Inside The ‘bad Will’ For Nithya Raman At La City Hall

LOS ANGELES — If Nithya Raman wins the Los Angeles mayor’s race next month, she'll face another challenge: getting anyone on the City Council to work with her.

Since Raman’s last-minute entry into the race against Karen Bass in February, council members have piled on the Democratic Socialists of America-aligned progressive. Not one of Raman’s 14 colleagues has endorsed her, and the shots against her have intensified as she’s climbed in the polls.

“Nithya and I vote together 99% of the time,” City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson told POLITICO. “And I’m actively opposing her being mayor. Because I understand what it means to work with her, and I understand how much more difficult it’ll make it for the city.”

The conflict could have far-reaching consequences, if Raman is victorious, in shaping Los Angeles at a critical moment. The 2028 Summer Olympics would occur halfway through her tenure, and alongside Zohran Mamdani in New York, Raman’s mayoralty would become another closely watched test of a DSA-endorsed politician’s ability to run one of America’s largest cities.

To accomplish her ambitious agenda on policing, transportation and homelessness, Raman will need a council majority to go along with her, although there’s ample reason to expect she’ll encounter resistance and deeper tensions. Raman’s platform relies on her bucking longstanding deference to council members’ positions on matters in their own districts, something she has done repeatedly over her nearly six years in office.

“Fundamental trust with a partner you’re working with is a big problem if you don’t have it,” Council member Monica Rodriguez told POLITICO. “There’s a lot of bad will there.”

Council members’ complaints about Raman range from assessments of her trustworthiness and effectiveness to what some describe as a brusque professorial persona, a waffling on policy stances and an indifference to others’ priorities.

Some of the criticisms are motivated by loyalty to Bass, some come from long-simmering tensions about Raman's personality spilling into public and others are about her approach to housing — a central plank of her candidacy — which upends long-standing City Hall customs.

The open hostility Raman is now facing has stunned even City Hall veterans.

Mike Bonin, a former council member who served alongside Raman for two years, called the public criticism “unprecedented” among council colleagues.

“A full-on, multiple-person verbal assault on someone — I cannot think of that happening," said Bonin, now executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles.

Raman’s frosty relationship with the council has been a constant line of attack from the incumbent. At a recent mayoral debate, Bass argued that Raman was ousted as head of the council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee in August because of her problems with other members.

"Your colleagues have a very difficult time working with you,” Bass charged. “As a matter of fact, we had to twist their arms to get them to even serve on the committee."

Raman has dismissed the opposition as retribution for her taking on the mayor.

“Part of what establishment politics means is you endorse incumbents, and I completely understand that,” Raman told NBC Los Angeles last week. She added that her signature achievement on the council, spearheading a dramatic expansion of the city’s rent control laws, was possible because she was able to work with her colleagues.

“I have no doubt I would be able to build those relationships again,” Raman said.

Her supporters insist that the criticisms are overblown and that, with few exceptions, opposition will fade if she pursues popular policies, builds a politically diverse administration and resolves managerial woes at the heart of frustrations with Bass.

Yet they note that should Raman win, voters — those in the city, not on the council — will have chosen a candidate who promised to shake up City Hall.

“Nithya’s an outsider and a reformer,” said Rick Cole, a longtime top bureaucrat in Los Angeles local governments and senior adviser to Raman’s campaign. “Will that create tension within the city family? Yes. But we will have just had a referendum on that.”

Raman being on the outs with the council is familiar territory. The urban planner educated at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had never held office before her victory in 2020, in which she defeated an incumbent council member for the first time in nearly 20 years and became the first DSA member elected in the city.

Soon after, her colleagues plotted against her in a brutal redistricting battle. One suggested in a secret recording that Raman’s district was the “one to put in the blender and chop up,” and Raman ended up losing more of her neighborhoods than any other council member.

But she won reelection in 2024 after having ascended to a plum post as chair of the council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee — a central role in a city struggling with both crises.

The council sets Los Angeles’ policy direction and controls its purse strings by passing laws and approving the annual budget. Each of its 15 members represents about a quarter-million people — unusually large for a local legislative body — and wields considerable influence over how the city operates in their districts.

“It’s probably the most powerful city council in any large American city” with a mayor as chief executive, said Raphe Sonenshein, executive director of the Haynes Foundation, a Los Angeles-based public policy nonprofit.

Housing is a prime example: When development projects go before the full council, members most often do what the district’s representative wants.

Bass has played by these rules. To explain her efforts to stop an affordable housing development in Venice, the mayor said she deferred to Council member Traci Park’s desire to kill it. The mayor’s opposition has stood firm even as the city has lost multiple court decisions and the state has pressed the city to approve it.

Raman supports the Venice project and has questioned the city’s strategy of litigating against housing. Three years ago, she broke with her colleagues in backing multiple affordable housing developments in single family-home neighborhoods, inside and outside her district, and warned that opposing them would violate the law. The aggrieved developers subsequently prevailed in court.

