LA’s homelessness uptick lets Raman target Bass. If only accountability was that simple

After two consecutive years of declines in the number of people sleeping on the streets of Los Angeles, the progress appears to have been nearly wiped out. That’s discouraging news for a city exhausted by the issue, and it throws a strange curve into the race for mayor.

The latest annual count, released last week, registered 45,194 unhoused people in the city of Los Angeles this year, up from 43,695 the year prior. That’s still below the level recorded during Mayor Karen Bass’ first year in office, but it follows back-to-back declines, suggesting that any momentum under Bass is tentative at best. 

This is hardly what city residents and voters wanted after years of concentrated effort and the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars. Bass is up for reelection in November, and her opponent, Councilmember Nithya Raman, highlighted the latest report as evidence of Bass’ inability to tackle the city’s most pressing crisis.

“This,” Raman said, “is a moral outrage. And it is a failure.”

On Monday, an energized Raman toured a training facility in Sylmar, where apprentice carpenters are learning their craft and pining for the chance to participate in a Los Angeles building boom. The council member picked up the endorsement of the Western State Carpenters union, while pledging to usher in a wave of new construction.

“You are the people who build Los Angeles,” she told a cheering crowd of workers, nimbly moving back and forth between English and Spanish. “And together, we are going to build its future.”

Raman beamed. It’s hard not to be buoyed when dozens of working men and women are chanting your name.

There’s something topsy-turvy in all of this politically. Raman is a democratic socialist, but her message to the carpenters was heavy on the importance of reducing government regulation and letting private industry build new homes, schools and roads. 

“Mayors don’t build housing,” she acknowledged ruefully. At the same time, the endorsement is particularly helpful to Raman, as the carpenters backed Bass four years ago and helped her handily defeat businessman Rick Caruso.

Meanwhile, Bass, who would be the liberal in almost any other run-off election in America, is campaigning in this race as the candidate of order — the leader willing to emphasize police in enforcing public safety and willing to disrupt encampments in order to reduce homelessness.

As such, the campaign scrambles many of the assumptions of Los Angeles and municipal politics — that the path to victory is through command of the political center, that homeowners are the core of the electorate, that unions favor incumbents, and that older and more established voters form a more reliable base than young people and newcomers. 

Those things have long been true in politics, but they may not be true anymore. Los Angeles is a very liberal place, one where renters dominate the electorate and where Raman’s blend of democratic socialism, personal appeal and practical compromise may be closer to most voters than Bass’ more traditional liberalism.

The upward tick in the city’s unhoused population is especially notable in political terms because it was accompanied by sharp reductions in Raman’s council district, which covers mostly affluent areas from Silver Lake and Los Feliz in the East, to Encino and Sherman Oaks on the other side of the Hollywood Hills. But the district envelopes working-class communities along the way, and struggles — as does all of Los Angeles — with street homelessness and its attendant community concerns, such as blight and petty crime. 

While street homelessness was on the rise citywide, it dropped by nearly 50% in District 4, which Raman represents.

Of course, there’s a wrinkle in all of that. Raman is not just the council member for her own district. She also chairs the council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, so she, too, has citywide responsibilities. Bass says her signature program, called Inside Safe, has helped Raman’s district — that Raman is effectively benefiting from the mayor’s initiative while simultaneously criticizing it.

Raman’s role as a committee chair blurs the edges of her accountability. It is just one example of the difficulty in disentangling the records of these two mayoral candidates. 

If elected, Raman has pledged to reduce street homelessness by 50% citywide in time for the Olympics in 2028, but Bass obviously has struggled to meet similar targets. Pressed for why the current efforts are falling short of expectations, Raman forcefully responded.

“Mayor Bass’ Inside Safe program is an emergency response that is only the first step of systemic changes that need to happen to get people indoors and off the streets,” she said on Monday, speaking loudly over the clatter of hammers and electric saws.

Raman believes her plan would go beyond shelter and get those who are unhoused “the mental health (treatment) and the services that they need to stay housed and to actually move … to that next step — whether it is reunification with their families, whether it is moving into mental health housing, whether it is getting a job and actually becoming self-sufficient.

“All of that is possible. None of that is being done at the city right now.”

Why not, I asked her. Why is the city — one that she serves in an important council position, and that Bass serves as mayor — not taking those steps now?

“That is not a question for me to answer,” she said sharply. “That is a question for this mayor to answer.”

None of this is easy. Homelessness is a stubborn pathology, a tragic confluence of failed public policies and eternal social conditions. There is nothing new about poverty, nor nothing novel about addiction. These problems are not easily wished away. If there was a simple fix to helping tens of thousands of people sleeping in tents and on the street, policymakers would fix it. Instead, it requires a blend of responses, a willingness to try things and then abandon them if they don’t work. And it demands public patience, a quality in short supply these days.

So Raman and Bass slug it out, raising money (there Bass is showing strength), holding events, circling each other with policy ideas and preparing to dash to the finish from Labor Day to Election Day. 

On Monday, Raman took in the carpenter training facility with interest and enthusiasm. She asked questions of her guide as she moved through a simulated construction site. At one point, Raman stepped on a large nail. Without pausing, she slipped off her loafer, yanked out the nail and kept going. 

That’s a mayor’s race in a nutshell.