Mayoral candidate Nithya Raman — who is also a sitting L.A. City Council member — unveiled a homelessness policy platform Tuesday that calls for the city to prepare for a breakup with the region’s troubled lead homelessness agency and to scale back Mayor Karen Bass' signature Inside Safe motel program.
In Raman’s new homelessness policy platform, she vowed to build an effective homelessness response system in the city, arguing it’s something that hasn’t existed during her five years as a city official.
“ One of the most persistent challenges with homelessness is that no one is in charge at City Hall,” Raman told LAist. “ There is no centralized management or oversight over our homelessness response system at the city. What we have is a patchwork of programs that have very different outcomes and hugely differential costs.”
Raman, who represents Council District 4 stretching from Silver Lake to Reseda, argues only the Mayor’s Office has the authority to fix that fragmentation and deliver transparency.
She is among 13 candidates challenging Bass in the race for L.A. mayor in the June primary.
Homelessness is one of the top issues in the mayoral race. Los Angeles is home to nearly 44,000 unhoused residents and budgets about $1 billion a year for homelessness.
In response to Raman’s announcement, a spokesperson from Bass’ campaign defended the incumbent mayor’s homelessness strategy and noted Raman had supported it.
“Councilmember Raman has been on the City Council since 2020 and is Chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee, and frankly the most success she has achieved is voting yes on Inside Safe,” Alex Stack said in a statement.
Bass introduced Inside Safe through an executive order, with a goal of moving more unhoused residents from encampments into temporary shelter. Raman later voted with the L.A. City Council 13-1 to accept Bass’ 2023-24 budget, which included $250 million for the program.
Raman argues that L.A. should shift spending away from expensive motel-based programs like Inside Safe, toward lower-cost interventions like short-term rental vouchers and shared housing.
“What I'm proposing is to look across our shelter beds and really investing in what works and stretching every dollar as far as possible at a time when the Trump administration is about to cut funds for homelessness response here in Los Angeles significantly,” Raman told LAist.
The Bass campaign criticized Raman’s plan as impractical.
“The campaign plan she threw out there relies on private landlords turning over apartments to people living in tents — it's unrealistic and would increase homelessness,” Stack said.
The campaigns for other candidates, including Spencer Pratt, Rae Huang and Adam Miller, did not respond to requests on Tuesday. Each includes some homelessness policy proposals on their campaign websites.
Inside Safe
Raman’s proposal took aim at Inside Safe, a city program designed to clear tent and vehicle encampments and move people into shelter, primarily hotel rooms.
The city of L.A. has spent more than $300 million on Inside Safe over the past few years. During that time, the program has moved more than 5,800 unhoused people indoors, according to the Mayor’s Office. Official data shows 40% of those people later returned to the street, as highlighted in a recent L.A. Times report.
The average Inside Safe bed, usually a hotel room, costs the city more than $225 a night, compared to an average nightly cost of about $86 at other shelter or “interim housing” options, according to the Office of the City Administrative Officer.
Raman called Inside Safe “the most expensive temporary housing intervention in the city by far,” estimating the program costs the city about $85,000 per motel room annually.
For the same money, the city could rent three apartments and provide services through its Time Limited Subsidy Program, she said.
That rental subsidy program costs about $24,000 annually per household, according to the Office of the City Administrative Officer.
Since Bass took office, L.A.’s overall homeless population estimates have declined by about 5%. The “unsheltered” population — those who live outside in tents or vehicles, instead of in homeless shelters or similar facilities — declined even more during that period, as Inside Safe moved more Angelenos living on the streets into hotel rooms and other shelters.
Bass’s campaign defended her approach.
“Mayor Bass launched L.A.'s first-ever comprehensive street homelessness strategy, driving street homelessness down nearly 18 percent, posting the first-ever consecutive-year decline in overall homelessness and achieving the first decline in homeless mortality since records have been kept,” Stack said.
As a candidate for City Council in 2020, Raman’s homelessness platform had called for eliminating “policies that criminalize people who are unhoused,” including sweeps of unhoused encampments led by the LAPD and sanitation workers.
Raman’s 2026 mayoral homelessness platform calls for “maintaining” the city’s “capacity for encampment resolution.”
"My approach to homelessness in my district would be exactly what I would be doing citywide, which is trying to ensure that we are using every single dollar and resource that we have to move people indoors as quickly as possible," Raman told LAist.
Accountability questions
The L.A. City Council has been considering whether to redirect about $300 million in annual homelessness funding away from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and, if so, whether to put the funds under city or county oversight.
As chair of the L.A. City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, Raman is expected to preside over that committee's final discussion on the issue, before it issues a recommendation and sends the issue to the full council for a vote.
Last year, L.A. County officials voted to move hundreds of millions away from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and administer the funds itself through a new county homelessness department. That funding shift begins July 1.
Bass has publicly clashed with county leaders about their decision. She’s also said the city should be cautious about following suit.
“Withdrawing from LAHSA too quickly, without a plan and without the capacity, will no doubt cause unintended consequences that will leave more Angelenos to die on our streets,” Bass said in a statement last month.
Raman said her mayoral platform sets a framework for moving hundreds of millions in city homelessness contracts away from LAHSA.
“The city needs to be prepared to make significant changes including taking on direct contracting for some funds and potentially contracting directly with the county,” Raman told LAist. “The biggest challenge right now is that, despite my efforts, the city still doesn't have the capacity to manage this transition effectively.”
That’s what her plan is designed to build, Raman said.
Raman’s platform describes LAHSA as “plagued with scandal” and “may be on the verge of shuttering.”
Bass and Raman both point to the city’s Bureau of Homelessness Oversight, created last year within the Los Angeles Housing Department, which they say can help deliver accountability and oversight if scaled up.
According to Raman, that bureau has not yet hired a single person, but it is doing some data work using consultants via a private grant.
Raman criticized the current city approach to the 6,500 people living in cars and RVs as "haphazard" and "ineffective, vowing to develop a clearer strategy.
Raman wants more street medicine teams — funded through Medi-CAL reimbursements — to meet health needs in encampments.
She also proposes a citywide unarmed crisis response team to respond to mental health and substance use calls.
Other candidates
Spencer Pratt, a former reality television personality who lost his home in last year’s Palisades Fire, urges a “treatment-first” approach to homelessness, according to his campaign website.
“For years, the Homeless Industrial Complex has prioritized process over outcomes, warehousing over treatment, and press releases over results,” the site states.
His approach would redirect resources to mental health care, drug treatment and stabilization services, according to campaign material.
The Rev. Rae Huang, a community organizer and Presbyterian minister running to the left of Raman, has proposed a new “Mayor’s Office of Housing For All” to coordinate housing and homelessness efforts in the city.
On her campaign website, Huang promises to build more permanent supportive housing and to end “sweeps” or city cleanups of tent encampments.
Candidate Adam Miller is a tech entrepreneur who founded Better Angels LA, a nonprofit that distributes small loans to families facing eviction.
Miller’s campaign platform lists a range of proposals for L.A.’s homelessness system, including 50 more tiny home village sites, more enforcement of anti-camping laws and a better tech system for managing shelter bed reservations.
If no candidate wins a majority of the votes in the June Primary Election, the top two vote-getters will face off in a November runoff.
