To Mayor-Elect Nithya Raman
AN OPEN LETTER -
Dear Mayor-Elect Raman,
Los Angeles has elected a mayor with a background in urban planning at an unusually consequential moment in the history of our city and nation. Our city remains one of the great urban centers of the world: an extraordinary place of culture, trade, immigration, education, innovation, and human ambition reaching all the way into space. We also carry a heavy accumulation of unfinished work in housing, homelessness, infrastructure, transportation, public safety, neighborhood quality, and wildfire recovery.
Mayor-Elect Raman, your opportunity is to convert the enormous capacity of Los Angeles into measurable improvements that Angelenos can actually see and experience.
Los Angeles has reinvented itself before. Earlier generations made consequential choices about public institutions, water and infrastructure, transportation, and development that helped make this modern city. I have been fortunate to participate in some of that work to delivery transportation projects, homeless shelters, major infrastructure, and the coordination of public agencies. My experience has taught me that Los Angeles can accomplish difficult things when leadership, institutions, resources, and public purpose become aligned.
America has clearly entered a new political era. Recent elections have shown voters are willing to reconsider long-established arrangements and support candidates who speak more directly to affordability, public services, economic security, and the effectiveness of government. Voters deserve to be heard clearly rather than reduced to ideological labels. Established institutions and their leaders should respond to what voters are saying: they want government to address everyday problems more effectively, remain open to new approaches, and demonstrate that our civic institutions can still deliver meaningful and visible results.
The election creates an opening; what happens next will determine whether that opening becomes a durable political legacy.
A mayor’s personality can help turn institutions that normally work alongside one another into people willing to work together. Mayor Tom Bradley demonstrated that temperament itself can become a civic asset. His patience, steadiness, and ability to work across communities helped him build relationships that led to lasting accomplishments.
Mayor Eric Garcetti provides another useful example. When the I-405 project had become badly delayed with cost overruns, and the transportation agencies, contractor, and public were frustrated, he asked me to become involved. The solution did not require inventing another bureaucracy. It required getting the responsible people together regularly, restoring urgency, resolving disputes, and keeping everyone focused on completion. That experience reinforced something I have seen repeatedly in public life: sometimes leadership means knowing whom to bring into the room, giving them a clear assignment, and insisting that the work move forward.
Your administration can begin with a limited number of great purposes and pursue them with unusual concentration. Define success, identify responsibility, establish realistic milestones, measure progress, and report the results honestly. Measurement can and should help people learn and governments act. When a program works, it can be expanded. When progress stalls, at least try to determine why, so that experience reveals a better approach and adjustments can be made. This kind of disciplined learning can become one of the signatures of your administration.
E. F. Schumacher wrote in Small Is Beautiful about human-scale institutions, appropriate technology, local responsibility, and arrangements organized around the needs and dignity of people. For example, select a transit station surrounded by broken sidewalks, poor lighting, difficult crossings, drainage problems, limited bicycle access, and neglected public space. Bring the responsible agencies together around one scope, one schedule, one budget. Fix it, measure the results, learn from the experience, and repeat what works.
Infrastructure deserves special attention because it is where residents experience government every day. Streets, sidewalks, streetlights, drainage, utilities, transportation access, and public facilities quietly determine whether a city feels functional and cared for. Disciplined asset management, preventive maintenance, state-of-good-repair programs, and life-cycle planning can produce visible improvements and control costs.
Several immediate challenges will test your approach. Wildfire recovery will require sustained focus. The 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, and even sooner the Super Bowl, place demands for coordination on transportation and public safety.
LA28 should be treated as both a deadline and a legacy opportunity. During the 1984 Olympics, when I was president of the Southern California Rapid Transit District, I participated in developing a transportation framework involving federal, state, county, regional, and local agencies. The lesson remains useful: preparation must be sustained, financing must be managed, responsibilities must be clear. Olympic investments should not bankrupt the City.
Homelessness may require the deepest collaboration of all. No single department, agency, or jurisdiction controls the entire problem. Your administration will also inherit an evolving relationship between the City and Los Angeles County as responsibilities in the homelessness system are reorganized. That relationship with the County will matter well beyond homelessness. Choosing capable senior leaders matters, and so does creating productive relationships with supervisors, regional agencies, Sacramento, Washington, business, labor, and community institutions ensuring all our safety.
During more than a few earlier crises, I was asked to help deliver facilities under demanding circumstances. We completed projects on time and on budget by following a simple creed: integrity, responsibility, trust, accountability, transparency, urgency, and sufficient authority to get the job done. Those principles remain useful today.
Affordability also requires a broader toolkit than rent regulation alone. Los Angeles is already a largely built-out city, which makes new construction more difficult, expensive, and politically complicated. You are already familiar with dynamic ways to expand housing opportunity: adaptive reuse, innovative financing, better use of publicly owned land, and thoughtful coordination of housing with transportation and infrastructure. Los Angeles has extraordinary professionals in development, affordable housing, finance, architecture, planning, and business who understand how these pieces fit together. Your administration can bring that expertise into the same room together to serve in both paid and volunteer capacities. Ask them a practical question: what can we do together that none of us can accomplish alone?
Mayor-Elect Raman, Los Angeles has a history, with sufficient talent, resources, and civic energy, to make substantial progress. Your leadership must summon those capacities, provide direction, and help institutions that are too often forced to operate separately. Let us continue to learn to accomplish good things together.
Very truly yours,
Nick Patsaouras
A concerned citizen
(Nick Patsaouras is a civic leader in Los Angeles. He ran for mayor in 1993 with a focus on rebuilding L.A. through transportation after the 1992 civil unrest. He is the author of the book The Making of Modern Los Angeles.)