As mayor, Raman wants to triple the city’s housing production and create an independent board to manage land-use disputes that would remove “routine housing decisions from the political process.”

This perspective clashes with Council member Imelda Padilla, her successor as chair of the Housing Committee who has boasted of squeezing an affordable housing developer in her district to cut the size of their project despite having no formal authority.

But Padilla’s disputes with Raman go beyond policy. After Raman’s removal as head of the committee, Padilla accused her of stalling debates, canceling meetings and ducking controversial votes.

“The months that I served on that committee under your leadership were the most unproductive time I’ve had on council,” Padilla wrote on Instagram. “You ran it like a lecture hall at a university, not a place of government decision making.”

Raman called her removal retaliation for challenging Bass and seeking greater scrutiny over the mayor’s homelessness policies.

“I might be getting punished for running against Mayor Bass, but Angelenos are the ones who are paying the price for these political games,”Raman said.

Harris-Dawson, the mayor’s closest ally on the council, acknowledged the perception of political retribution but disputed it.

Harris-Dawson said that he and Raman had discussed committee members’ frustrations at length and that some were threatening to revolt against her leadership. Keeping Raman in charge, he said, would have hampered urgent decisions on combating Trump administration threats to withdraw funding and the disintegration of the city-county agency that oversees Los Angeles’ homelessness response.

Even Raman’s victory on rent control has an asterisk, Harris-Dawson said, because the council member did not finalize the deal. After Raman’s committee put forward a version preferred by tenant advocates, it was up to him and others on the council to hammer out language that could earn a majority vote, he said.

And for someone who wants to accelerate affordable housing production, Harris-Dawson said Raman’s incurious about how it’s actually gotten done in his district.

“Council member Raman will come to me with very strong opinions about the rules under which affordable housing should be built,” he said. “Except she's talking to the member who's built the most affordable housing of anybody on the council. It's kinda like, well, ‘I don't care what article or book you read, I've been on the ground doing this work. You should be asking me what I think about it, not the other way around.’”

Stella Stahl, a Raman spokesperson, said the councilmember has relied on Harris-Dawson because the role of council president is to "strategize, negotiate and work through compromises in support of what is best for Angelenos.”

Stahl said Raman always has been willing to ask tough questions or make difficult decisions if she believes they will help the city.

“Personal frustrations and political disagreements are inevitable in government, and she respects her colleagues even when they don’t see eye to eye,” Stahl said.

Cole, the Raman adviser, said some of the ill will stems from her abrupt entry into the race, and he predicted that Raman will be able to mend fences. Even Raman had endorsed Bass before jumping into the contest right before the filing deadline.

Raman’s ideological allies — fellow DSA-endorsed Eunisses Hernandez, Ysabel Jurado and Hugo Soto-Martinez — expressed shock when Raman announced her candidacy. In recent weeks, Jurado and Soto-Martinez have campaigned with Bass.

There’s precedent for reconciliation. Two decades ago — the last time an incumbent mayor lost reelection — a council majority backed sitting Mayor James Hahn over the eventual winner, then-Council member Antonio Villaraigosa. As mayor, Villaraigosa secured major council votes advancing his agenda.

Bonin expected some of the acrimony to dissipate if Raman wins.

“The majority of the council will give her a honeymoon,” Bonin said. “The council will try to be supportive.”

But not everyone, he said, pointing to Park and Rodriguez.

Park, one of the council’s most conservative members and the only one of Raman’s colleagues not to have endorsed Bass, has criticized both candidates. She faulted the mayor for her handling of the January 2025 wildfire that devastated Pacific Palisades in her district, but she said recently she was going to vote for the incumbent. Park maintains that Raman would be even worse and has gone after Raman for not discussing the recovery with her and for Raman’s DSA-aligned positions on policing and homelessness.

Rodriguez, who has blasted Raman on multiple occasions on the council floor and in media interviews, echoed complaints about stalled committee debates and shifting policy commitments while accusing Raman of evading responsibility for homelessness policies she helped shape.

Cole said that Raman would seek common ground with council members by assembling an administration spanning ideological, business, labor and geographic perspectives.

And Raman will be able to accomplish major parts of her agenda even if the council attempts to frustrate other ambitions, he said. Her campaign’s primary argument is that Bass is running the city poorly. Raman has pledged to hire new leadership to coordinate city departments and speed repairs to streetlights and sidewalks among other tasks.

“You don’t need the legislative function to do jobs that are in the executive function,” Cole said.

He added that Raman is more comfortable with policy than politics and her approach can come across as if she’s “acting like she's the smartest person in the room.”

Raman herself has recognized failures in building consensus. In January, she sought to put major changes to the city’s “mansion tax” on high-dollar property sales before voters. The proposal was dead on arrival in the council with Rodriguez and others blasting the plan as rushed. Raman later called the effort her biggest mistake in office, acknowledging she hadn’t built support for the plan inside and outside the council. Raman, Cole said, is learning.

“Part of growth is you have the advantage of confounding expectations,” he said. “I think she’s smart enough to confound expectations.”