After a tough primary battle, Councilwoman Nithya Raman resoundingly won her bid for a second term in Council District 4, a tough stretch of the city from Silver Lake to the western San Fernando Valley. Her victory is a reassuring sign of support for the progressive ideas on solving the housing and homelessness crises that Raman has championed and that the city and her district, in particular, desperately need.
To win, Raman fought his main rival, the deputy city attorney. Ethan Weaver, who tried to tap into residents' frustrations with an easy-to-sell, if misleading, message about worsening homelessness during his tenure. Homeless numbers increased across the city and county; They fell in his district. Weaver was buoyed by a huge outlay of $1.35 million in independent contributions and expenditures on his behalf from donors, including police and fire unions and property owners, the groups most upset by Raman's decisions in office. push for tenant protections, vote against the police and states that the city cannot afford and we refuse to criminalize homelessness.
His victory is an encouraging sign that powerful interests can't just throw a ton of money at a race and always prevail.
And Raman did it in a district that has been significantly redrawn since he won the first time. During his tenure, he lost 40% of his original district (more than any other council member) due to redistricting, the fraught and overly political process of redrawing districts. It is not surprising that both her supporters and her critics expected that she would have to fight for re-election in a second round.
This race was also seen as an indicator of how the small but open progressive coalition on the City Council is doing. So far, Raman is doing his part.
Being one of the 15 members of the Los Angeles City Council is an extraordinarily challenging job. It is difficult to manage a district of 260,000 people and impossible to please everyone, particularly when there are such divergent opinions in communities about how to make streets safer, build affordable housing and address the homelessness crisis in a thoughtful and humane way. Some of the community members most upset with Raman have said she doesn't listen to them. She listens. She just doesn't always do what they want.
We hope that Raman, in his second term, will work hard to listen to his constituents, consider their concerns and work with them. But we also want him to be as brave as he was in his first term in doing what is best for the people who live in the city, particularly those whose voices are rarely heard.
