Add The California Post on Google Mayor Karen Bass conspired with a political ally to push rival Nithya Raman out as chair of LA’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, the councilwoman alleged.
Raman, who is challenging Bass in November, blasted the shake-up in a video posted to X Monday after the California Post first reported that she was being removed as chair of the committee.
“Mayor Bass’ top City Council ally removed me as Chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee,” Raman said. “The Mayor may be trying to punish me for challenging her, but Angelenos are the ones who pay the price for these political games.”
She then went directly after Bass’ handling of homelessness, pointing to rising numbers citywide and questioning oversight of the mayor’s signature Inside Safe program.
“The mayor has blocked our independently elected city controller from doing an audit of her signature homelessness program, Inside Safe, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars of public money, and still we’ve seen homelessness go up citywide,” Raman said.
Raman contrasted those results with her own Council District 4, where she said street homelessness fell nearly 50%.
“But in my district, it went down by almost 50%, and we did that the hard way,” she said. “We did outreach, we matched people to beds, we got people indoors.”
Raman’s own record overseeing homelessness at City Hall has drawn scrutiny.
As chair, Raman canceled four of the committee’s first eight scheduled meetings this year by late May, while roughly 133 pending items piled up before the committee.
Meanwhile, the city’s 2026 homeless count found 45,194 homeless people in Los Angeles, up 3.4% from the previous year. Unsheltered homelessness jumped 7.9% to 29,115 people.
Raman also oversaw the rollout of the city’s redesigned Time-Limited Subsidy program, which had a $62.6 million budget and was expected to help roughly 2,000 households.
However, just three households had been permanently housed through the program, as of June 25.
Raman used Monday’s video to argue that she had been fighting the dysfunction rather than contributing to it.
“I fought to create a Bureau of Homelessness Oversight at the city to make sure that we’re tracking every single dollar,” Raman said. “Sixteen months later, the mayor’s office still hasn’t hired someone to lead it.”
She also accused City Hall of perpetuating a system that shifts homeless encampments around Los Angeles rather than resolving them.
“I fought for years to push back against a politically motivated system of homelessness response that incentivizes elected officials to shove encampments from one district into another instead of actually solving the problem,” Raman said. “And I faced a wall of resistance.”
Bass’ campaign has fired back at Raman’s record.
“Nithya Raman canceled committee meetings for weeks, didn’t show up to votes, and failed to deliver on building more housing or getting people off the streets,” Bass campaign spokesman Alex Stack previously told The California Post.
“Her signature program has been a failure, spending over $60 million for nearly a year but only filling 3 apartments,” Stack added. “Karen Bass approached these crises with urgency, cleaning up over 120 encampments and unlocking 100,000 new homes.”
