The Accidental Politician Who Could Run Los Angeles

A few weeks after Donald Trump was first sworn into office, a 35-year old woman with a graduate degree in one of Los Angeles’s most liberal neighborhoods sent an unsolicited Twitter direct message to someone she believed might be able to help with an issue over which she agonized daily.

“When is next meeting?” Nithya Raman wrote in February 2017 to the head of the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council Homeless Committee.

That message pulled the recent transplant to California into neighborhood activism and from there to a longshot outsider candidacy for City Council. Now, nine years after what could have been a passing and quickly forgotten social-media interaction, Raman stands on the cusp of running the country’s second largest city.

It has been nearly a century since Los Angeles has elected a mayor with such scant experience in the city’s civic life. (The only non-politician elected during that time, lawyer-businessperson Richard Riordan, had spent a decade on public boards and commissions.) Yet after entering the race hours before the filing deadline, a two-term City Council member who moved to Los Angeles in 2013 has a strong chance to defeat incumbent Karen Bass in Tuesday’s Democrat-on-Democrat general election.

Unlike New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, to whom she is frequently compared, Raman did not build her base by fusing her identity with an existing movement or by capturing mass attention through mastery of online communication. Instead, she pursued the type of civic engagement that plays out in claustrophobic public-library meeting rooms rather than celebrity-packed rallies or viral memes. Raman built her standing on an issue rather than a banner or a brand, zeroing in on one of Los Angeles’ longest-running, most intractable problems — street homelessness.

Nearly the entire city views homelessness as a serious matter, according to polls, a highly visible and daily reminder of Los Angeles’ struggle to manage housing costs and build new places for people to live. In her campaign against Bass, a one-time ally, Raman has identified their approaches as a key differentiator, calling the problem “mismanaged” but not “unsolvable” and criticizing her opponent’s carceral approach. In her campaign materials, Raman calls the “desensitization to homelessness” a “moral failing and a stain on any leadership that would call itself progressive.”

The two candidates do not lay out dramatically different visions about how to address homelessness. Bass prioritizes getting people off the street and into temporary shelters, while Raman wants to maintain shelter capacity while shifting money to shared housing and rental subsidies she views as more permanent solutions. Her platform calls for funding stalled homeless housing projects, deploying street medicine teams citywide, and creating an unarmed crisis response system. She has criticized Bass’ signature Inside Safe program, which has cleared encampments while pressuring occupants to take temporary residence in city-leased hotel rooms, as expensive and unreliable.

Bass has dismissed Raman’s criticisms as hypocrisy, saying she voted in favor of Inside Safe, and has taken credit for the mayor’s homelessness initiatives. Critics have pointed to her lack of executive experience, and the track record of the homelessness non-profit that facilitated her rise in politics. As Bass put it recently, Raman “wants to be in charge of the entire city that she barely knows.”

For Raman’s backers, her arc — from concerned homeowner to neighborhood activist to ambitious office-seeker — is evidence not only of her commitment to addressing homelessness but of a fresh perspective developed in a brief but formative period in which she first confronted one of the central failings of modern Los Angeles.

“I was like, there's a whole LA out here begging to be served by this city, but is completely ignored by the political establishment — an LA of renters and of young people trying to scratch out a living in a city that was increasingly becoming so expensive, an LA that that wanted to see homelessness addressed with urgency and compassion and care,” Raman said in an interview last week between campaign stops. “That's the LA that I knew I could speak to.”

When Raman first came to Los Angeles in 2013, she did not immediately fall for the city that she would later aim to run. Raman had been living in India, where she was born before her family emigrated to Massachusetts as a child, working on sanitation and urban poverty projects in India after receiving her urban-planning master’s degree from MIT. She moved to California because her husband — a television writer and producer she had met while both were students at Harvard — worked there, and they were tired of living apart.

Upon arriving in Los Angeles, Raman spent about a year working for the city’s chief administrative officer, analyzing public spending and developing a report on how city money was being spent to combat homelessness. She found herself disturbed by what she learned; her report noted that $100 million was being spent each year to combat homelessness, but much of that was, as she put it, “going into arresting people.”

