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

The post Homelessness Increase Gives Raman an Opening to Criticize Bass — But Accountability Isn’t That Simple appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

For decades, Los Angeles has been a national example of coalition politics, where candidates build governing majorities by stitching together groups with different interests and histories. The model has shifted repeatedly as the city has changed.

Former Mayor Tom Bradley, Los Angeles’ first Black mayor and its longest-serving chief executive, built one of the city’s most durable coalitions. Elected in 1973, Bradley joined Black voters with liberal voters then concentrated on the Westside, a base strong enough to carry him through four additional mayoral victories.

Richard Riordan, a moderate Republican and Catholic who succeeded Bradley, reworked the city’s political map in 1993 by winning support from the San Fernando Valley, moderate voters in central Los Angeles and Latino voters. That coalition helped him win reelection easily, but it has proved impossible for later Republicans to duplicate as GOP registration in the city has fallen to less than 15% of voters.

Other mayors have risen or fallen depending on how well they held together key voting groups. James Hahn won with backing from the Valley and Black voters, but lost support after opposing San Fernando Valley secession and declining to reappoint Police Chief Bernard C. Parks. He was defeated when he sought a second term. Antonio Villaraigosa later drew strong support from Latinos and liberals and served two terms. Eric Garcetti carried that coalition through the COVID-19 era.

Bass’ 2022 victory reflected, in part, a return to the Bradley-style formula. She began with strong backing from Black voters and expanded her support among progressives with help from organized labor. That coalition was enough to defeat Rick Caruso, a former Republican running as a Democrat who spent more than $100 million of his own money on the campaign.

This year, however, Bass faces a different kind of challenge. Raman is also a woman of color, but she is younger and positioned further to the left politically. That creates an unusual test for Bass: a coalition built to defeat a well-funded, more conservative opponent now must be reoriented against a progressive challenger.

Early results from the election earlier this month showed Bass performing well in central Los Angeles, where many Black and Latino voters live. Raman led in younger, more progressive neighborhoods such as Silver Lake, Echo Park and parts of the southeast San Fernando Valley.

The returns also revealed possible openings and limitations for both candidates. Spencer Pratt, despite running without traditional qualifications or a detailed policy platform, won precincts on the Westside and in the western San Fernando Valley. Even so, Bass often finished second in those areas, a notable result given that Pratt’s campaign capitalized on frustration with City Hall and with Bass in particular.

If Bass becomes the more moderate or conservative option in a runoff, that could make it harder for Raman to pick up votes in those precincts. Raman, who received 28.5% of the vote, would need to expand well beyond her existing base to cross the 50% threshold.

One group that may matter more than in past Los Angeles elections is newer residents. At a recent event hosted by UCLA’s Blueprint magazine and co-sponsored by CalMatters, City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson said people who have arrived in Los Angeles more recently often bring different political priorities than longtime residents.

Housing is one major example. Many newer Angelenos strongly support building more housing density, arguing that it could help address high rents and homelessness. But Harris-Dawson noted that for many longtime residents, particularly Black families who migrated from the South, Los Angeles represented something different: a place where they could buy a home, have a yard and enjoy space that had been denied to them elsewhere.

For those residents, single-family neighborhoods are not simply inefficient land use. They are tied to opportunity, stability and freedom.

Public safety may also be viewed differently depending on a voter’s history with the city. Some of Pratt’s supporters, including people commenting on social media who have not lived or worked in Los Angeles, portrayed the city as being in severe decline. Newer residents or those from more insulated neighborhoods may share that view, especially in a city that still struggles with serious violence. Last year, Los Angeles recorded 230 homicides.

But longtime Angelenos may see the same number through a different lens. The city once recorded more than 1,000 killings in a year. Many residents also remember the 1992 unrest following the acquittal of Los Angeles police officers in the beating of a Black motorist, part of a broader history of police abuse and racial tension.

In that context, current crime levels can be seen as both deeply troubling and significantly improved from earlier decades. Whether voters focus on the danger that remains or the progress made may shape how they respond to candidates’ messages.

New residents can bring urgency, energy and expectations for change. They may be less attached to older political habits and less willing to accept longstanding conditions. At the same time, longtime residents can view some of those criticisms as lacking historical understanding.

That divide could become one of the defining features of the mayoral race. Bass is expected to draw her strongest support from voters with deeper roots in the city, while Raman appears positioned to appeal to newer arrivals and younger progressive voters.

Los Angeles politics has long been shaped by coalitions of race, class, ideology and neighborhood. This election may add another major bloc to the calculation: voters divided by their relationship to the city’s past.

Original source: CalMatters

The post Nithya Raman Could Further Reshape L.A.’s Shifting Political Alliances appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.