Housing, Homelessness, and the L.A. Political Machine with L.A. Councilmember Nithya Raman

Hello!

Today we have a great interview with Nithya Raman, the City Councilmember for Los Angeles’s District 4. We talk about housing, the despair around the homelessness problem in California’s biggest cities, and whether there might be a different future for the city’s political machine.

My interest in Councilmember Raman started back when I was writing the newsletter for the Times because there was an effort by some of the more powerful local politicians to redraw her district in ways that would both disenfranchise many of the people who had voted for her to be their representative but also seemed to reflect the unrelenting power of homeowners in Southern California.

You can read some of those pieces here, here, and here.

What became clear to me during the reporting of those pieces was that Mike Davis was right when he wrote “the most powerful ‘social movement’ in contemporary Southern California is that of affluent homeowners, organized by notional community designations or tract names, engaged in the defense of home values and neighborhood exclusivity.”

The real battle in California, then, is between the self interests of homeowners to protect their value and the “character” of their neighborhoods and the best interests of everyone else. This is not a fight that follows basic partisan lines nor is it one that really has much coherence to it, but it’s the fight that every politician in California, especially in Los Angeles or here in the Bay Area, must navigate to get anything done.

Nithya and I talked about all that and the massive scandal in the Los Angeles City Council in 2022, where Latino members of the council and labor leaders were caught on tape making bigoted statements about pretty much every other group in the city. What those tapes revealed, at least to me, was how a type of identity politics actually functioned in the country’s second biggest city.

If you want to know a bit more about Nithya, here’s a link to her campaign page and a story about the leaked tape scandal.

thank you!

TTSG