Add The California Post on Google Nithya Raman wants Los Angeles voters to make her mayor.
She also wants to bulldoze her 1,879-square-foot Silver Lake home and replace it with a three-story, 3,528-square-foot house with a spa and two-car garage.
That is an 88% increase in living space for a politician who has made housing affordability central to her political identity — and who is now the officially endorsed mayoral candidate of the Democratic Socialists of America’s Los Angeles chapter.
DSA-LA endorsed Raman on Sept. 2. She has been a member of the organization since before her first City Council campaign in 2020.
This stops being merely a story about a politician building herself a bigger house.
There is nothing wrong with Raman wanting a bigger home. If she owns the property, can afford the project and follows the law, she should be free to improve it.
Private property means you get to make choices about something you own. You invest in it, improve it and shape it around the life you want to live.
Raman understands that perfectly well when the property belongs to Nithya Raman.
Her socialist allies see things differently when the property belongs to somebody else.
DSA-LA’s Democratic Socialist Program for Los Angeles promotes “decommodified housing” outside the private market and expressly calls for the government to “expropriate privately owned housing.”
And Raman cannot dismiss it as somebody else’s socialism.
She is a DSA-LA member. She sought the organization’s endorsement for mayor and accepted it. Its activists and political machinery are now working to put her in City Hall.
When the house belongs to Raman, private ownership means the freedom to tear it down, nearly double its size, add a spa and build the home she wants.
Turn to everyone else’s property, and she aligns herself with an organization whose program seeks to move housing outside private ownership.
Raman calls Los Angeles’ inability to affordably house its residents “the compounding moral crisis of our time.”
Meanwhile, her own 1,879 square feet apparently will not do.
According to the Post’s reporting, her current three-bedroom, 2.5-bath hillside home has hardwood floors, wood-beamed ceilings, a gourmet kitchen, walk-in closets, a sprawling deck and panoramic views.
It is also listed as a contributing property in the Silver Lake Residential Historic District.
People like space. They like comfort. They like beautiful homes and the freedom to improve what they own.
There is something rich about a politician endorsed by an organization that wants to “decommodify” housing deciding that her own valuable housing commodity could use an 88% upgrade.
Raman’s defenders may say socialists are allowed to own homes.
Nobody should begrudge Raman a nice house or a bigger one. The hypocrisy is embracing private ownership and control over property when she exercises those rights herself, while seeking and accepting the backing of a political organization whose housing agenda takes direct aim at private ownership.
And this is not some minor side issue in Raman’s campaign. Housing is central to the case she is making for becoming mayor.
She wants voters to believe she understands what is wrong with Los Angeles housing and has the answers to fix it. That makes the principles she follows in her own backyard fair game.
If the rules change when the property is hers, voters are entitled to notice.
There is one other irony here. Los Angeles already provides its mayor with an official residence: Getty House, in tony Windsor Square, next door to Hancock Park.
So perhaps Raman is hedging. If she loses, she gets a much bigger Silver Lake home. If she wins, she could move into the mayor’s mansion and someday sell the upgraded house for a profit.
Which raises one last question: How much profit is too much profit for a socialist?
Los Angeles voters may wind up facing an impossible choice for mayor, with real reasons for serious reservations about the candidates before them.
But when Angelenos start making their lists of reasons for and against Nithya Raman, put this one on the ledger.
She wants voters to trust her with City Hall while running with socialists who want to “expropriate privately owned housing.”
Meanwhile, back in Silver Lake, Raman wants 88% more house.
Some principles, apparently, are easier to live with when they apply to somebody else.
Jon Fleischman, a longtime strategist in California politics, writes at SoDoesItMatter.com
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