Washington, Nov 6 (IANS) Nithya Raman entered politics with a focus on housing and homelessness. On Thursday, that journey took the Kerala-born urban planner to the mayor’s office in America’s second-largest city, Los Angeles.
Mayor Karen Bass conceded defeat after NBC News projected Raman the winner. Results late Thursday showed Raman with about 53 per cent of the vote against Bass’ 47 per cent, with roughly 874,000 ballots counted. The result remains unofficial.
“I have called Councilmember Nithya Raman to congratulate her on her victory, and I have committed to ensuring a smooth and seamless transition,” Bass said in a statement.
Raman, 45, will take office in December. She is the city’s first Asian American mayor.
Speaking at the Original Farmers Market on Thursday, Raman placed her victory within the city’s immigrant story.
“And the idea that Angelenos voted for an immigrant to be their next mayor at this moment in American history is so deeply moving to me,” she said.
Raman was born in 1981 in Thrissur and briefly lived in Thiruvananthapuram, where her father, Venkitaraman, worked at KELTRON and her mother, Sudha Kechery, worked in banking. She left India at about six. She became a naturalised American citizen at 22, taking the oath in Boston.
At Harvard, she studied Social Studies and joined a programme providing interest-free loans to tenants facing eviction, The Harvard Crimson reported. Her freshman-year roommate, Stephanie Stallings, recalled her sleeping outside in freezing weather to draw attention to homelessness.
“The Housing Opportunities Programme was a big influence for me in thinking about insecurity for people, and what can we do to help stabilise people during difficult moments in their lives,” Raman told The Crimson.
Her undergraduate research also took her into the workings of government in India. The Crimson recounted an encounter at a rural Tamil Nadu office where an official told her: “You must leave your shoes and your politics at the door.”
She walked out without removing her shoes. The official subsequently offered to open his office for her questions. This featured in her senior thesis.
India also shaped her choice of profession. In a 2020 interview with an Indian newspaper, Raman recalled working with slum-based organisations in Delhi against evictions and for basic services.
“Seeing how the government decisions negatively impacted the lives and livelihoods of so many made me realise how important urban governance was. That pushed me to study urban planning,” she said.
She earned a graduate degree in urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her thesis adviser, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, told The Crimson that her subsequent political career followed a “straight line” rooted in housing and the lives of marginalised people.
After MIT, she returned to India to build Transparent Chennai, a civic-data project.
“We also found that the location of the toilets had very little relationship to slums in the area, residents of which would be most likely to use them,” Raman, then the project lead, told the newspaper.
She moved to Los Angeles in 2013. Her husband, Vali Chandrasekaran, whom she met at Harvard, is a television writer with credits including “Modern Family” and “30 Rock”, ABC7 reported.
Working in the City Administrative Officer’s office, she examined homelessness spending and found that much of about $100 million went towards arrests rather than housing, outreach or services.
She co-founded the SELAH Neighbourhood Homeless Coalition in 2017 and later led Time’s Up Entertainment.
Her defeat of Councilman David Ryu in 2020 made her the first challenger in 17 years to unseat a Los Angeles council incumbent, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Campaigning also meant managing family life. Raman told an Indian publication that her four-year-old twins would interrupt speeches to ask for snacks or run around her.
“I had to learn how to stay focused,” she said.
On the council, Raman backed stronger renter protections. Legislation she supported extended protections against eviction without specific cause to about 400,000 additional rental units, according to city figures reported by the Times.
In November 2025, the council approved her proposal to lower the annual rent-increase limits for rent-stabilised apartments from 3–8 per cent to 1–4 per cent, depending on inflation.
“The city has not done enough to protect renters,” she said before the vote.
Her politics have sometimes unsettled allies. A candidate repeatedly endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, she also identified with the pro-housing “Yes in My Backyard” movement.
“But I feel like I have demonstrated over and over again that my decision-making has been independent,” she told the Times in February.
Her mayoral bid began with a break from Bass, whom she had endorsed. According to the Times, Raman decided to challenge her the night before the February 7 filing deadline. Nine council colleagues reaffirmed their support for Bass.
Raman finished second in the June primary, securing a place in the runoff.
Her record on homelessness became a central campaign dispute. In August, Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, a Bass ally, split the housing and homelessness committee Raman had chaired since 2023, the Times reported.
“The committee is behind in excess of more than 100 issues,” he told the newspaper.
Raman defended her scrutiny of city programmes as “oversight and accountability”.
There were shortcomings in delivery. Her rental-voucher programme aimed to house 600 households by July 1, but only three had moved in by then, rising to 54 by August 13, the Times reported.
Raman cited a 49 per cent decline in street homelessness in her district. Bass attributed the improvement to her own Inside Safe programme, the newspaper reported.
The contest grew bruising. The Los Angeles police union spent more than $5 million opposing Raman, The 19th reported, citing campaign finance records.
Yet her candidacy drew support from younger voters. Democratic consultant Mike Trujillo, who backed Bass, told the Times: “This is not a geographic coalition or racial coalition; this is a when-you-were-born coalition.”
At her election-night gathering at the Greek Theatre plaza, Raman brought her parents, brother, husband and 10-year-old twins on stage, Times columnist Gustavo Arellano reported.
“Hopelessness can be fatal for a city, but this campaign refused to accept that,” she said, according to The 19th.
She now faces the task of turning her housing agenda into results across Los Angeles, with preparations for the 2028 Summer Olympics adding urgency to the demands of governing.
On Thursday, she acknowledged the limited time ahead, telling the Times that hers was “one of the shortest transitions across the country — for a city of 4 million people where the challenges are absolutely immense”.
–IANS
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