Councilmember Nithya Raman says Los Angeles has been seriously mismanaging its budget under Mayor Karen Bass and she has long-term plans to run the city better, from combating homelessness to preserving LA’s sanctuary city status and working more closely with the county to support street vendors.
This is what she discussed in a sit-down interview with student reporters from The LA Local’s Youth Journalism Program on Wednesday. The students from Boyle Heights, East LA, South LA, Koreatown, Pico Union and Westlake pressed Raman on issues affecting their communities, including homelessness, immigration, street vending, MacArthur Park, youth services, Metro safety and what she would have done differently in response to the Lineage fire.
During the interview, Raman criticized Bass for mismanaging the city’s budget, which has cut city services like street repairs and trash pickup, and she reiterated her plans to replace LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell if she is elected.
“I believe that at a time when immigration enforcement is everywhere in Los Angeles … we need a law enforcement presence that is telling immigrants that they are safe in our city. Under Chief McDonnell’s leadership, I don’t believe LAPD met that standard,” Raman said, emphasizing LAPD’s responsibility to uphold LA’s sanctuary city ordinance and not collaborate or share information with immigration authorities.
Read more: The LA Local’s youth journalists interview Mayor Karen Bass.
Raman said she would request an audit across city departments to ensure they are following the ordinance.
Speaking to the student journalists, Raman also said she would prioritize long-term housing solutions for people experiencing homelessness and expand youth services, including turning 100 school playgrounds into community hubs.
In less than two weeks, Angelenos will decide if Raman will be the next mayor of Los Angeles or if Bass will stay for a second term.
This story was produced under The LA Local’s Youth Journalism Program. To learn more or to get involved, click here.
Read the full Q&A below. Questions and answers have been lightly edited for clarity.
Q: You have been successful in lowering homeless rates in your district, but the city of Los Angeles also has a shortage of long-term affordable housing and permanent supportive apartments. What are your plans to help unhoused people find permanent and stable housing, rather than just temporary situations?
A: This is a really important question. Right now, we have about 8,000 shelter beds that the city is funding every day across the entire city. On average, when people are getting into those beds, they are staying in them for longer than a year. There are about 2,000 people in those beds who’ve been there longer than a year. There are 700 people who’ve been there longer than two years in a temporary bed. Yesterday, I was at an event, and I met someone who had come in who said she was planning to vote for me, who said that she had been in a women’s shelter for three years and wanted to get access to a home. So this is a very, very common problem.
I think that we’re not going to be able to build enough housing fast enough to be able to get people out of that situation quickly. So what can we do to make sure that we’re addressing people’s needs when they’re in the shelter? I don’t think you should be in a shelter for a long time. A lot of our shelters are communal, which means they’re shared beds or bunk beds in big spaces. They’re not places where you necessarily may want to spend a lot of time. They’re not places where you have a lot of privacy, and so you want to be able to move quickly to the next step. There’s a program called a time-limited subsidy voucher. This is a two-year rental voucher. It’s actually cheaper, in many cases, than shelters because the two-year rental voucher gives you a $2,000 subsidy every month to find an apartment and to go rent it yourself. And I’ve created a setup in the city with the housing department, where we work with a nonprofit partner who helps people who are in the shelters get access to those vouchers, and then helps them find an apartment in LA that will take that voucher. And this program is cost-effective; it’s cheaper than most of the shelters that we’re funding. So it’s actually cheaper to be in permanent housing than it is to be in a shelter, and the outcomes are incredible.
So, if you look at data across these vouchers, 75% of people who get access to this voucher end up staying in permanent housing afterwards. That’s an amazing outcome, right? That means that the program is working to get people back into stable housing, which requires real case management and oversight. You can’t just put someone in an apartment and walk away. You have to make sure they’re getting access to support, access to jobs, access to getting their benefits. But if you can do it, this program can help them succeed. So that’s my plan, and I want to increase the availability of those vouchers in LA. I’ve already done that strategically during my time on the council, and I want to do more of that as mayor. And I want to make sure that we’re doing it, particularly at a time when the Trump administration is taking away support for so many of the homelessness interventions that we have, because this is city-funded or county-funded or state-funded. We can actually serve people that the Trump administration refuses to serve, who deserve that service.