After about seven years in India, Los Angeles was an adjustment. An avid cyclist in college, the driving culture got her down. While raising twins in Silver Lake, a gentrified neighborhood filling with boutiques and cafes as well as sidewalk tents, she was startled by the proximity in which wealth and despair could coexist.

While encampments have long been part of Los Angeles, dating back to transient laborers in the early 1900s and post World War II housing shortages, in the mid-2010s, according to activists, the problem began to spread beyond the traditional centers in downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood into the rest of the city.

“Housing costs were rising, there were encampments where you didn’t see them before, people visibly struggling that you wouldn’t see in residential areas before,” said Darius Derakshan, at the time chair of a newly revived Silver Lake homelessness committee. “I was new to the issue, but I wanted to try to figure out how to help.”

In February 2017, Derakshan received an unsolicited message on Twitter from a fellow Silver Lake resident whom he had never met. In her message, Raman expressed concern about the growing crisis and asked if there was any way to get involved. The two made plans to get coffee in nearby Los Feliz.

“I didn’t have a lot of answers,” said Derakshan. “But we both felt like we were on the same page that not enough was being done.”

Not long after, at a Silver Lake Neighborhood Council Homeless Committee meeting, one of many semi-formal advisory panels that exist across the city, Derakshan nominated Raman to be his co-chair. During the meeting, which was held at a local library, she told committee members her priority was making the neighborhood safe for women, bicyclists and the homeless through a “more compassionate, people-first approach,” as draft minutes of the meeting put it. Raman was well acquainted with the city’s response to homelessness as a result of her time working for the city. And before one of the smallest manifestations of governmental power in California, she made many of the points that would ultimately animate a mayoral campaign nearly a decade later — that this was the biggest issue facing the city, that police shouldn’t be the face of the government to homeless people, and that government services like 311 needed to be accountable. Raman was unanimously confirmed to the post.

In early 2017, the American left was awash in lively opportunities for online-enabled mass politics: the Women’s March on Donald Trump’s inauguration an opportunity for Democratic catharsis, the impromptu airport protests against his ban on travelers from majority-Muslim countries an expression of solidarity. But Raman found inspiration in a contrasting model of civic engagement: hyper-local, small-scale, arcane, decidedly unglamorous in its focus on practical solutions rather than the unifying spirit of dissent.

A few weeks later, Raman and Derakshan joined an employee of People Assisting the Homeless, one of California’s largest service providers, on a ride-along to encampments on the Los Angeles River and beneath 101 Freeway underpasses. Derakshan remembers being shocked by what they encountered, in one instance approaching a man who wielded a metal baton like a baseball bat. He recalled Raman was rarely fazed. She had a knack for connecting on an individual level with those living on the street — “making people feel heard,” in the words of Cat Kim, another resident of Northeast Los Angeles who partnered with Raman on homelessness response.

Cat Kim and her sister Janet were among the earliest allies Raman and Derakshan cultivated for their work. The Kims had been inspired to act after observing the growing tensions surrounding a man who lived in a red van in Los Feliz and periodically dressed up as Elmo. The man, whose history of aggressive outbursts led him to be identified in press accounts as “Evil Elmo,” had become the target of posters on the neighborhood social media platform Nextdoor, with some among them threatening to take matters into their own hands if the city didn’t act.

“We wanted to get him connected to services and do more humane things,” Cat Kim said. “There seemed to be a need for neighbors to be able to do something.”

That spring, Raman, Derakshan and the Kim sisters came together to found their own social-service organization, fueled by shared disappointment from having approached county supervisors and City Council members to little effect. (A fifth partner, Dorit Dowler-Guerrero, declined to be interviewed for this article.) Their SELAH Neighborhood Homelessness Coalition — the abbreviation refers to Silver Lake, Echo Park, Los Feliz, Atwater Village, and Hollywood — would aim to fill service gaps that city and county programs missed. While neighborhood committees typically focused on resolutions, discussion, and petitioning city government for help, the new group would avoid the policymaking labyrinth and instead take a direct approach to engaging with homeless people.

“Our work was not high profile. The people you interact with the most are not kingmakers,” Derakshan said. “And we were all distinctly like, we don’t want this to become a political operation.”

