Nithya Raman

Kerala to Louisiana at Age Six

Raman was born in 1981 in Kerala, in southern India, according to Newsweek and Gulf News. Her family moved to the United States when she was 6, first to Louisiana and then to Massachusetts. She became a naturalized citizen at 22.

She earned a bachelor's degree at Harvard and then a master's in city planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, finishing in 2008. When she gave the commencement keynote for MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning in 2021, the department listed her as "DUSP Alumna Nithya Raman (MCP '08)."

Transparent Chennai and a Move West

After MIT she went to India and co-founded Transparent Chennai, a research and mapping project in Chennai. Gulf News dates its start to 2010. In 2013 she moved to Los Angeles, Newsweek reports.

A City Budget Report and the SELAH Coalition in Silver Lake

Her first work on homelessness in Los Angeles was with the city's own books. A 2014 report she wrote in the City Administrative Office found the city was spending more than $100 million a year on homelessness, most of it on policing and enforcement, according to a 2020 article in Knock LA. That article was an opinion piece paid for by Ground Game LA, a group that had endorsed her, so the account comes from her supporters.

In Silver Lake she co-chaired the neighborhood council's homelessness committee and co-founded the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition, according to her council biography. Knock LA dates SELAH to 2017 and describes it as a volunteer group that offered showers, hot meals, and outreach. She also served as executive director of Time's Up Entertainment, FOX 11 reported. When the radio host Larry Mantle introduced her on LAist's AirTalk, he described her as having headed both a homelessness nonprofit and an entertainment industry advocacy group.

She lives in Silver Lake with her husband, Vali Chandrasekaran, a television writer and producer whose credits include Modern Family and 30 Rock, according to TheWrap. They have twins. "I will say that my husband's a union member," she told Mantle, while pointing out that organized labor had not backed her first council race.

Unseating David Ryu in District 4

In 2020 she ran against the incumbent council member for District 4, David Ryu. In the March primary Ryu took 45 percent to her 41 percent, sending them to a November runoff. Ryu had raised $1.04 million for the primary to her $272,375.10, Knock LA reported, and her volunteers had knocked on more than 70,000 doors.

She won the runoff. FOX 11 reported that she was the first challenger in 17 years to unseat a sitting Los Angeles council member. Her council page says she became the first Asian-American woman and the first South Asian to serve on the council, and that she was elected to a second term in March 2024. The Associated Press noted that she had been elected with the support of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Griffith Park, PLUM, and the Votes on Encampments

The district reaches across both sides of the Hollywood Hills and takes in Van Nuys, Sherman Oaks, Hancock Park, Hollywood, Silver Lake, and Los Feliz. It also holds Griffith Park, where, she told LAist, people are not allowed to camp. Her council page lists her as chair of the Civil Rights, Immigration, Social Services, and Neighborhoods Committee, vice chair of the Planning and Land Use Management Committee, and a member of the Homelessness and Health, Public Safety, and charter review committees.

Her votes on homelessness and policing drew the most fire. The AP reported that she voted against dozens of no-camping zones and opposed a ban on tents within 500 feet of schools and daycare centers. She posted "defund the police" on social media in 2020 and did not support the mayor's 2023 police contract, which she said was too expensive for the city. By the 2026 campaign she said the police department should stay at its current size of about 8,600 officers, down from about 10,000 in 2020, and that as mayor she would not block no-camping zones. The police union ran ads calling her "Flip Floppin' Raman."

She also broke with allies over Measure ULA, the so-called mansion tax, which she had endorsed and phone banked for. She told LAist the tax had hurt new housing production and that she wanted new multifamily construction exempted: "I was the only councilmember that stood up and said, against significant pushback from many of the people who backed to ULA that we need to reform it."

Filing for Mayor in the Final Hours

Raman had endorsed Bass for re-election. She then entered the race herself, hours before the filing deadline. Asked why on AirTalk in April, she pointed to the city's lack of preparation for the fires and its response in the Palisades afterwards. "For me, I don't plan to be a politician for the long term," she said.

She promised to cut the number of people living in tents and encampments by at least half by 2028, the year of the Los Angeles Olympics, and to triple housing construction. Her case against Bass's Inside Safe program was about cost: "Right now, the average motel room in the Inside Safe Program costs over $80,000 a year, and data shows that people are staying in those rooms on average of a year, which is a very, very expensive intervention." She said short-term rental subsidies could pay for two or three apartments for the price of one motel room, and that only about 4 percent of people in the city's shelters were getting mental health services from the county. On rent, she backed the city's rent stabilization ordinance and said any expansion should exempt new construction for its first 15 or 20 years.

"What we are doing right now is just not working," she said during the primary campaign. "LA's primary strategy for homelessness has been to move encampments from one block to another, from your block to your neighbor's block and back again. ... It's political theater."

In the June 2 primary she ran third on election night, behind Bass and Spencer Pratt, the Republican former reality television personality from The Hills, and moved up as later mail ballots were counted. On June 8, with 93 percent of ballots counted, CBS Los Angeles projected that she had passed Pratt, with Bass at 34.3 percent and Raman at 28.5 percent. That set up a runoff between two Democrats who had been allies. Bass is the city's first Black woman mayor, the AP noted, and Raman is set to become the first South Asian woman in the job once the count is certified.

Sources

• Nithya Raman Projected to Win LA Mayor, Beating Karen Bass
• Karen Bass concedes as Nithya Raman wins Los Angeles mayoral race
• Democratic Socialists gain ground with Nithya Raman's LA win
• Nithya Raman Projected To Upset Karen Bass In LA Mayoral Race
• Nithya Raman will be LA's next mayor; Karen Bass concedes | LAist
• Meet Nithya | Nithya Raman | Los Angeles City Councilmember 4th District
• Who is Nithya Raman? Meet Kerala-born LA's first Indian-American mayor
• Congratulations to the Class of 2021! | DUSP
• Nithya Raman is Already the Strongest Policymaker in Los Angeles
• Nithya Raman talks to LAist about why she should be LA's next mayor (Transcript) | LAist
• Nithya Raman advances to November runoff in mayor's race
• Nithya Raman defeats Spencer Pratt to face Karen Bass in LA mayoral election, CBS News projects - CBS Los Angeles