Q: In your campaign, you frequently remark about LA being park poor and have emphasized how the lack of access to nature impacts children. McArthur Park is one of the only parks in one of the most densely populated areas in Los Angeles, but even nearby schools don’t use it because it’s considered unsafe. What would you do to make MacArthur Park an actual usable green space for youth?
A: Great question, and one that I think is really important — to make sure that people are able to utilize the limited park spaces that we have here in Los Angeles. I think making that park fully usable again will require real work and engagement. There is a lot of homelessness in it and around it. There’s a lot of active drug use in and around it, and drug sales in and around it. We need presence in the park to make sure that the park can be a public space that can be used for what it was originally intended: as a recreational space for families and individuals and children who live in Los Angeles.
So how do you do that? I think you need more investment in it, and Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez has actually brought in more resources into that neighborhood that I’m excited about — things like more homeless outreach teams who are out there in the field every day, getting people who are experiencing homelessness out of the park and into shelter. So let’s invest more in that. Let’s make sure that we’re going out there and targeting people who are living on the streets and getting them indoors. Let’s ensure that we’re working in partnership with both homeless outreach, fire department and with the LAPD to ensure that everyone is working together to move us in the right direction. That kind of coordination is really important in the city. I know that from my own district, and I want to do that at MacArthur Park and hold ourselves accountable to real results there.
Q: All of us live in communities that have been affected by ICE raids, and federal immigration agents have racially profiled people who look like us. You have accused the LAPD of sharing data with ICE, as well as the department’s handling of ICE enforcement and protests on LA streets. You have also said, as mayor, you would replace LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell. Can you give us a timeline for when that would happen, how would you define success for a new police chief, and how would that be different from the way the current chief is doing his job?
A: So I believe that at a time when immigration enforcement is everywhere in Los Angeles, where you’re seeing a higher number of raids just even over the last few days than you’ve been seeing in recent weeks, I believe that here in Los Angeles, we need a law enforcement presence that is telling immigrants that they are safe in our city. Under Chief McDonnell’s leadership, I don’t believe LAPD has met that standard, and I think we can do better. And so my goal for a new police chief will be to ensure that they are someone who can make sure that we achieve our public safety goals here in Los Angeles, Overall, keeping families, individuals safe here in the city, and making sure that we are keeping immigrants safe in Los Angeles. I think we can do both. I believe we can do both, and as mayor, I will work to achieve both.
So here’s what that looks like for me. That means having an LAPD chief who understands that our sanctuary city ordinance, which I authored, is being followed by LAPD as well, ensuring that there are no searches being made on behalf of ICE in our databases, and no information is being shared from any of the databases that we have. There were reports from news organizations that data from LAPD was being accessed by ICE or at the request of ICE, and I believe that reduces trust with our law enforcement at a time when that trust is so needed. We are now responding to protesters against ICE with, in some cases, excessive violence and in some cases with tear gas. I believe we can maintain people’s First Amendment rights to protest and keep them safe while also ensuring that we’re reducing any kind of negative impacts from those protests. I think our LAPD is capable of doing that, and these are the things that I would be asking of our new police chief: making sure that we are not cooperating with ICE at all, especially through data sharing, especially at a time when the way immigration enforcement is happening right now is not what was happening in June of last year. That’s why the question of data is so important. Right now, ICE is using tracking and surveillance tools to identify individuals and targeting particular individuals rather than doing raids in particular locations. That’s the way in which they’ve moved. So making sure that our data is safe and protected is incredibly important, and that’s what I would value.
