Check out Nithya Raman interviewed by Nick Andert

I've posted quite a lot on this blog about the state of Los Angeles transit. The upcoming mayoral election has the possibility to really change the momentum behind transit programs in the city... because the LA mayor, despite being very "weak" compared to comparable positions like the NYC mayor, controls nearly 1/3rd of the seats on the Metro board of directors.

I never got around to posting about this, but we had a deranged upset in the June mayoral primary - the republican candidate, Spencer Pratt, failed to place in the top two and therefore will not appear in the November election. Instead, he was edged out by Nithya Raman, a progressive city council member whose political career in the city has been kind of a rollercoaster. If you recall the 2022 city council racism scandal, your memory is already longer than most people who comment on LA politics nationally. What you may not recall is that the meeting where those city council members said all that racist stuff was largely focused on figuring out how to gerrymander Nithya out of her district. Insane!!!

LA's left wing city politics breaks along a couple fault lines, but one of the bigger ones is housing. There's been a rash of vaguely urbanist progressives who acknowledge our housing shortage and propose solving it with density, and additional building to achieve that density. They tend to support SB79, a state bill which allows increased density around rapid transit stations. Many LA politicians are currently trying to figure out how to block it - for a variety of reasons, of course, but I'll be honest that I find none of them convincing. (That is all you will get from me on the leftist NIMBY chaos in LA! Ha ha ha!!!)

Nithya supports SB79, and she represents a district with a high percentage of renters. You can find her renter platform here and her housing platform here.

Re: Nithya's housing platform - it is probably not going to look very good to anyone who comes from a city with actual public housing. For example, she's not able to make any of the big promises that Mamdani made about rent freezes or public housing construction in NYC. LA genuinely has very few public housing units per capita compared to, for example, NYC - I found this article claiming we have fewer than half the units per capita than NYC does. If you're comparing Nithya's housing goals to Mamdani's, you're gonna see a lot more stuff about changes to the construction approval process, and a lot less stuff about the city actually building public housing or freezing rents.

I know that we partially have the generationally shitty and socially corrosive Prop 13 to thank for the fact that housing advocates in CA never propose public housing as a solution to our problems. By messing with the ability of state and local governments to increase or institute new taxes, it makes it much harder for local jurisdictions to fund these kinds of projects. Add that to our weak mayor system, and it means what a mayor can accomplish in the city is not really comparable to what an NYC mayor like Mamdani can accomplish. I don't believe we are ever going to see "LA's Mamdani." Nevertheless, people all over the city are talking about electing the right person to transform the city, but not talking about, say... overturning Prop 13, a much more difficult political battle. I personally do not believe that any mayor of Los Angeles could "transform" the city without major changes not only to Prop 13, but also to the way the city and county are chartered and governed generally.

Despite all this, I am generally very pleased that we have a pro-density candidate in the running for mayor. Whether a pro-density mayor would actually be able to accomplish anything is a separate question... but I do think that the fact she has a chance to be elected at all is a strong signal that things are really changing very quickly in the city.

Most Angelenos are renters. HLA passed, but has been largely blocked by the city. Raman edged out Pratt. I think there's a growing hunger for big-city density, big-city transit, and all the environmental, traffic violence, and cost-of-living improvements regular people experience when they enjoy dense construction around a high-quality transit system. I think that a mayor with a very good comms team could harness a lot of this energy.

Could Nithya?? I have no idea - comms honestly does not seem to be her strong suit. I'd absolutely vote for her over Karen Bass if I could... but I actually CAN'T vote for Nithya at all, because I live in Culver City, which is a separate municipality!!

Anyway! To finally, finally get around to the topic of the post: my favorite LA transit youtuber, Nick Andert, interviewed Nithya and published the interview to Youtube a week or so ago. I think a lot of people will find the first half of this video fascinating... it feels completely crazy to have a mayoral candidate for a major American city telling regular-person stories about a three-leg transit commute, or missing a bus that comes only once an hour. It's very clear that she is (or at least was) a for-real transit user in LA.

I wrote a lot more about the specific stuff she says in this video, but I deleted it because if you live in LA and are interested in this stuff, you should just watch it yourself... and if you're not, you probably no longer reading this blog post by this point. I will say that the conversation ranges across a bunch of different leftist micro-fault-lines involving transit, housing, and density, and that watching it is worth your time if you care about those things in Los Angeles.