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IN MY OPINION - Without a doubt! Nithya Raman (LA-CD4) has been the worst thing to happen to the San Fernando Valley since the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Nithya Raman does not believe in representative democracy. She takes her policy positions as seriously as a hereditary monarch practicing the divine right of Kings. Raman believes she knows best, no matter how many of her constituents literally beg her not to do something or cry for relief.
There are politicians who fail because they are incompetent. There are politicians who fail because they are corrupt. And then there are politicians like Nithya Raman, whose failures stem from something even more dangerous: an ideology so rigid, so detached from reality, that entire neighborhoods become sacrificial lambs to political zealotry that ordinary people never voted for.
For decades, the Valley represented the stable, unglamorous backbone of Los Angeles. It was not fashionable. It was where middle-class people escaped the chaos of the urban core to build lives rooted in safety, homeownership, schools, families, and expectations of civic order. People worked hard, paid taxes, obeyed the law, maintained their property, and believed the government would at least uphold the basic standards of civilization. Under Nithya Raman, this simple social contract has been shattered.
To her mainstream opposition, which includes police and LAFD unions, local merchants, parent groups, and most taxpayers, Raman is a clear and present danger to Los Angeles. As the powerful Chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee, she and Mayor Bass are responsible for the dismal failure of reigning in the epidemic of addicts and the mentally ill that infest our habitat.
Under Nithya Raman, this social contract has been shattered. The deterioration began under Mayor Garcetti and accelerated under Raman, aided and abetted by Karen Bass’s pro-revolution Venceremos Brigade training. The decline has been wrapped in the hopeful language of “equity,” “housing-first,” “decriminalization,” and “social justice.” The cumulative effect has been devastating to the Valley's livability.
Encampments spread. Crime worsened. Budgets were stressed to the breaking point. Neighborhood objections were dismissed, police were undermined, and taxpayer concerns were treated as just reprehensibly wrong rather than legitimate civic concerns. To critics in the San Fernando Valley, Nithya Raman did not arrive as a pragmatic problem-solver rooted in the traditions or priorities of Los Angeles neighborhoods. She arrived as an ideological activist, importing a worldview shaped by academic theory and political orthodoxy rather than by the lived realities of working communities.
Born in Kerala, India, and educated at elite institutions such as Harvard and MIT, Raman cultivated the image of a reformer while implementing policies that many residents know have exacerbated disorder, weakened accountability, and subordinated public safety to ideological purity.
Critics argue that because her background is in global urban planning and slum-research initiatives in India, she views LA’s homelessness crisis through a purely systemic, theoretical lens. She approaches Los Angeles like a thesis project, where it is more important to please her professors than to have a functioning city.
Nothing captures Raman’s contempt for ordinary residents more perfectly than her remarks regarding homeless encampments near schools. As parents pleaded for buffer zones protecting children from tents, drugs, mentally unstable individuals, and lawless conditions surrounding public sidewalks, Raman, like a Roman emperor in the Colosseum, voted thumbs down (no) on a motion in the City Council.
Raman was one of only three councilmembers who voted against amendments to the Los Angeles Municipal Code (LAMC) Section 41.18, which did not ban encampments but required they be at least 500 feet from schools and daycares. In a moment that was widely circulated by neighborhood groups and opponents, she dismissed concerns about tents near schools, suggesting that moving encampments 500 feet away would not make children safer.
“I mean, it’s like I don’t think a kid’s going to be safer because a tent is 500 feet away from a school... You know it’s like, whatever”, said Raman.
To the people living with the consequences of these choices, that single word, whatever, exposed everything. It revealed the mindset of an imperial politician. This was Nithya’s Marie-Antoinette (the French Queen), “let them eat cake” moment. She seems utterly oblivious to the destruction these vagrant criminals inflict on neighborhoods and children’s psyches. Raman’s words are her ultimate symbol of elite, effete ignorance and disconnection from the everyday worries of parents all over the Valley.
Parents should not have to beg to clean up the depravity of what we witness every day on city streets. Why should children have to navigate human waste, needles, open-air narcotics activity, and unstable behavior on their way to school?
Raman has repeatedly referred to municipal enforcement codes as "lies" told to the public, arguing that sweeping people does nothing but displace them "500 feet down the street". Actually, Raman is right about the whack-a-mole outcome of street sweeps, because she refuses to enforce the consequences of breaking the laws that are typically found 24/7 at these so-called camps. Detractors interpret this stance as a total abdication of municipal duty. By refusing to back immediate enforcement tools, she chooses to keep these wretches addicted and victims of their own psychosis over the physical safety of schoolchildren, effectively legalizing squalor, drugs, and indecent behavior in shared public spaces.