And as you asked about a timeline for the replacement of the chief, it’s not a unilateral decision that a mayor can make. You need to get the support of the police commission, and you may have to get the support of the council as well. So that process will take time, and I know that. What I will commit to is doing it responsibly, while making sure that we can keep Angelenos safe, that we can make sure that our ability to deliver law enforcement services are not impacted at all, and that we’re still getting ready for the Olympics.
Q: Following up on the previous question, what else would you do to help build trust between the LAPD and immigrant communities, and how will you measure whether that trust is improving?
A: So I think one concrete intervention that I want to make is conducting an audit, not just of LAPD but across our entire city, to make sure that our departments are following our sanctuary city ordinance. LAPD has had reporting that suggests that they are not in terms of data sharing, as I explained already. That audit is really important right now because trust between the city and immigrant populations is low, and because we need to restore that trust. I think doing an audit, making the findings of that audit public and ensuring that we are changing what practices need to be changed to ensure that every city department is following our ordinance to the fullest is really important.
Here’s another thing that I would do, and this is not about LAPD, but it’s just about restoring trust with our immigrant communities. Under this mayor’s leadership, she cut support for legal defense for detainees, for people who are detained by ICE, to zero. It used to be much higher, in the millions. I want to restore that funding and to make sure that the city is providing that at a time when it is more needed than ever. I’ve talked to many immigrant rights organizations, and the difference often between whether a person who is detained is freed and able to come back to their families is legal representation, and I want to make sure that the city is funding that. This is not the time to cut it to zero, as this mayor did.
Q: As you know, many of us in Boyle Heights had sleepless nights due to the Lineage fire, due to the smoke and ash, and then the smell of rotting food. You have criticized the mayor’s handling of the crisis and have said that industries operating near residential areas should get a higher level of scrutiny. What would you have done differently than your opponent, and how can residents living in similar neighborhoods know their needs will be met in an emergency?
A: I would not have told residents that the smoke was safe to breathe, which this mayor did multiple times, contradicting the advice of public health experts who shared very different advice about air quality. Black smoke was billowing into neighborhoods, and multiple times this mayor told the public that the air was safe to breathe. When I talked to residents around the Lineage facility, when I knocked on the door, every single person I talked to had gone to the doctor or gone to the hospital because of difficulties from smoke inhalation. They had experienced fatigue, headaches, nausea, scratchy throat or worse. Elderly people were hospitalized as a result, and I think sharing that information was not appropriate.
What I would do differently is to make sure that we have public health expertise in the mayor’s office for situations exactly like this that would help us give clear advice to residents that could help them keep themselves safe and keep their families safe. Here’s another thing I would have done differently. I would have made sure evacuation was easier. Maybe it didn’t reach the level of needing a mandatory evacuation. I understand that, but I don’t know if residents who wanted to leave knew that they had access to Airbnb-funded rooms or safe relocation facilities at the level they needed to. I would have made sure that city buses, like Dash buses, were there every day and that we were knocking on doors in that neighborhood to make sure people had the resources that they needed. Overall, when there are so many neighborhoods in Los Angeles where industrial sites are right next to residential neighborhoods, it’s not just in Boyle Heights; it’s all over the city. We need to do a better job of keeping residents safe.
Q: We’ve read about the sanitation sweeps before the 1984 Olympic Games, which targeted homeless encampments. Today there are nearly 6,000 unhoused residents living near competition venues who are facing displacement.
Currently, it seems there is no relocation plan or dedicated funding for these individuals. As mayor, how will you ensure these LA residents are given a real pathway to housing and that they’re not left in the hands of encampment sweeps by federal agencies?
A: So I think we need to do a better job of housing people overall, and the city has not been doing good enough. In my district, we’ve seen very different results because we have ensured that we have increased shelter bed access, and we have ensured that when people are getting into shelters, that they’re actually able to move on to their next step, freeing up that bed for the next person who gets to come indoors. So I want to do that work across the entire city, but we must prioritize people living on the streets near our Olympics and Paralympics venues. You are right. You’ve identified this as potential for real harm to people that is coming. We have to prioritize our scarce shelter resources and all of our dollars for those individuals in those locations. We need to be proactive about it. We cannot wait to plan to do it. We need to be starting now, and we need to be ensuring that people are able to get indoors safely and quickly right now.
