Nithya Raman is running against incumbent David Ryu to represent L.A. City Council District 4. In the primary election, Raman and Ryu were neck-and-neck at the polls. Raman received 40.8 percent of the vote and Ryu got 44.4 percent, according to Ballotpedia.
The Harvard- and MIT-educated candidate has dedicated her life to anti-poverty advocacy. When Raman moved to Los Angeles in 2013, she worked in City Hall with the City Administrative Officer. She conducted a study on homelessness, and her findings have stuck with her to this day.
“When I was at City Hall, I led writing of this report which found that the city was spending over $100 million responding to homelessness and that the bulk of it was going towards putting unhoused individuals in jail. This kind of response—this policing- and criminalization-led response—this continues to be a major way in which the city responds to homelessness. In most neighborhoods, even today, LAPD continues to be the most frequent point of contact between those experiencing homelessness and the city. And I think we would do much better if we were able to lead with outreach and services first,” Raman said.
She plans to solve homelessness with the community's help.
“I talk about having a set of neighborhood-based responses, neighborhood-based outreach workers, and mental health case workers who go out proactively to get to know every person in their neighborhood experiencing homelessness by name and who are held accountable for making sure those individuals are able to access services and helping them move along the process to getting housed, which can often be a confusing and labyrinthine path,” Raman said. “I think this kind of response is a really important one. A lot of people who are experiencing homelessness, not all, but some people who are experiencing homelessness, struggle with things like mental illness, struggle with things like addiction. Right now we have not set up a system through which they’re effectively able to access the services that they need.”
Raman sees relationships between unhoused people and case workers as a path toward ending homelessness in Los Angeles.
If elected, Raman said she will fight for the L.A.'s homeless population urgently and compassionately.
“I’m also an urban planner. I think about this city a lot. I love thinking about cities, and in L.A. we have a very powerful city government. And the more I started thinking about running for office, the more I realized that it wasn’t just on the issue of homelessness where our City Council has fallen short of using their powers to take action that can lead L.A. in a better direction. It’s on so many of the issues that I care passionately about, that I vote on and donate on at the national level in my politics like the environment and so many things, but on all of these issues, I felt like at the local level we just weren’t making the kind of changes that we could make using the powers that the City Council had and feeling the urgency that I felt on these issues,” Raman said.
Ending homelessness and addressing the climate crisis are two issues Raman said will “require sacrifices” but are worth fighting for.
“Those will require us having, for example, homeless resources in our neighborhoods, affordable housing built nearby us, things that have faced resistance in the past. But if we can build a collective energy that agrees on the outcomes we want to get to, I think it’s far more likely that we can get there as a city,” Raman said. “Far too often in Los Angeles, I feel like too few people have participated in our municipal political space. And my entire campaign has been built around inviting as many people in as possible.”
Prior to running for City Council, Raman served as the first executive director of Time’s Up Entertainment.
“One of the reasons that I was brought into the role at Time’s Up was because I had a history of taking activist energy and using that activist energy to really create institutional change and policy changes that made lasting impact in situations,” Raman said. “And that’s exactly the kind of work that I led at Time’s Up. So Time’s Up had an incredible amount of energy, wanting to make rapid change in an industry that as you said was very resistant to change. [Under] my leadership, we put into place one of the most in-depth mentorship programs to bring underrepresented voices into the executive and producer pipeline. We worked on diversifying critical voices that were given access to the industry. We created ‘Know Your Rights’ resources that empowered both casting directors and performers to be able to understand their rights and to demand what they needed in situations in which they felt really vulnerable, something which didn’t exist in the industry before.”
Raman has committed to not accepting any campaign donations from corporations, real estate agencies, or fuel companies.
“We haven’t accepted a single corporate donation as part of this campaign. And that’s an incredibly important thing that I want to talk about. For a long time in Los Angeles, including Councilmember Ryu, City Council campaigns have depended on corporate donations to get elected, and I think that’s a big reason why people who seek to profit from the city have so much power over City Hall, not just real estate, but a range of industries that control Los Angeles and that have an interest in its governance. We haven’t taken any corporate donations at all. We’ve simply refused. And that’s something that every councilmember could do if they wanted to. They don’t have to wait for laws to change at City Hall to do that, and that’s something that I’m very proud of,” Raman said.
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