Progressive’s Progress: Incumbent Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman Wins Reelection Bid
- The Indian American received over 50 percent of the votes to avoid a runoff in the November general election.
Incumbent Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman who represents District 4 has won her reelection bid in the March 5 primary. Since she received over 50 percent of the votes, she managed to avoid the runoff in the November general election.
According to the latest results from the county registrar, the 42-year-old first-term councilmember received more than 32,000 or 50.6 percent. She faced a challenge from deputy city attorney Ethan Weaver and another candidate Lev Baronian in the primary.
The L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk is expected to provide more updates until the election results are certified on March 29.
Raman told Eyewitness News the results make her “proud to be an Angeleno” because “voters rejected the heavy spending by Weaver and the unions backing him.” There is “a lot of frustration and anger,” about homelessness, she said, adding that she feels the same. “But to me, what this vote, what this outcome represents, is that Angelenos want to respond to homelessness in the right way. By offering housing, by offering services, by doing work that can really move people indoors and off the streets — not just shuffle them from sidewalk to sidewalk as the city has been doing for so long.”
Los Angeles Times noted that win is “a reassuring sign of support for the progressive ideas about solving the homelessness and housing crises that she has championed and that the city and her district, in particular, desperately need.” It is also “a heartening sign that powerful interests can’t just dump a ton of money in a race and always prevail.”
According to the Los Angeles Daily News, District 4 was “heavily impacted by the city’s 2021 redistricting process, in which City Council boundaries were redrawn.” As a result of the new maps, “Raman lost 40% of the constituents she represented prior to the redistricting.”
Raman was first elected in 2020, after defeating incumbent David Ryu, who had served on the council for five years. Her focus since taking office has been on homelessness, affordable housing, and the city’s climate goals.
She moved to the U.S. when she was six years old. Until then, she was raised by her grandparents after her father came to the U.S. “in search of better work,” and her mother “had to move for work.” The family first lived in Louisiana, then settled in the suburbs of Boston. “My experience as a young immigrant to this country, and as one of the only people of color in my classrooms, shaped my decision later in life to focus on social justice in my work,” she wrote on her website. After graduating from public schools, she attended Harvard and later got her Masters in Urban Planning at MIT.
Before and after her graduate studies, she worked for more than seven years in both Delhi and Chennai She started Transparent Chennai, which created maps and data about urban poverty that helped to improve service delivery. She moved to Los Angeles from India in 2013 to be with her husband, now a television screenwriter Vali Chandrasekaran, a fellow Harvard alumnus.
She took a job with the City Administrative Officer of Los Angeles, where she was assigned to write a report detailing city spending on homelessness. “What I found in my research shocked me,” she wrote on her website. “My report concluded that the city was spending over $100 million on homelessness — and almost 90 percent of that money was being spent on jailing people experiencing homelessness. Very little, meanwhile, was going toward services, outreach, treatment, and other effective paths to stable housing.”
She left the workforce temporarily when she had twins, but stayed active in addressing homelessness in her community, joining the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council’s Homelessness Committee as co-chair. Stunned by rising homelessness in our part of the city, she and a group of neighbors started SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition in 2017, “and grew it into one of the most active all-volunteer homeless services nonprofits in the city.”
She served as the first executive director of Time’s Up Entertainment, the organization that grew out of #MeToo activism, and was focused on equity and safety for women in the entertainment industry. Under her leadership, the team launched a mentorship program for the executive and producer pipeline, published comprehensive Know your Rights resources related to sexual misconduct in the workplace, built a critics database, and created regular opportunities to build community among women in Hollywood. She ran for city council “to implement transformative policies that can help guide LA out of our intersecting housing and climate crises,” as per her website.
Raman lives in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles with her husband Vali Chandrasekaran, and their twins Karna and Keveri.