The SELAH volunteers began meeting on Saturday mornings over breakfast burritos at a Glendale Boulevard coffee shop. In small groups, they headed out to different encampments across the area to take notes on the circumstances in each. Afterward, one of the members would share the information with PATH or another service provider and then follow up with the individual requests of the people they had met.

The group grew, its membership rising to 40 people. Volunteers moved beyond impromptu supply drops to a standing schedule, in which they committed to visiting the same Northeast Los Angeles encampments on a biweekly basis. SELAH began training its volunteers to help people living on the street to navigate government bureaucracy, with guidance to secure federal nutrition benefits and replace missing Social Security cards.

Raman began to gingerly approach the political sphere on her own. She volunteered for a campaign to defeat Measure S, a slow-growth ballot initiative that would have imposed a two-year moratorium on certain development projects. The fight over the proposal, resoundingly defeated by voters in November 2017, helped to clarify Raman’s thinking about the connection between homelessness and development: a city that kept people off the street would have to be willing to build more homes.

“I’m an urban planner by training. Land use is the way I see the world,” Raman said. “Economic resilience, housing, affordability, all that is rooted in land use.”

In July 2018, Raman took a job as executive director of Time’s Up Entertainment, a new group that had emerged from the Me Too movement to combat sexual harassment and gender inequality in Hollywood. (Later that year, partly over concerns surrounding liability and growing logistics, SELAH decided to officially organize as a non-profit.) Raman continued her work on homelessness over “nights and weekends,” as she put it.

“I had not thought about running for office, but I thought about the city a lot. I thought about what it would take for the city to be able to respond to these issues with urgency and care,” Raman said. “My desire to run, or my thinking about running, came much later.”

Raman had been interested in politics — she says was inspired by Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential run, and donated the $5,400 maximum to Hillary Clinton after she won the nomination — but Cat Kim and Derakshan agreed that Raman never spoke about the homelessness work in political terms. Yet as what was once a modest weekend volunteer project became a self-perpetuating activist network, she came to see it as a model of what was possible when ordinary people were mobilized to action.

While SELAH grew, Raman and her partners tried to get their local elected officials to pay attention, to minimal success. She said Councilmember David Ryu blew off requests for a meeting, sending staff instead. The Measure S campaign had “activated a lot of people” to focus on housing and homelessness, as Raman put it, but Ryu appeared slow to pick up on the changing political environment. In 2019, he told the Los Angeles Times that in his initial run for City Council four years earlier “no one really wanted to hear about it” but now “you cannot go anywhere without talking about homelessness.”

To Raman, it was impossible to separate the issue from California’s broader housing crisis. The only way to keep people off the street was to have more housing accessible to Angelenos at every level of need — stable residences for those currently homeless, affordable options for those looking to buy, and expanded tenant protections for existing renters. Even some SELAH volunteers, Raman noticed, were on the verge of losing their homes.

“It felt like there was a kind of urgency to the struggles that we were seeing … that just was not reflected in the politics that David Ryu had run on and seemed to be most engaged with, and that that was ultimately what pushed me to think about running,” Raman said.

In November, 2019 she declared her candidacy for Ryu’s seat, running to represent a district that stretched from the hipster precincts of Northeast Los Angeles into the suburban sprawl of the San Fernando Valley. (Ryu declined to comment for this article.) Raman said in an interview that she did not really expect to win, imagining a campaign in the model of Sanders’ 2016 presidential run that could help reshape the public agenda. “End homelessness” topped the list of priorities listed on her campaign signs.

“I wanted people like David Ryu to stop ignoring what I saw on the ground, and a city that was begging for City Hall's attention and not getting it,” Raman said. “A campaign is a really good way of making people pay attention.”

Without Ryu’s name recognition or donor base, Raman knew that her campaign was going to have to rely on low-cost politicking to stand a chance. She sought out backing from a group outside the traditional Democratic establishment, one unafraid to back longshot insurgents. She became a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and captured the endorsement of its local chapter.

