“We’re in a moment of deep distrust of government institutions, elected officials, and state power, and we have to rebuild a robust local system of trust.”
Amid Los Angeles’ overlapping crises—from homelessness and affordability to climate risk and federal antagonism—District 4 LA City Councilmember Nithya Raman reflects back on her first term navigating the maze of City Hall and the hard-earned lessons of governance. Raman shares her perspective on the structural challenges that hinder effective regional responses to Southern California’ complex challenges, the promise and shortcomings of Measure ULA, and the urgency of rebuilding civic trust in a time of fragmentation. Here, Raman advocates for charter reform, collaboration, and delivering tangible results for Angelenos—while grappling with the challenging realities reshaping local politics in LA.
Given that Los Angeles faces an array of overlapping crises—housing, homelessness, wildfire recovery, climate risk, affordability, and, increasingly, federal hostility—how do you prioritize the aforementioned?
To me, except for some of the recent federal issues related to our ability to control public safety that are beyond the scope—all of these issues you mention are fundamentally connected to our lack of housing for people here in LA.
To me, housing continues to be a priority and, hopefully, the need to really incentivize and create much more housing in Los Angeles will be an even greater focus of my work in my second term to ensure the city’s future.
Considering that the national media and even the White House have targeted the City of LA as “unfunctionally unmanageable,” how do you, as a member of City Council, counter that narrative?
Well, I think there’s a fundamental disconnect between the way in which the region is designed to be governed and the nature of the challenges we’re facing. LA was designed to be decentralized, partly as a reaction to corruption and centralization of East Coast cities like Boston, New York, and Chicago. But the issues that we’re dealing with are regional, whether it’s transportation and the need to alleviate traffic, housing, homelessness, climate change, or air quality. The issues That come up as the most important locally are ones that are regional in nature.
How do I show that LA is governable? Well I think there’s a lot that you can do just through effective governance, and I really try to ensure that I’m delivering on campaign promises. I focus on outcomes.
For example, I’ve delivered on my campaign promise of reducing street homelessness year after year, I’ve reduced street homelessness in my district for three consecutive years, most recently by 40%. I’ve also worked to ensure that whenever we have the opportunities to collaborate with other jurisdictions to address these issues, that I’m taking those opportunities to actually function better as a region, as opposed to just as a city or council district.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, Outliers, famously offered readers the "10,000-hour Rule,” which postulates that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is the key to achieving world-class expertise in any field. Now in your second term on the Council, and having served for more than 10,000 hours, what do you know now …that you didn’t in your first term?
City Hall is a maze, and no one gives you a map when you start.
I got a binder when I came in, and most of it was about retirement benefits. That’s it. And you remember, I was doing this during COVID. No one told me how to get a streetlight fixed. No one told me how to house someone living in an encampment. There was no roadmap.
Now I know how to push City Hall to function for my district. I often think of myself and my staff as a kind of concierge for our constituents—helping them navigate and advocate for them in a city where resources for constituent response are very, very stretched. Over time, we’ve developed a huge amount of expertise in doing just that.
That’s the biggest change.
I now know how things work. I know how to push the levers of government toward actually resolving problems. And I’ve had a crash course through one crisis after another, whether it’s the fires this past January, the federal government’s actions, or other issues we’ve dealth with in the past. That doesn’t mean I don’t still face resistance—bureaucratic resistance, or resistance to change over. And I haven’t solved every problem. But at least now, I know who to call.
Has your first term’s experience changed any of your views on governance? Any policy positions you’ve reconsidered?
I’m still an advocate for expanding the City Council. Fifteen council districts are just too few for a city of our size. Each member has too many constituents to serve them as well as they deserve. I’ve also come to believe strongly that Council expansion needs to be paired with greater centralization of executive authority in the Mayor’s office. Right now, our departments have16 bosses— 15 councilmembers and the mayor.
