Hypocrite socialist Nithya Raman wants 88% more house

Nithya Raman wants Los Angeles voters to make her mayor.She also wants to bulldoze her 1,879-square-foot Silver Lake home and replace it with a three-story, 3,528-square-foot house with a spa and two-car garage.That is an 88% increase in living space for a politician who has made housing affordability central to her political identity — and who is now the officially endorsed mayoral candidate of the Democratic Socialists of America’s Los Angeles chapter.DSA-LA endorsed Raman on Sept.2.

She has been a member of the organization since before her first City Council campaign in 2020.This stops being merely a story about a politician building herself a bigger house.It becomes a story about hypocrisy.There is nothing wrong with Raman wanting a bigger home.If she owns the property, can afford the project and follows the law, she should be free to improve it.That is the point.Private property means you get to make choices about something you own.

You invest in it, improve it and shape it around the life you want to live.Raman understands that perfectly well when the property belongs to Nithya Raman.Her socialist allies see things differently when the property belongs to somebody else.DSA-LA’s Democratic Socialist Program for Los Angeles promotes “decommodified housing” outside the private market and expressly calls for the government to “expropriate privately owned housing.”That is not vague language.And Raman cannot dismiss it as somebody else’s socialism.She is a DSA-LA member.She sought the organization’s endorsement for mayor and accepted it.

Its activists and political machinery are now working to put her in City Hall.The contradiction is impossible to miss.When the house belongs to Raman, private ownership means the freedom to tear it down, nearly double its size, add a spa and build the home she wants.Turn to everyone else’s property, and she aligns herself with an organization whose program seeks to move housing outside private ownership.One s...