The same political movement (DSA) Raman crawled from spent years demonizing law enforcement, demanding defunding the police, and treating criminal enforcement as inherently immoral. Raman rose to power with heavy backing from the activist infrastructure of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and she has consistently advanced a platform aligned with their core tenets.
Predictably, under these policies, police morale cratered, recruitment collapsed, and staffing shortages exploded. Yet, when confronted with severe officer shortages and slow response times in the San Fernando Valley, Raman actually denounced her record during her 2026 mayoral run by stating, “Anybody who has called for help would agree that the LAPD needs to do better to be responsive to the needs of constituents.”
Police unions and crime victims slammed this comment as deeply hypocritical. Opponents point out that Raman voted against the 2023 LAPD contract, which included raises and retention bonuses intended to address the city's massive law enforcement staffing crisis. She has consistently resisted supplemental budget allocations and funding for police overtime. Detractors’ heads exploded, arguing that after deliberately hamstringing the department and undermining proactive policing, she then has the gall to blame the officers themselves for not being fast enough.
In the Valley, where property crimes, home burglaries, and organized retail theft have surged, the lack of a visible police presence is squarely blamed on her fiscal policies. This dynamic highlights a sharp class divide: critics label her a "liberal elitist" because she lives in an affluent area where private security is readily available, while working-class neighborhoods in the Valley are left to contend with depleted LAPD divisions and long waits for a 911 response, if the police respond at all.
Nowhere is the disconnect between Raman's office and her constituents more apparent than in her handling of local development projects and interim housing placements. Under her "housing-first" mandate, community concerns are frequently ignored because every neighborhood is forced to have a “shelter” and has to pay the price of higher crime and less safety.
In Encino, Raman’s office aggressively pushed for the conversion of the Oak Tree Inn at 17448 Ventura Boulevard into a transitional youth housing shelter. The Encino Neighborhood Council, local business owners, and nearby families organized heavily against the project, particularly when details of the facility's "harm reduction" model became public. The facility was slated to include "amnesty lockers" where residents could store weapons and illegal drugs without fear of confiscation or legal repercussions.
Local merchants and homeowners argued that introducing a facility that explicitly accommodated weapons and narcotics into a prime commercial and residential corridor would invite drug sales and property crime directly to their doorsteps. When residents protested, with over 300 residents from Encino attending a question-and-answer session in the Balboa Community Center, Raman did not appear. Her office dismissed their safety concerns as "irrational fear". To Encino residents, being told their anxiety over unconfiscated weapons and illicit drugs was mere prejudice was perceived as Raman being completely out of touch with what happens in the real world.
While residential corridors face top-down shelter mandates, historic community spaces have been sold off to the highest bidder. For decades, the Weddington Golf & Tennis, a designated Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument (HCM), was an affordable, public-access recreational facility for families in Studio City and beyond. Despite intense local opposition, protests, and petitions to save the green space, the City Council, with Raman's support as the district representative, unanimously approved a project that would allow the elite private school Harvard-Westlake to purchase and replace the facility. Harvard-Westlake is creating its own version of an Olympic Village while depriving roughly 100,000 people annually of affordable golf and tennis facilities.
Raman justified her stance by stating: “I share the deep emotional attachment to this property... but the city simply does not have the funds to purchase the land.” But Nithya, we obviously have 100’s of millions to waste on failed housing programs like Inside Safe, right? For a politician who campaigned heavily on environmentalism and protecting public green spaces, neighbors viewed her response as a whoring capitulation that sold out middle-class recreational assets to elite, private interests, but also raised questions about what benefits she got from the billionaire-supported school.
At a time when ordinary Angelenos are struggling under soaring inflation, rising insurance costs, and collapsing city services, Raman has championed policies that critics argue make the city fundamentally unaffordable.
In May 2022, Raman introduced and successfully passed a motion that effectively banned natural gas hookups and gas appliances in almost all new residential and commercial construction in Los Angeles, mandating all-electric buildings. Raman celebrated the motion as a major victory:
“This is a major step toward our goal of a zero-carbon city... We are leading the way to a healthier, more sustainable future.”
