NIthya Raman
is running for Mayor of Los Angeles.
“I don’t think I am alone in feeling that our city is falling behind. Housing costs are rising and LA has become a difficult place to live. The city’s failure to prepare for last January’s tragic fire, a too-expensive and fractured mismanagement of homelessness, slow 911 response times, entire neighborhoods left in the dark by broken streetlights, a $1 billion budget deficit, and a lack of action against an adversarial federal government sending ICE agents onto our streets show that LA is not being led with the clarity or accountability this moment demands.
I’m running for Mayor to make LA more affordable and to meet this moment with honesty and urgency and hard work.
Los Angeles is the most incredible city in the world. This campaign is about honoring what this city has given us - and giving back to this city what its people deserve. The political establishment will spend millions in this election to maintain our broken status quo - but with your help, we can build a more hopeful LA.”
THE PLATFORM
As mayor my commitments to the city are:
Make sure Angelenos have a home they can afford.
Fix the city: fill the potholes, pave the roads, plant trees, turn on streetlights, and put a park near where you live.
Protect Angelenos: from ICE, from harassing landlords, from unsafe streets, from fires and natural disasters. I’ll make sure when you call 911, someone actually shows up.
End the pay-to-play politics that have dominated the city for decades. I will not make political decisions. Only the best decisions for Angelenos.
Bring the jobs back. I’ll make it easier to start and run a business. We’ll revive small businesses, support restaurants and bars, and bring the Hollywood jobs back home.
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The inability to equitably and affordably house all of our residents is the compounding moral crisis of our time. It has driven our homelessness crisis, deepened segregation, and pushed working families out of the city they built.
The worst part? This crisis is almost entirely self-made. Thanks to land use policy that sharply limited where new housing can be built, and a bureaucracy that rewards indecision and delays, Los Angeles now has the fewest homes per adult of major US cities, and has the largest percentage of households who are rent burdened.
We must build much more housing to reduce housing costs. This includes housing at all income levels, everything from deed-restricted affordable housing to market rate housing to social housing to homeless shelters.
Our plan will triple annual housing construction, and allow Los Angeles to remain a city of opportunity that welcomes people looking to build their dreams here.
What we’ve done
Increased housing in Council District 4 by over a thousand units
Streamlined affordable housing projects
Created a single portal to search for affordable housing citywide (launching soon!)
Passed the Hollywood Community Plan Update and the passage of the Housing Element to create new housing capacity citywide
Passed programmatic and expenditure plans for Measure ULA and LACAHSA that will invest more than $1 billion of city and county funds to support affordable housing production, unit preservation, and eviction defense services
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Nearly two thirds of Angelenos rent their homes. Nearly 60% of them are rent burdened, which means they pay more than 30% of their income toward housing, a larger percentage than any other major city in America.
Let’s underscore what that really means: every month, a larger percentage of Angelenos choose between paying the rent or paying for groceries, healthcare, school costs, childcare and other necessities than in any other city in America. And for 80% of the lowest-income Angelenos, more than half of everything they earn goes to rent before a single other bill gets paid.
That burden can tip into crisis with one bad month. From 2023 through 2025, the Housing Department received 245,599 eviction notices. Ninety-three percent were for non-payment of rent. The average amount owed: less than $4,000. This is a burden that falls hardest on the same people every time: renters with children, renters of color, renters with disabilities, renters in low-income communities, older renters.
What we’ve done
Capped the rent after 40 years
Passed the strongest renters’ protections in Los Angeles history
Expanded Just Cause protections to all rental units
Required landlords to file an intent to evict with the City within 3 days
Made it unlawful to evict tenants who owe less than one month fair market rent
Strengthened the Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance
Improved code enforcement to ensure units are habitable and in good living condition
Passed Right to Counsel and increased tenants ability to access a lawyer when facing an eviction
Passed stricter regulations for illegal home-sharing
First council office to launch a dedicated team for tenant casework
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Every time we see one of our neighbors living and dying on the streets, we should be shocked. Instead, in Los Angeles it has become routine. The desensitization to homelessness is a moral failing and a stain on any leadership that would call itself progressive. Angelenos have voted three times in the last decade to tax themselves to respond to our city's most serious problem with housing, services, and care. But City Hall has not done nearly enough with this investment, allowing inhumane suffering to continue in one of the wealthiest cities in the world.
Los Angeles is spending hundreds of millions on homelessness every year, but we have not applied the rigor or accountability that this money demands. 40% of people moved indoors through the Mayor's signature program have returned to the streets. By failing to use our dollars, staffing, and infrastructure as efficiently as possible, we are failing the people we promised to help and squandering the compassion of voters who believed something could change. We must earn back the trust of both. If Los Angeles is going to spend real resources on this crisis — and it should — the problem must be solved.
What we’ve done
Led efforts in our district that produced some of the largest declines in unsheltered homelessness across the entire city, and brought hundreds of people indoors into safety.
Created the Bureau of Homelessness Oversight to manage homelessness spending and hold the system accountable.