What I can tell you is that everywhere in the city, we could be doing better if we actually managed the system more effectively. That’s the oversight and management that I want to bring. People deserve to go indoors. Right now, the city is not working hard enough. This mayor’s office is not working hard enough to ensure that we’re getting people indoors into safety and helping to keep them safe.
Q: Street vendors are an important part of our neighborhoods. I know you created a plan for street vending that includes permitting, legal advice, and microloans. You’ve also said you would create opportunities for vending zones near areas hosting the Olympics. Currently, there are an estimated 50,000 street vendors in LA, with only a little more than 50 having permits to sell food. As mayor, how would you plan to make the permit processing more centralized and less confusing and make vendors feel safe about sharing their personal information?
A: I’m proud to have led the city processes for reducing costs for vendors that prevented them from being able to secure city licenses to sell, from hundreds of dollars annually to just $27 annually, making it much more affordable for vendors to be actually able to get a city license. But barriers still remain for vendors. A lot of those barriers are not actually city barriers; those are county barriers because of the health codes that the county has set up for the sale of food, but guess what? The city needs to do, if it wants to create real regulated vending, it needs to advocate with the county and partner with the county. No one in the public cares if the city or the county is responsible for anything. They just want these problems solved.
So what I would do is go to the county and work with them, work with their county health department to ensure the regulations that they have in place are reasonable for food vendors to be able to meet, rather than the way that it is right now. If you followed those codes to the letter, it would cost you thousands of dollars to create carts and public food vending operations that met those regulations. That’s not realistic. That’s why so few people have actually become legalized through this process. You can’t create regulations that are impossible to meet. You have to craft them to make them appropriate for the businesses that you’re trying to regulate, and I would work with the county to do that.
Q: Last year, the Youth Development budget was cut by 30% when it was merged into the Community Investment for Families Department. Many criticized the decision that youth services were the largest funding cut, while law enforcement was protected. How will you ensure that underserved youth are still prioritized, especially when youth are entering a competitive labor market?
A: I’ve been very vocal about the fact that I believe that the city has been fiscally mismanaged by this mayor. The cuts in services that have resulted from contracts that we couldn’t afford with the police union left us with a billion-dollar budget deficit that didn’t just cut the Youth Development Department; it cut every single city service, from street repaving to garbage pickup to graffiti removal to streetlight repair. That’s why 30,000 streetlights across the city are dark. That’s why it takes a year to fix a broken streetlight in this city now. So we have defunded every other service as a result of her fiscal mismanagement, and we need to fix that.
My question to you and to the city, because I believe we need to serve the youth better, is what is the work of the Youth Development Department, or what is the work of the city in serving youth? Was it being done well by the Youth Development Department, or do we need other interventions that can really serve the youth of the city more effectively?
One of my policy platforms is creating 100 community school parks across Los Angeles. This is when you have an LAUSD school that you open up the schoolyard on weekends and invite neighbors to come in and use those facilities. So it can be green spaces and playgrounds that are in LAUSD yards that a lot of people don’t have access to, in parks in their own neighborhood. So this is a way of creating more park space for the community. To me, it’s not just park space, though, and I want to think about these community school parks as community hubs that can provide youth services, that can provide programming and classes, things like art classes, things like journalism classes, things like music lessons; things people may not even get at their schools that they can get at these community school parks that we can partner with philanthropic institutions to fund. There are ways to think of these community school parks as so much more than parks. To think of them as community hubs that bring youth in need into the city and in engagement with the city, and to help lift them up and support them. And that’s how I’m thinking about them.
Q: Near my sister’s house in South LA, there’s always trash left on the street. We have called the sanitation department, but a lot of times bags are left sitting outside. People get into the bags, and then trash ends up all over the streets again. We’re not able to walk in the neighborhood, and my niece can’t even play outside. What are your plans to address illegal dumping?
