Interviews

Nithya Raman claimed forty percent of Inside Safe participants returned to streets

The Los Angeles mayoral candidate blamed weak oversight for rising homelessness as Graham Stephan pressed her on taxes and housing.

Nithya Raman said about forty percent of people who entered Mayor Karen Bass’s Inside Safe program ended up back on Los Angeles streets, citing the city controller’s push to audit the roughly four-hundred-million-dollar intervention.

Raman, a city council member challenging Bass in the mayor’s race, made the claim on The Iced Coffee Hour while Graham Stephan questioned whether City Hall had earned another dollar of trust from landlords and residents who left California.

She tied the figure to programs that she said cost up to one hundred thousand dollars per person per year and contrasted them with time-limited rental vouchers in her district that she said run twenty-nine thousand to thirty-five thousand dollars annually with stronger housing retention.

Raman said unsheltered homelessness citywide rose 7.9% this year while her district posted a forty-nine percent drop in unsheltered counts last year and a seventy percent reduction in tents, RVs, and encampments over three years.

When Stephan argued that Los Angeles should fix spending before raising taxes, Raman said she had said the opposite and that voters in June rejected even a tourism tax and a street-light repair measure because faith in city hall had collapsed.

She said wealthier Angelenos should pay more in time but that she could not pass new levies until audits and performance tracking restored confidence, and she pointed to her push for a Bureau of Homelessness Oversight that she said Bass and other leaders blocked.

On policing, Raman said she would maintain the current LAPD headcount, hire to attrition, and expand unarmed mental health and outreach teams to take nonviolent calls off sworn officers’ plates rather than expand the force.

Asked about auditor Nick Shirley’s videos on homeless spending, Raman said fraud hurts government and that her goal was a system transparent enough that he could not find waste to highlight.

She also defended her council vote against a nearly six-billion-dollar downtown convention center expansion that city projections showed could lose ninety million dollars a year, and she rejected Democratic Socialists of America platform planks on abolishing prisons or expropriating private housing.

Source video: WTF Happened To Los Angeles - Graham Stephan Confronts Nithya Raman