Los Angeles’ hard-won progress against street homelessness appears to be slipping, and the timing couldn’t be worse for Mayor Karen Bass as she fights to keep her job this November.
The city’s latest homeless count, released last week, found 45,194 people living unsheltered within Los Angeles city limits, up from 43,695 a year earlier. While that figure remains below the total recorded during Bass’s first year in office, it breaks a two-year streak of declining numbers — undercutting the narrative that the city was finally turning a corner.
For a city that has poured hundreds of millions of dollars and years of political capital into the crisis, the reversal lands hard. And it’s given Bass’s mayoral challenger, City Councilmember Nithya Raman, fresh ammunition.
“This is a moral outrage,” Raman said of the new numbers. “And it is a failure.”
On Monday, Raman took her campaign to a carpenters’ training facility in Sylmar, where she picked up the endorsement of the Western State Carpenters union — a labor group that backed Bass four years ago in her lopsided win over businessman Rick Caruso. Moving fluidly between English and Spanish, Raman told a crowd of apprentices and tradespeople that she’d push to accelerate housing construction across the city.
“You are the people who build Los Angeles,” she said. “And together, we are going to build its future.”
There’s an odd role reversal playing out in this race. Raman, a self-described democratic socialist, spent much of her Sylmar remarks talking about cutting red tape and clearing the way for private developers to build homes, schools and infrastructure faster. “Mayors don’t build housing,” she conceded — but she’s betting that streamlining the permitting and approval process will help.
Bass, meanwhile, has staked out ground as the law-and-order candidate in this race, leaning into police enforcement of public safety rules and the clearing of homeless encampments as central planks of her homelessness strategy — a notably tougher posture than the one many expected from a longtime progressive stalwart.
It all scrambles the conventional wisdom about how Los Angeles elections are supposed to work — that winning requires courting the political center, that homeowners anchor the electorate, that labor sticks with incumbents, and that older, more established voters outweigh younger and newer ones at the ballot box. Those assumptions may no longer hold in a city where renters make up the bulk of the electorate and where Raman’s mix of progressive politics and pragmatic messaging might resonate more broadly than Bass’s brand of establishment liberalism.
The politics get even more complicated when you look at where the homeless count actually rose — and where it didn’t. Raman’s own council district, which stretches from Silver Lake and Los Feliz on the east side, over the Hollywood Hills to Sherman Oaks and Encino, saw street homelessness drop by nearly half. That’s a striking contrast to the citywide increase, especially given that Raman also chairs the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee — a post that gives her a hand in citywide policy even as she represents one relatively affluent district.
Bass’s team has pointed to that discrepancy, arguing that her signature Inside Safe program deserves credit for the improvement in Raman’s district — meaning Raman may be benefiting from the very initiative she’s campaigning against.
That overlap makes it difficult to cleanly separate the two candidates’ records heading into the fall.
Raman has pledged that, if elected, she would cut street homelessness in half citywide before the 2028 Olympics arrive in Los Angeles — an ambitious goal given that Bass has struggled to hit far more modest targets. Asked why current efforts have fallen short, Raman didn’t hold back.
“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 Monday, raising her voice over the din of saws and hammers at the training site.
Raman argues her approach would go further, connecting people not just with shelter but with mental health treatment, family reunification, supportive housing and job placement — the kind of wraparound services she says the city currently isn’t providing.
“All of that is possible,” she said. “None of that is being done at the city right now.”
When asked why the city — which she helps oversee as a council member and committee chair — hasn’t already implemented those steps, Raman deflected.
“That is not a question for me to answer,” she said. “That is a question for this mayor to answer.”
None of this lends itself to easy answers. Homelessness in Los Angeles reflects decades of policy failures layered on top of enduring social problems — poverty, addiction, a housing shortage that predates any single mayor’s tenure. There’s no quick fix, and any real progress likely requires a combination of strategies, a willingness to abandon what doesn’t work, and a level of public patience that’s increasingly hard to come by.
In the meantime, Bass and Raman will keep trading blows — raising campaign money (Bass currently holds an advantage there), staging events, and sparring over policy details as the race barrels toward its Election Day finish.
At Monday’s event, Raman toured the training site with visible enthusiasm, peppering her guide with questions as she walked through a mock construction area. At one point she stepped on a stray nail. Without missing a beat, she slipped off her shoe, pulled the nail free, and kept walking.
It was, in miniature, a fitting image for the race itself.
Original source: CalMatters
