The Democratic Socialist Running for Mayor of Los Angeles

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1:43This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. an incumbent mayor of Los Angeles hasn't lost a bid for re-election in a quarter century. And so under normal circumstances, this election should be pretty smooth sailing for a Democrat like Karen Bass. But Bass's first term has been full of bad headlines. Headlines in particular about her handling of the devastating wildfires of last year, and also about a homelessness crisis that seems to many Angelenos to be absolutely out of control. A so-called jungle primary in June saw a surprisingly potent challenge from a conservative, the reality TV star Spencer Pratt, and also from a former ally of Bass's, Nithya Rahman.

2:28Rahman now faces Bass in the runoff. She serves on L.A.'s city council, and when she won her seat in 2020, she defeated an incumbent in what the L.A. Times called a political earthquake. She's aligned herself with the Democratic Socialists of America, But Rahman isn't exactly leaning into that affiliation. In fact, in our conversation, you'll see how she negotiates it. Her candidacy is powered, above all, by a frustration with Democratic Party leadership. And that's something that she shares with a lot of candidates across the country. We aren't just running against an incumbent. We are running against the entire political machine.

3:07But we have something that they don't. We have a vision of the city that we know is worth fighting for. I spoke with Nithya Raman about how to succeed where she thinks that other mayors have come up short. Tell me about the dynamics of the race that you face. Yeah. What was interesting about this primary was that it had the highest turnout for a primary that we'd seen. A huge number of voters voted. And a very close one. Yeah. And it was close. I mean, I got within five points of a sitting incumbent mayor. And Spencer Pratt got a significant portion of the vote. He sure did. Yes, he did. He did.

3:55So people turned out to vote in a mayoral primary who may not have voted in mayoral primaries in the past. Okay, you got to explain for non-Angelinos the phenomenon of Spencer Pratt. A reality TV personality doesn't even begin to explain it. but who got a hell of a lot of votes. How do you go about even thinking about appealing to his voters? I think what Spencer Pratt was speaking to is a very real frustration with the way that things are going here in the city of Los Angeles. He is speaking to frustrations around persistent homelessness. He is speaking to frustrations about kind of the lack of services around the response to the fires.

4:46And so I think the frustrations that he was speaking to were very, very powerful. And yes, you know, I'm here because I'm frustrated, too. You feel that even though, despite the, let's just put it this way, vast difference between you and Spencer Pratt, that you can somehow get his voters. I. Because it was about disaffection. I, you know, I think we'll, I'm hoping that at least some of them, some of them will stay home. I know that. They will say, oh, it's left and lefter, you know, we're not voting for anyone here. But I hope that I can get some of them. And I know when I used to, you know, when I was running for city council, I got Trump ramen voters.

5:31And the reason I got those voters was because I was speaking to what I would do directly for residents. And in my second election, what I had delivered for residents. Now, you endorsed Karen Bass before deciding to run and challenge her. What motivated your decision? When did you decide you'd be a more effective mayor than Karen Bess? When a sitting mayor asks a sitting council member for their endorsement, you generally provide it, as many of my fellow council members have, because you depend on the mayor to work with them in order to be able to move things forward in your district. And I didn't think much of it at the time, but I had been getting more frustrated with the direction of Los Angeles.

6:11I had been very excited about this mayor when she first ran and campaigned for her and endorsed her and, you know, held events at my home for her. And in office, I had seen particularly over the last couple of years just a lack of urgency around the issues that I felt mattered most and in some ways a complete moving away from the direction that I felt L.A. needed to be moving. So that included the responses to our disasters, our Palisades fires, and now again, the Boyle Heights fire. But also her response to housing issues. Housing, I think, is kind of the key fault line in Los Angeles. We absolutely desperately need more housing.

6:57Cost of housing is skyrocketing. And this mayor was not prioritizing it. And that kind of lack of urgency was incredibly frustrating. But I think the thing that really started undermining my trust was something that a lot of Angelenos are seeing as well, which is that in L.A. and particularly this mayor, but it's part of a broader culture of decision making. Many of the decisions in City Hall are made around political interests as opposed to what's right for the city of Los Angeles. How has the city resisted building housing and why and how are you going to change that system? Well, so for decades, multiple people's political careers here in the city of Los Angeles have been really built around saying no to new housing.

7:48We had Zev Yaroslavsky and Marvin Braude, who ran on political platforms, council members and later supervisors, who ran on political platforms of ensuring that this city didn't become Manhattan. and passed propositions that reduced density along our major boulevards and thoroughfares and cut the city's ability to produce new housing significantly. Hundreds of thousands of units were not built because of changes that we made to our zoning and planning regulations that have led to this moment of extreme housing shortage. Los Angeles now has the fewest homes per adult of any major city in America and has the largest rent burden population of any city in America.