Created performance data on city investments for the first time and used it to drive real results: city-funded shelter beds went from 80% to 94% occupied, and all new permanent supportive housing is now over 90% occupancy.
Created the first homelessness team at City Hall to provide consistent case management and get unhoused residents indoors quickly.
Created the city's first system to track whether homeless programs are actually working — and used it to push shelter occupancy from 80% to 94%.
Won over $2.5 million in competitive state and congressional funds to house people living along the LA River.
Worked with community partners to win more than $10 million in state funds to develop permanent housing and a treatment center for pregnant and new mothers.
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The problem
Los Angeles is losing Hollywood. Not because productions want to leave, but because we've made it too hard for them to stay. Cities around the world are funding dedicated agencies and offering aggressive incentives to take our film industry, and we have let them. This is a $30 billion industry for California that once supported nearly 150,000 jobs across the county. We've lost more than 40,000 of those jobs in recent years because we have treated it as an inconvenience rather than an asset.
The causes are structural. There is no real city film office — permitting is handled by a third-party nonprofit, and the mayor didn't appoint a dedicated film liaison until late 2025, years into the collapse. City permitting is slow and unpredictable, with no guaranteed timelines, departments that contradict each other, and fees that add up to thousands of dollars even on the smallest shoots. Neighborhood filming conditions have accumulated over decades and effectively made parts of the city off-limits to production. And recent improvements to California's tax incentives still can't match competitors who offer uncapped credits that cover above-the-line costs. We must do everything in our power to keep this industry here.
Our plan
Staff an LA Film Office in the Mayor's Office, led by people with real industry experience, and make Los Angeles a reliable partner to productions of every size.
Proactively engage studios and production companies to encourage local production, not just process permits when they come in.
Coordinate with the County and other jurisdictions so productions that cross city, county, and state lines have someone tasked with resolving inter-jurisdictional issues before they derail a shoot.
Guarantee faster, more predictable permitting with clear timelines. Institute real structural reforms within city permitting departments and FilmLA so that the bureaucracy is not standing in the way of keeping production in Los Angeles.
Lower and eliminate fees for smaller productions so indie and mid-sized projects can afford to shoot here.
Simplify neighborhood filming conditions that have accumulated over decades and made parts of the city effectively off-limits to production.
Require regular review of all filming restrictions, including Council-set special conditions and LAPD location notes, so that rules put in place after a one-time complaint don't permanently block filming on a street. Any restriction that can't be justified on current evidence should expire.
Be the loudest advocates for the most expansive possible film tax credits at the state and federal level, guaranteed multiple years into the future so that producers and studios can count on them.
The current expansion of our state tax credits to $750 million is better than before, but California is still losing to jurisdictions that offer uncapped credits, cover above-the-line costs, and provide refundable and transferable credits. For every tax credit dollar allocated, California sees $24.40 in economic output, $8.60 in wages, and $1.07 returned in state and local tax revenue, according to LAEDC.
Multi-year certainty matters as much as the dollar amount. Studios plan productions years in advance, and so do the investors building the soundstages that keep the industry rooted here.
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Angelenos are tired of sitting in traffic, feeling unsafe on their streets, and navigating broken sidewalks. We’ve voted for real change — Measure R (2008) and Measure M (2016) committed $120B to the expansion of rail and transit across the county, and Measure HLA (2024) mandated that street safety improvements happen when streets get repaved, not decades later. We’ve been waiting for City Hall to deliver on those promises with the urgency they deserve. Los Angeles moves too slowly, spends too inefficiently, plans too haphazardly, and acts too timidly to give people the transportation network they've already voted for.
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The goal
A Los Angeles where every community has access to green space that’s well maintained and joyful.
The problem
Only 62% of Angelenos live within a ten-minute walk of a park. In Chicago and New York, that number is closer to 99%. Los Angeles is a different kind of city but the gap isn't just geography, it's investment. Los Angeles spends $92 per person on our parks, while peer cities spend between $137 and $583. The result of this chronic disinvestment is deferred maintenance, too few recreational facilities, and entire communities that have no green space within walking distance.
Our plan
Champion more budgetary resources for our parks by backing the Charter Reform Commission's proposal to increase the parks set-aside in the city charter. We will treat that set-aside as a floor, not a ceiling, and pursue additional revenue sources to keep our parks funded.
Open 100 Community School Parks: school campuses that open their grounds to the public after hours for free recreation. This is a proven model that would increase the percentage of Angelenos living within a half-mile of a park from 62% to 80%, without acquiring more land.
Reform outdated rules that inhibit private and nonprofit donations to our parks and make lasting partnerships to care for our parks hard to create.
Build shade where Angelenos wait. Add at least 600 new bus shelters before the 2028 Games, prioritizing the highest-ridership stops.
Plant 100,000 street trees before the 2028 Games, prioritizing the neighborhoods with the least shade and the most heat.
Finish the LA RiverWay: an unbroken path along the river has been a dream since the 1990s, but the missing 8-mile stretch through Downtown breaks the route. We will form a Joint Powers Agreement with LA County and the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority to finally complete, manage, and operate the Upper RiverWay from Canoga Park to Downtown.