Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman is expected to lose her leadership role on the L.A. City Council\u2019s Housing and Homelessness Committee, which she has chaired since 2023, according to people familiar with the situation. <\/p>\n
Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson is planning to announce this week that the committee will be split into a housing committee and a homelessness committee \u2014 neither of which will be led by Raman, the people said.<\/p>\n
Harris-Dawson is a close ally of Mayor Karen Bass, whom Raman is challenging for reelection. He declined to comment. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hard to imagine that it\u2019s not related to politics. The timing of it would be too much of a coincidence,\u201d said Zev Yaroslavsky, a former Los Angeles City Council member and Los Angeles County supervisor who now serves as chair of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.<\/p>\n
In a video released Monday afternoon, Raman said that she was being \u201cpunished\u201d for mounting a campaign against the incumbent mayor.<\/p>\n
\u201cMayor Bass and her allies are protecting what we all know is a deeply broken status quo, one that is not serving any person here in the city of Los Angeles,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
Alex Stack, a spokesperson for Bass\u2019 campaign, said that Raman\u2019s signature program out of the committee \u2014 to get homeless individuals off the streets by housing them through time-limited subsidies \u2014 had been a failure, costing more than $60 million and filling just three apartments so far.<\/p>\n
\u201cNithya Raman canceled committee meetings for weeks, didn\u2019t show up to votes, and failed to deliver on building more housing or getting people off the streets,\u201d he said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The Raman campaign called Stack\u2019s claim inaccurate and said that the money for the program is not spent until the people served by it have leases and that $60 million hasn\u2019t yet been spent.<\/p>\n
Plans to take away Raman\u2019s leadership role, reported earlier by the California Post, come at a pivotal moment. <\/p>\n
The city\u2019s unsheltered homeless population increased<\/a> this year after two straight years of decreases, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported last month.<\/p>\n