking shelter beds, housing placements, encampments, and spending by program, alongside the homelessness budget and quarterly spending.
Require regular neighborhood-level engagement from city staff on homelessness so that every community has a direct line to the people responsible for results in their area.
Establish regular coordination between all outreach teams and emergency dispatch related to homelessness that ensures that we make steady progress towards reducing unsheltered homelessness. Many different agencies in addition to homeless service providers engage with people on our city’s streets: the Los Angeles Fire Department, the Bureau of Sanitation, unarmed crisis response programs like CIRCLE and UMCR, and LAPD, as well as the County Department of Mental Health and the County Department of Health Services. Coordination would begin as a pilot in one neighborhood and then expand quickly citywide, and would make every part of the government work together towards clear goals, buttressed by regular data collection, similar to the process used in San Francisco.