That structure is confusing and inefficient. If we want things to function—if we want accountability—we need to make it clear who’s in charge. For me, charter reform needs to do both: expand Council representation and centralize executive decision-making.
Pivoting to housing policy, you're widely recognized as a strong advocate for incentivizing new development (supply) to increase affordability for those who truly feel shut out of the market. What then are your thoughts on Measure ULA?
Measure ULA has brought resources into Los Angeles that we never had access to before—certainly not in a regular, sustained way. It’s provided funding for affordable housing construction, eviction defense, and tenant protections. To me, it’s an incredible resource for the city, and it’s worth fighting for. That said, there is a fight ahead.
There are people who seek to repeal the law entirely, and those who have critiqued the measure for having unintended consequences and would like to see tweaks in the law. I’ve been deeply engaged in conversations with people making those critiques. I’ve asked: What are you seeing? What’s the research and data showing? How can we make sure we keep ULA intact as much as possible, while addressing those unintended consequences.
Elaborate on those conversations.
I’ve reached out to authors of recent studies—including from UCLA—to understand their methodology, conclusions, and proposed fixes.
At the same time, I’m in active conversations with supporters of ULA, who are a broad coalition of labor, tenants' rights advocates, and affordable housing developers. I’ve asked them what they make of the data, how they interpret the trends we’re seeing, and what they believe needs to happen next.
I’m also trying to distinguish the local effects of ULA from broader economic forces like interest rate hikes, construction slowdowns, and national headwinds. It’s important not to conflate those.
What’s heartening is that across the board, people agree on the core issues: we need more housing, especially multifamily; we’re deep in a housing crisis. There’s also widespread agreement on how useful and important ULA’s resources are for keeping people in their homes and as a new city resource for housing production. The conversations have been incredibly valuable, and I’m committed to continuing them in the months ahead.
Could you further elaborate, given that ULA critics suggest ULA has generated less revenue and fewer transactions than expected?
Revenue has increased year-over-year and is getting closer to the numbers that were predicted. It’s still an enormous sum of money. We just approved a $330 million Notice of Funding Availability. That’s more funding than the City of Los Angeles has had for a very, very long time.
Nothing I said about Measure ULA being an unprecedented resource is inaccurate at all.
Before our last TPR interview with you in April 2021, Judge Carter had just ordered the City and County to offer shelter to everyone in Skid Row within 6 months. As the current Chair of the LA City Council’s Homelessness Committee, what’s your reaction to Judge Carter’s most recent decision not to put the City in receivership for failing to meet those goals? Do you approve of Judge Carter’s decision?
I don’t think the City should be under receivership. We are making progress on reducing street homelessness for the first time in years. More progress than the County, which has been left untouched by the court’s action so far, in many ways. And the goal of this case is supposedly to address and reduce street homelessness.
To put the City into receivership now, when we are finally making progress on those issues for the first time in a very, very long time, I think would be deeply hypocritical.
Nithya, you are also on the board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District. What priorities are you championing?
You’re catching me at an odd time with that question. I was excited about amendments to Rules 1111 and 1121, which were before the board at our last meeting. If they had passed, those amendments when fully implemented would have reduced emissions in our region at a scale equivalent to taking every car off the road.
The proposed rules targeted gas furnaces and water heaters and were thoughtfully designed: low cost, with a phased rollout, and minimal impact on the end user. People would only have had to comply when replacing old equipment. It was a smart, strategic step forward, but we didn’t pass it.
I’m honestly still reeling from the idea that even where we do have local and regional authority to regulate emissions, we’re backing away from those opportunities. All of this is happening as the federal government is taking an ax to environmental regulations nationwide, so yes, I’m concerned about our ability to really make environmental progress going forward.
Critics of the South Coast board’s inaction on these rules have argued that there has been too little outreach and capacity-building to support the policy goals being advanced by staff. Is that a fair critique?