With DSA’s support, Raman challenged Ryu from the left, a political outsider with a progressive platform that included a rent forgiveness plan and a downsized police department. She ran a dynamic campaign on Instagram, releasing easy-to-digest, fun-to-watch video explainers about the city’s failings, leading one supporter, in contemporary reporting, to describe her as “like a celebrity.”

In a top-two jungle primary in March 2020, Raman found herself trailing Ryu by only 3,000 votes. She became a rallying point for progressives across the city and beyond, winning endorsements from climate advocate Jane Fonda and Sanders himself. Over the course of the year, Raman built a volunteer army that eventually grew to 2,000 strong, with the help of the DSA and another progressive organizing group, Ground Game LA, that delivered a cadre of young, digital-savvy supporters. She also cultivated support from real celebrities, raising one-third of her total $953,000 from Hollywood writers, actors and directors.

In November, she defeated Ryu by a six-point margin, becoming the first person in nearly two decades to defeat a council incumbent. “Our City Council has an incredible amount of power,” Raman said then. “And so far they have failed to use it.”

One Sunday this October, Raman traveled to a street corner in South Central Los Angeles, a few City Council districts away from the one she has represented for the past six years. Dressed in jeans and a Dodgers T-shirt, she began grabbing pieces of trash off the ground near a long line of homeless encampments. This time, Raman did not have to struggle to find others to join her. Twenty volunteers from her mayoral campaign joined in, picking through sidewalk needles and condoms as traffic slowed to peer at the television cameras tracking Raman’s every move.

“If I’m mayor, hopefully you won't be waiting for the city anymore,” Raman told a litter influencer named Juan Naula, who has built an 85,000-follower Instagram account by recording himself cleaning up trash around the city. “The goal is a city that is clean, that is picking up the trash, and is working for you and every single resident.”

During a term and a half on the City Council, Raman built a dedicated homelessness response team within her office, sidestepping city bureaucracy. She opposed anti-encampment restrictions, saying the policy did nothing to move people indoors, while proposing a new plan for addressing people living in their vehicles. In 2023, she became the chair of the city’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, where she demanded more scrutiny of city spending on temporary rent subsidies.

Within her district, she began rehousing projects directed at people living along the Los Angeles River, the region she toured with Derakshan years ago. She converted a hotel in her district to housing, and developed an outreach program for people occupying RVs. Her office claims to have placed upwards of 2,000 people into interim housing.

But Raman has struggled to meld her activist origin story and her political education on City Council to make the case that she is prepared to run a city of nearly four million people. Her relationship with the Democratic Socialists eroded as she broke with them on issues like Israel. In 2024, she helped steer $42,000 in city funding to the organization for homeless outreach services, prompting criticism from some in the community and a later legal challenge. (“No current SELAH board member works in our office or had any role in this decision,” a Raman spokesperson said, noting that the councilmember sought ethics guidance prior to entering the contract.)

Her stint atop the housing and homelessness committee has been panned by colleagues, all of whom are supporting Bass, and the mayor, who has made Raman’s failure to win colleagues’ support a major part of her attacks on the challenger. Bass’ campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

“It was the most unproductive time I’ve had on council,” said councilmember Imelda Padilla of her time on the committee. “There's no way to rephrase that.”

Even some of the grassroots, homelessness-focused organizations that one would expect to serve as the core of Raman’s constituency are unsure about her candidacy. Some point to Raman’s record of DIY activism — and the way she came to fuse her concern for the poor with a pro-construction mentality that could benefit private developers — as reasons not to trust her.

“It’s hard to say what a mayoral candidate or a city council candidate will be like once they’re in office. They can make a lot of promises, and they might even believe them, but once they’re in office it's a whole different story,” said Lupita Limón Corrales, an organizer with the Los Angeles Tenants Union, which is not supporting either candidate in the election. “She’s not accountable to or supported by a social movement in L.A.”

On the block beside the cleanup in South Central Los Angeles, an extensive encampment lined the southbound sidewalk of Avalon Boulevard. One resident, Nyah, had just returned from work as the cleanup crew passed by. She recognized Raman and went up to shake her hand, thanking her for her efforts for the city and promising her vote. The artifice broken, Raman took her aside, out of the view of cameras, and asked if there was anything she could do to help.