Nithya Raman goes scorched earth on Mayor Karen Bass after councilwoman was pushed out of homelessness committee position

Mayor Karen Bass conspired with a political ally to push rival Nithya Raman out as chair of LA’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, the councilwoman alleged.Raman, who is challenging Bass in November, blasted the shake-up in a video posted to X Monday after the California Post first reported that she was being removed as chair of the committee.“Mayor Bass’ top City Council ally removed me as Chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee,” Raman said.“The Mayor may be trying to punish me for challenging her, but Angelenos are the ones who pay the price for these political games.”She then went directly after Bass’ handling of homelessness, pointing to rising numbers citywide and questioning oversight of the mayor’s signature Inside Safe 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,” Raman said.Raman contrasted those results with her own Council District 4, where she said street homelessness fell nearly 50%.“But in my district, it went down by almost 50%, and we did that the hard way,” she said.

“We did outreach, we matched people to beds, we got people indoors.”Raman’s own record overseeing homelessness at City Hall has drawn scrutiny.As chair, Raman canceled four of the committee’s first eight scheduled meetings this year by late May, while roughly 133 pending items piled up before the committee.Meanwhile, the city’s 2026 homeless count found 45,194 homeless people in Los Angeles, up 3.4% from the previous year.Unsheltered homelessness jumped 7.9% to 29,115 people.Raman also oversaw the rollout of the city’s redesigned Time-Limited Subsidy program, which had a $62.6 million budget and was expected to help roughly 2,000 households.

However, just three households had been permanently housed through the program, as of...