I'm skeptical of that as an explanation, only because we got significant policy outreach during that process both from people who wanted to see the measure move forward and from people who had concerns and questions. I will say, the AQMD in the past few years has made big policy strides that, just a few years ago, would’ve seemed very expansive. We managed to make those strides successfully, for example, the indirect source rules, through leadership really pushing forward a vision for change that the board got behind.
To me, what happened with these rules reflected a shortfall in both external and internal organizing. We didn’t meet the moment on either front, and I think we fell short as a board.
Of immediate importance for City’s leadership is the ICE immigration raids and the many impacts on, for example, housing production. What can Leadership do to protect its vulnerable communities and mitigate economic disruptions?
The City already has policies in place that prevent us from aiding with immigration enforcement. We don’t participate in the actions of the federal government—certainly not in these recent actions. I think the City can do more to get creative about protecting residents.
To be honest with you, I don’t know exactly what that looks like. That would take creative thinking from our law enforcement leadership, as well as our City Attorney, to ask: Are we doing everything we can? Not just avoiding cooperation, but actively protecting people, especially given how these raids are being conducted in unconstitutional ways that feel like kidnappings by people who aren’t identifying themselves as immigration officials. It’s a very distressing and scary time.
People are being abducted from their places of work. We need to be more creative—we need to go beyond non-cooperation. We must protect our residents from unconstitutional acts. Now, I’m not a lawyer, and not the City Attorney. I’m an urban planner, so I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but I feel strongly that we can and should be doing more.
I’ve been urging our leadership in both LAPD and the City Attorney’s Office to think about what those actions could be. I hope we can be more proactive going forward.
Stepping back from immediate priorities, if you were to recommend a Blue Ribbon Committee to respond innovatively to any of the challenges facing the City today—whether in response to federal hostility towards Los Angeles or the need for more housing— whom would you nominate to Chair or be on such a panel?
We have a wealth of expertise in former Attorneys General and in law enforcement leadership—people who’ve been in place during previous moments when these issues were prominent, though arguably not this potent. I think looking at them would be very useful.
We also have immigration attorneys who really understand the scope of these laws and what they mean in practice. These are attorneys who’ve advised the City before on how we can do more, and I think bringing them into the room, inviting their guidance and feedback, would be useful. But I also think we have to start from a place of trusting one another. We all need to trust that we share the same goals on these issues and rebuilding that trust is going to take work.
Unlike during the first Trump administration, when Los Angeles felt more united in its response, this time feels more fragmented. We’re in a moment of deep distrust of government institutions, elected officials, and state power, and we have to rebuild a robust local system of trust.
Tomorrow’s the last day of our regularly scheduled Council meetings—we go into recess after that, unless we have to reconvene for emergencies. I hope we can use this month to start rebuilding some of that trust.
As we come to a close, drawing upon your 10,000+ hours of experience in political office, what lessons should voters and leadership in Los Angeles take from the recent mayoral elections in San Francisco and New York?
I think it’s the same lesson we’re seeing in elections across the world: there is a very strong anti-incumbency sentiment right now. There’s a deep distrust of government overall and of people in power. We need to look to leaders who’ve won re-election during these times, and there haven’t been many without too many hiccups.
We should study how they did it, what they did, and what lessons we can learn to bring more stability to our politics in the next few years.
How did you do it?
I already answered that. You’ve got to deliver on your promises. You have to do what you say you’re going to do.
Lastly, allow an addendum to that first question: given the intensity of the challenges of the current moment, do you ever have second thoughts about being an elected local government official?
I don’t have second thoughts about being an elected official. Serving in this role—for a city I love so deeply, honestly, a city I’m obsessed with—is an incredible honor. Aside from my family, LA is what I care about the most.
That said, this is not what I expected when I became a local elected official. I anticipated working on homelessness and land use policy. I did not expect to be dealing with things like potential federal takeovers or people being taken off the streets by masked men.
We’ve entered a new and unsettling era in American politics, and unfortunately, that’s changed what it means to serve in this role.
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