8:36And those two facts are connected, deeply connected. And even now in this city, everyone says there's a housing shortage, but actually enabling new housing to be built, which would involve zoning reform in order to actually allow for new housing to be zoned into neighborhoods. talking about changing and expediting, planning, decision-making at the city. All of those things continue to be things that many of our local elected leaders push back against. Nithya Rahman of Los Angeles. More in a moment.

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13:27You've identified yourself as a democratic socialist. What does that term mean to you? Well, so I talk about myself as a member of our local DSA, of DSA LA. And I was excited by Bernie Sanders when he ran, and I got excited about the DSA at that time. And when I first ran for office, the local chapter of the DSA was the only organization that was talking about renters and renters' rights and really talking about making sure that renters facing such a tough environment in this city actually were protected. And I was excited about that. And I joined and have been a member since and have actually delivered in office some of the strongest renter protections that this city has seen in four decades under my leadership, which has been really exciting.

14:19I think for me, as someone who is, you know, I'm running to be the mayor of a city, I've been a council member in a city. This is much less about broader ideologies around capitalism and all of that and much more about how do we ensure that this economic system, which can be so that that causes a lot of negative impacts. How do we use our city government to ensure that people can thrive here? You seem very eager to avoid any question of ideology broader than housing, and I understand that is a huge issue of practicality, but you do seem eager to avoid discussion about DSA in its specifics. Where you cleave to its orthodoxies or not, where you depart from it.

15:11I don't I mean, look, I would say that the local chapter of the DSA would say that I've had plenty of discussion with where I just, you know, where I've allied with them and where I haven't. So would you say you've departed? So recently, we the city passed something called the mansion tax, which was a citizen initiative as a proposition that put a pretty high transfer tax on the sale of properties over five million dollars. and a lot of people supported it. I supported it. I endorsed it. And after a few years in practice, I realized that the structure of the tax was actually reducing the city's capacity to build privately funded housing because it changed incentives for developers to invest and for people to be able to finance new construction in the city.

16:02And I have pushed for reform of the mansion tax to try and enable new construction to happen. So I got a lot of pushback from a lot of my allies, including in the DSA. But I think market rate construction is important for LA. I also support publicly funded housing. I pushed for permanent supportive housing to be built. I've pushed for affordable housing to be built that's entirely publicly funded. And I've pushed for social housing. Like I think we need all of it. And my efforts to try and make this reform met with some real pushback, but I still believe it's necessary and I'm in continued. My efforts have so far not yielded success, but I'm hoping that we can continue to have this conversation because I think it's really important to have.

16:53It is, though, important for people to understand what you mean by democratic socialism. The democratic part, I think we get. The socialist part is exploited all the time by the president of the United States and immediately uses the word communist. What does the socialism part mean for you? Does it mean that you are anti-capitalist, that you're anti-market? What does the socialism aspect of DSA mean to you? You know, I don't, I'm not anti-market. What I am against is exploitation. the market. What I am against is structuring a market such that it doesn't serve the interests of Los Angeles. And I think we have to be able to create zoning rules and regulations and planning rules and regulations that are really generating the kinds of units that we need.

17:38What I don't get, and forgive me for, I don't mean to beat a dead horse here, but what the socialism part is. I believe in big government intervention. I'm not trying to be evasive. I just, One of the big issues that we're facing in Los Angeles right now is that we need to be able to address our homelessness crisis, right? But there is huge amounts of skepticism about government spending on homelessness. And we need it. This is kind of the other end of our affordable housing crisis is that we have the largest unsheltered homeless population in the entire country here in this city. We have to be able to intervene in it.

18:16And I believe in that spending very much. I believe in big government intervention here to make sure that exploitation, harm, that workers' rights are protected. I believe in the power of labor unions. I believe in making sure that we have an economic system locally that works for Angelenos. And those policies that enable us to get there are the ones that I'm going to support. It just seems to me that as I listen to you, you sound very much like a reformist Democrat of a familiar kind, but that the brand of the Democratic Party is lousy and the brand of the DSA is more attractive, particularly for younger voters.

19:11that makes me sound more uh i think a little bit more calculating than i am um i found a i found a political home um in the dsa when i first ran and continue to engage with the dsa deeply on on the issues that matter to them and we'll we'll continue to do that as mayor. Well, I wish you all the best. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for your time.

19:44Neetha Raman is a Los Angeles City Council member running in the city's election for mayor in November. I'm David Remnick. That's our program for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer, with guidance from Emily Botin. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund.

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