Mayor-elect Nithya Raman names priorities for Los Angeles transition

Raman begins assembling her City Hall team amid unresolved implementation questions

Appearing before reporters Thursday for the first time as mayor-elect, Nithya Raman was brief about her agenda. “Homelessness, housing costs and public safety,” she said. “These will have to be the priorities that I take on in the city.” Raman defeated Karen Bass in an upset and will take office in mid-December, when she will face political divisions in City Hall and problems that have defied her predecessors: a long-running homeless crisis, an exodus of Hollywood jobs, miles of crumbling streets and sidewalks and a strained budget.

Raman is just starting to assemble her City Hall team and has not delivered a financially detailed plan for how she will address some of the city’s persistent problems. The Associated Press described her campaign as that of an outsider and said she now had to show she can lead. It reported that she did not win a single endorsement from her 14 colleagues on the Los Angeles City Council. The police union opposed her campaign. The AP also reported that Raman had friction with the Jewish community and that the Democratic establishment supported incumbent Bass.

Street work is one area where implementation details remain unsettled. Los Angeles, described as the birthplace of car culture where driving is part of everyday life for most residents, has among its most common complaints traffic and potholes. In 2013, former Mayor Eric Garcetti campaigned on a “back to basics” platform to address street paving, but little happened. Under Bass, the city focused on filling potholes rather than resurfacing streets. Raman has said she will recast that policy; how much money will go toward streets and how quickly they can be repaved remain unknown.

Caroline Heldman, a political scientist at Occidental College, said Raman will need concrete solutions to day-to-day problems such as potholes, thousands of broken streetlights and clearing homeless encampments. “She didn’t win the election by positioning herself as being really ideologically distinct from Karen Bass,” Heldman said. “She positioned herself as the pothole politician, very similar to Zohran Mamdani. I see her taking a page out of his playbook.”

The Associated Press reported that Los Angeles mayors have less clout than their counterparts in New York and Chicago because power is shared with the City Council. Mike Bonin, a former Los Angeles City Council member who served with Raman from December 2020 to 2022 and is executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles, compared the arrangement to an accordion that can expand or contract depending on who holds the office.

The city council’s reaction to Raman’s election was somewhat muted. Traci Park, who voted for Bass and had said she had “concerns about the leadership and effectiveness” of both candidates, said in a statement that she looked forward to working with Raman in a city with “great challenges.”

When Raman takes office in mid-December, she will join democratic socialist mayors in municipal government, including Zohran Mamdani in New York and Katie Wilson in Seattle. Janeese Lewis George was elected Tuesday as mayor of Washington, D.C. The Associated Press said Raman was expected to steer Los Angeles in a leftward direction, while she has said she is willing to break from the Democratic Socialists of America if its agenda conflicts with the city’s interests. “My independence will always be paramount,” she said at a candidate forum in September.

The millennial, India-born Raman remains a new face to many Angelenos, according to the AP, which described Los Angeles as a city where local politics often attracts little public attention. Her governance of the nation’s second most populous city will be closely watched nationally, particularly as she prepares to welcome the world to Los Angeles for the 2028 Olympics.

During the campaign, Raman faced questions about Israel while the Democratic Party was deeply divided over the war in Gaza and aid to Israel, the AP reported. In an interview last spring with progressive commentator Hasan Piker, she responded “I do, yes” when asked whether she believed Israel had committed genocide. At a forum co-hosted by the Jewish Federation Los Angeles, Raman said genocide was “a deeply painful word” and said she was compelled to speak out after seeing images of “the targeting of hospitals, the deaths of children.” Her comments prompted murmurs in the audience. Some within the Democratic Socialists of America believed her positions on Israel were not sufficiently tough.

After Raman’s victory, the Jewish Federation called on her to “rebuild trust with Jewish Angelenos that was strained during the campaign.”

The Associated Press described the Los Angeles contest as relatively low key and said turmoil in Washington and the fight for control of Congress overshadowed it. The AP reported that Raman never had the star power known as a Mamdani trademark. Bonin described Raman as philosophically progressive but temperamentally moderate. “She got painted in this campaign as a crazy socialist idealogue or a flip-flopper with no core values,” Bonin said. But, he said, “she wanted to work with people. She is very focused on results.”

Raman and her TV writer and producer husband are raising 10-year-old twins in the Silver Lake neighborhood. Her unlikely rise to the mayoralty came at least in part because she ran against a wounded incumbent at a time when voters nationwide were eager for change, the Associated Press reported. Bass was undone by the deadly Palisades Fire, which ignited while she was out of the country and caught the fire department unprepared. Raman is an urban planner educated at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose background includes founding a homelessness outreach nonprofit in Los Angeles.

In election-night remarks before she was declared the winner, Raman depicted Los Angeles as a city in stasis and broadly sketched her vision for what the city could be. “LA stopped being a place where we could build things, where we could open things, where we could film things, where we could create things,” she said. She added that she wanted to revive “that ambitious Los Angeles, that joyful Los Angeles, that creative Los Angeles, that entrepreneurial Los Angeles.”

Bonin said former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa “swung for the fences.” He contrasted the former mayor’s approach with Bass’s and said Raman would set her own course. “I can’t think of a mayor who had to take office with so many problems,” Bonin said. “Everybody leaves unpopular. … It’s not a job that makes you well loved.”