Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman is losing her chairmanship of the city's Housing and Homelessness Committee, a move she calls political retaliation by Mayor Karen Bass ahead of their November mayoral showdown.
City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, a close political ally of Bass, is expected to announce the leadership reshuffle this week, splitting the single committee into two separate panels, The California Post reported. Raman, 36, will not chair either one. Councilwoman Ysabel Jurado, a Democratic Socialists of America member whose district includes Skid Row, is expected to lead the new homelessness panel. Councilwoman Imelda Padilla, who represents a large portion of the San Fernando Valley, is set to head the housing panel.
The shakeup comes after a record that even Raman's allies would struggle to defend. A $62.6 million homeless initiative she championed had placed just three households into permanent housing by June 25, against a goal of roughly 2,000. A March 2024 proposal exploring greater city control over homelessness programs sat for 316 days before her committee took it up. And every committee meeting over a five-week stretch in April and May was canceled, letting more than 130 agenda items pile up untouched.
That ratio, three families placed for $62.6 million, stands out even in a city long accustomed to expensive failures on homelessness. City records reviewed by The California Post confirmed the figure. The initiative's stated goal was to move roughly 2,000 households into permanent housing. By any measure, the program fell catastrophically short.
Raman's committee also approved $358 million for the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority in the current year's budget. LAHSA itself is now suspended from federal grant activity amid a federal investigation into financial management, conflicts of interest, and contract oversight. Investigators found the agency failed to verify nearly 2,300 housing sites, and roughly 70 percent of contracts tied to those sites showed no reported spending during the previous year.
That is the agency Raman's committee was supposed to oversee. The numbers suggest the oversight was not happening.
Meanwhile, the city's 2026 homeless count put the total at 45,194, up 3.4 percent from the prior year. Unsheltered homelessness hit 29,115, a 7.9 percent surge. Raman is campaigning on a promise to cut unsheltered homelessness by at least 50 percent before the 2028 Olympics. The trendline is moving in the opposite direction.
Hours after The California Post broke the story, Raman posted a video to X alleging that Bass engineered the reshuffle to punish a political rival.
"Mayor Bass' top City Council ally removed me as Chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee. The Mayor may be trying to punish me for challenging her, but Angelenos are the ones who pay the price for these political games."
Raman went further, accusing Bass of blocking the city's independently elected controller from auditing Inside Safe, the mayor's signature homelessness program.
"The mayor has blocked our independently elected city controller from doing an audit of her signature homelessness program, Inside Safe, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars of public money, and still we've seen homelessness go up citywide."
She added that a mayor's job "is not to explain why someone else is responsible" but "to take charge of the system and deliver results." The framing positions Raman as the accountability candidate, a harder sell when her own committee's track record is the one under scrutiny.
Raman's political troubles are not new. She has faced grassroots backlash since early in her tenure. A recall campaign was launched against her after just six months in office, with organizers citing her office as inexperienced, unresponsive, and too politically radical for her district. Recall backers pointed to her support for protesters who opposed the LAPD clearing a crime-ridden homeless encampment at Echo Park and her platform to "defund the police."
Dennis Zine, a former Los Angeles city councilman who served 12 years at City Hall from 2001 to 2013, called Raman's removal highly unusual and politically damaging. Zine chaired the Personnel Committee and served on the Public Safety and Budget committees during his tenure.
"I can't remember the entire 12 years I was there that anyone got reassigned unless they wanted to be reassigned. You were assigned to a committee and you stayed in that committee. You gained expertise in the committee."
Zine said the timing makes the move particularly damaging for Raman's mayoral bid.
"It's like pulling the carpet out from under you, especially in a campaign year when you are, as an individual, running to fill the mayor's seat, and homelessness is a huge issue in Los Angeles."
Whether the reshuffle was politically motivated or not, the practical effect is clear: Raman loses her most visible platform on the issue she has made central to her campaign against Bass. She is already running third in the Los Angeles mayoral race, and the committee chair gave her at least a claim to executive-level engagement on homelessness. Without it, she is a backbench council member criticizing the mayor from the outside.
Alex Stack, a spokesperson for the Bass campaign, did not treat the reshuffle as a defensive move. He went on offense.
"Nithya Raman canceled committee meetings for weeks, didn't show up to votes, and failed to deliver on building more housing or getting people off the streets."
Stack called Raman's signature program "a failure, spending over $60 million for nearly a year but only filling 3 apartments." He credited Bass with "cleaning up over 120 encampments and unlocking 100,000 new homes."
Those claims from the Bass campaign are worth scrutiny on their own terms, "unlocking" 100,000 homes is not the same as building or filling them. But the core counterattack lands because Raman's own numbers are so poor. When your opponent can point to $62.6 million and three households, the rebuttal writes itself.
Raman did not respond to The California Post's request for comment beyond her video on X.
The broader pattern is familiar in progressive urban governance. Democratic Socialists and their allies win seats, claim oversight authority, and then preside over ballooning budgets and worsening outcomes. The internal Democratic tension over the socialist wing's influence is playing out in real time in Los Angeles, where the city's most pressing crisis, tens of thousands of people living on the streets, has only deepened under the watch of leaders who promised radical solutions.
Jurado, the DSA member now expected to lead the homelessness panel, represents the district that includes Skid Row, downtown Los Angeles, and Boyle Heights, ground zero for the city's homeless crisis. Whether handing the committee to another socialist-aligned council member will produce different results is an open question. The socialist wave building inside the Democratic caucus nationally has not yet produced a city where the approach has worked at scale.
LAHSA's federal suspension adds another layer of dysfunction. The agency that Raman's committee funded with $358 million is now locked out of federal grants while investigators examine whether it can account for the money it already received. Nearly 2,300 housing sites went unverified. Seventy percent of the contracts tied to those sites showed no spending in the prior year. Those are not paperwork errors. They suggest a system where money flows in and results do not flow out.
For Los Angeles taxpayers and the 45,194 people the city counted as homeless this year, the committee reshuffle is a sideshow. The real failure is structural: hundreds of millions spent, homelessness rising, an oversight agency under federal investigation, and elected officials trading accusations about who is to blame. Progressive leaders across California keep finding themselves in these positions, managing crises they promised to solve, then fighting over who holds the gavel when the results come in.
Los Angeles spent $62.6 million and housed three families. No committee reshuffle fixes that. The city does not need a new chair, it needs leaders willing to admit the approach has failed.