A: So, illegal dumping is a huge problem in Los Angeles and needs to be addressed, and there’s a few different things that I would change about the way in which we’re responding to it. I hope it will help the exact situation that you’re talking about. One is that illegal dumping enforcement has gone down over the last few years. So people who are regularly dumping in a public location, we need to make sure that they’re getting ticketed for it, and that they’re actually dealing with some consequences for doing it. That can happen in partnership with city entities that are responsible for that oversight. That’s not currently happening right now. Secondly, if there is regular illegal dumping happening in a location, can there be interventions? That can prevent that. For example, I’ve noticed that in a lot of places where there is illegal dumping, the lights are off, the street lights are off, or it’s a darkened place, which allows for illegal dumping to happen. So, can we fix the street lights? Can we make sure that fencing is repaired? Can we make sure that the space is maintained so that illegal dumping is disincentivized? Thirdly, can we make sure that when you do call 311 that the trash is actually picked up and not just bagged and left to sit around? Sometimes that requires coordination between multiple entities within the city who are responsible for our public spaces. That isn’t currently happening. So I want to make sure that that’s happening. And fourth, I want to make sure that we are actually doing more to address regular locations that have illegal dumping happening. So if it’s a place where it’s happening over and over again, we know that we don’t have to wait for a 311 call from a family before we go and pick up that trash. So if we have a map of 311 locations where we know illegal dumping regularly happens across LA, can we actually send out our sanitation trucks regularly and pick up that trash before you have to call it in? And can we actually deal with it rather than leaving it in bags on the street for it to get worse?
Q: For young women like myself, we often feel unsafe while taking public transportation. I’ve often been approached and harassed by older men with no security in sight. While Metro has shown drops in crime due to its public safety model, many public transportation riders feel anxious and say they still feel unsafe riding alone.
What would you do as mayor to make riding public transport a viable option?
A: I used to be a transit rider. I took two trains and a bus to the job I had before I got elected for the first time. I took a bus to the job I had before that, so I’m a regular user of transit, and I’ve experienced all of those same things using transit. The biggest thing that made a difference for me was the number of other people that were also using that transit. So I think making sure that transit is a viable option for more people. Getting more people incentivized to take transit is a really key part of also making it safer. So that means ensuring that buses and trains are coming regularly, that they’re actually connecting people to and from where they need to be going, that we’re having things like bus lanes that make sure that buses are moving quickly and especially along high-frequency routes. Those can all make sure that people can say, “Oh, this is a viable option for me. I’m going to take it.” Second, I think the model that Metro is using, which is they’re investing in their own police force, and they have these unarmed safety ambassadors across the system, has demonstrated real results in improving safety. So the police force is limited and cannot be on every bus and train. These safety ambassadors are cheaper to invest in. You can expand them. They’re the yellow-vested people that you sometimes see on a platform or on a bus. I think those have done a good job at reducing incidents of crime and disorder that are on these trains and buses, and I want to make sure we’re expanding that program and making sure that it’s in more places across the system so that more people feel safe using it.
To me, those are the two most important ways in which we can address some of the public safety concerns. But it is something that’s really important. I remember, like when it got dark, I wouldn’t take the train home. I’d ask my husband to come and pick me up, or I would take an Uber, and it was really expensive, and so I think it’s something that has to be fixed. I was able to pay for that Uber when I needed it. Not everybody can, and that doesn’t mean that you should be sitting in a place where you don’t have that capacity to feel safe. It’s really important that people feel safe using these trains and buses, and I really care about this issue. ■
Student journalists Hawaii Utterback, Nathan Reyes, Kenadie Gillette, Alyssa Lopez, Sebastian Mecinas, Hailey Esperarza, Miloh Nwanko, Valeria Cervantes, Illiana Lua and Kira Kovaleva contributed to this report.
