Nithya Raman’s big Olympics promise: Reduce street homelessness by 50%

When Nithya Raman becomes mayor of Los Angeles next month, she’ll have just a year and a half to deliver on a huge promise she made with a summer 2028 deadline.

Raman has laid out a plan for moving people off the streets that she says will cut street homelessness by 50% in time for the Olympics and eliminate long-term encampments by the end of her first term.

That may have some Angelenos feeling déjà vu. Soon after then-Mayor Eric Garcetti made the deal for the city to host the Games, in 2018 he promised to all but eliminate street homelessness before the Olympics.

More than eight years later, homelessness remains the city’s most visible crisis, with more than 29,000 unsheltered people in Los Angeles, according to the latest point-in-time count. Under Mayor Karen Bass, unsheltered homelessness in L.A. has dropped by around 11% overall since its 2023 peak, but rose this year, per the homeless count.

Now, Mayor-elect Raman says she can drastically reduce street homelessness by moving away from Bass’ Inside Safe model, which focuses on getting people out of encampments and into motels. Instead, Raman says she will prioritize getting people quickly onto rental subsidies and into more long-term housing.

Success would mean bucking a long-standing tradition of city leaders pledging to slash homelessness and underdelivering.

“I've been hearing those promises for a very long time, but they were always dramatically over-promised,” said Gary Blasi, a UCLA professor of law emeritus, who has followed homelessness policy in Los Angeles for 40 years.

Raman campaigned criticizing the Inside Safe program that Bass staked her first term on as too slow and too costly, saying the city needed to invest in other solutions. Since late 2022, the city has placed 5,800 people into interim housing through Inside Safe, but 40% have returned to homelessness, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

“Motel rooms are our most expensive intervention — they should be used like emergency rooms to help people stabilize quickly and then move onto their next step,” Raman wrote in a document released during her campaign laying out her homelessness strategy.

Raman's plan for addressing encampments is to move people out of motel rooms within four months and expand a program that provides unhoused individuals with rental subsidies and case management for up to two years to move people into housing more quickly. On the campaign trail, Bass’s team criticized Raman’s strategy as “unrealistic,” saying it relied on private landlords renting to people who had been living on the street.

Experts on homelessness told LAist that Raman’s promise to halve street homelessness in a year and a half was a stretch — but if the mayor-elect could make a significant reduction by 2028, that would be a victory.

“The plan is ambitious, it's bold, and I think that's a good thing,” said Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “When you set an ambitious and bold goal, you tend to get farther than you might have without the goal.”

Steve Lopez, the longtime L.A. Times columnist who has covered homelessness in the city for decades, had a harsher take.

“I cringe when I hear such grandiose proclamations,” Lopez wrote after Raman declared victory last week, citing a laundry list of societal issues outside of mayoral control: income inequality, mental health problems and the high cost of building new housing.

Raman's 2028 goal comes with additional challenges. The Olympics and Paralympics are expected to displace potentially thousands of unhoused people living near venues, if they are within security perimeters determined by the U.S. Secret Service. There’s still no plan from local officials on how they'll address encampments ahead of the Olympics or where people will go. There’s also no additional funding.

Just last week, the L.A. City Council passed a motion asking staff to report back on how the city will respond to homeless encampments near venues during the Games.

Blasi, the emeritus UCLA professor, said the urgency of 2028 could be an opportunity for the Raman administration to lay the groundwork for longer-term solutions that keep people from returning to homelessness, like establishing more options for permanent housing.

"It's not impossible to come up with a plan that's motivated in part and at least time limited by the Olympics, but doing that in a way that's replicable and solves some of the problems that have bedeviled politicians in L.A. for a long, long time," he said.

Advocates say they’re worried that without advance planning, unhoused people could be swept with nowhere to go, or the federal government could intervene.

“It makes sense to think about the Olympics as a really key kind of deadline where we have to get moving and have to make sure we've gotten people into safer situations,” Visotzky said.

Aaron Schrank contributed to this reporting.