However, builders, developers, and small business owners viewed this as a punitive, "luxury belief" driven by an affluent green agenda. Electric appliances and the extensive electrical panel upgrades required to support them significantly increased the upfront cost of building new housing, all while preaching about our affordability crisis. If it is about the middle class flourishing or being able to live in LA, Nithya’s record shows she is against it.
Furthermore, because electricity rates from the LADWP are substantially higher than natural gas rates, the mandate effectively guaranteed higher monthly utility bills for future tenants. While high-income individuals can easily absorb these premiums, everyday working families, independent restaurants, and small landlords are left to bear the financial burden on an energy grid already prone to summer brownouts.
This speaks to a broader contradiction in Raman’s record: she frequently laments the city's housing shortage while backing regulatory frameworks that make building permits incredibly difficult to obtain and much more expensive to build. By expanding heavy tenant-protection mandates and championing the anti-development Measure ULA (the "Mansion Tax"), she added immense regulatory costs to construction, causing many developers to halt projects entirely. By squeezing the supply of new housing and increasing development costs, her socialist-adjacent policies have actively accelerated the skyrocketing cost of rent and homeownership in Los Angeles.
In May 2026, amid her broader political ambitions, Raman introduced a motion to explore restricting or banning outdoor grilling, backyard barbecues, and fire pits on Red Flag Warning days to prevent wildfires. This proves once again that she has no understanding of American culture and how families enjoy themselves and cook.
The backlash across local media and neighborhood forums was immediate. Critics pointed out a glaring double standard: while law-abiding, tax-paying families were being threatened with restrictions for grilling a burger in their own backyards, unregulated cooking and warming fires lit daily within illegal brush-zone encampments and under freeways go entirely unpunished. As I write these words, there is yet another fire in the Sepulveda Basin, served up by Nithya’s legion of feral tramps. This reinforced the narrative of a councilwoman who prefers to police the behavior of compliant citizens while entirely giving up on enforcing basic order at the street level.
When confronted with the visible decline in public spaces, budget deficits, and rising crime, Raman and her staff frequently resort to a defensive refrain: “I am only one vote out of fifteen on the City Council.” To the working people of District 4, this is the ultimate elite cop-out, an elected official dodging personal accountability for the city's condition while collecting a six-figure, taxpayer-funded salary. In addition to the overly generous salary of $218,000 plus benefits, to make life worse, each Council Person has a base operating budget of approximately $2.1 million to fund their office staff, operating expenses, and field offices.
Even more striking was her admission in an April 2026 interview: “One of the most persistent challenges with homelessness is that no one is in charge at City Hall... What we have is a patchwork of programs...” Critics immediately seized on the statement as a stunning acknowledgment of institutional failure. Raman has served as a city councilmember for six years and is the Chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee. If "no one is in charge" of the crisis, she is directly describing her own failure to provide leadership and coordination at the highest level of city governance.
The damage facing Los Angeles is no longer abstract. Families are leaving the state, businesses are closing, and public trust has severely eroded. Billions of dollars have been spent on homelessness in Los Angeles, yet most people, trusting their eyes, report that the “homeless” drug addict situation continues to worsen.
The insanity at the heart of this governance style is simple: create conditions of disorder, undermine law enforcement, attack standard policing, normalize high-risk encampments, and support harm-reduction policies that hand out needles and meth pipes with our tax dollars. This is a form of state-sponsored permission for drug addiction, and then Nithya doesn’t understand why neighborhoods become less safe.
The San Fernando Valley is exhausted. Residents are tired of being told that rising crime is merely a matter of perception, especially after your house has been ransacked and robbed. Being ripped off, Nithya, is not social justice, and it is certainly not a voluntary charitable donation.
Taxpayers are tired of being lectured that encampments are compassionate and that it’s a human right to run wild, like Cro-Magnon man, pitch a tent in the middle of just about anywhere, do drugs, and drop a dookie in the street.
We are sick and tired of watching City Hall protect dysfunction while it asks for more money from taxpayers. Raman may believe she knows best, but for residents of the Valley and Los Angeles, she represents the systematic dismantling of the civic norms, safety, and stability that once made the city livable. Nithya is the personification of all that is wrong in city government.
(Eliot Cohen is a longtime civic advocate who has served on the Neighborhood Council, the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, and the Board of Homeowners of Encino, where he was president of HOME for over seven years. A retired Wall Street executive with a 35-year career, Eliot brings a sharp eye to local governance. He critiques the bureaucratic missteps of City, County, and State officials. Eliot and his wife split their time between Los Angeles and Baja Norte, Mexico.)
