The Babcock Avenue Burnout: Is Nithya Raman Truly Ready to Occupy City Hall Room 300?
IN MY VIEW - This opinion article was going to be a much larger assessment of Councilmember Nithya Raman’s almost seven-year tenure representing Council District 4—one that, in my view, raises serious questions about her qualifications for mayor. That assessment would have been a sweeping review of her record in office, including both her accomplishments and her shortcomings. To be fair, Raman has had some successes during her tenure, including her work expanding tenant protections in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those accomplishments deserve acknowledgment. But a few successes do not change what I believe has been an overall below average record in office. After all, even a losing baseball team gets a win every so often—but it is still a losing team.
That broader assessment, however, would have had to confront a record that includes her second-worst attendance record on the City Council; the Measure ULA “mansion tax” debacle, which chilled housing production rather than solving the problem; her long history of championing the “defund the police” movement before a convenient pivot during her citywide mayoral campaign; her philosophy of blaming car companies for the epidemic of catalytic-converter thefts rather than confronting the criminality driving it; her support for policies that allow street vending to expand at the expense of brick-and-mortar businesses in her district; her failure to make any significant effort to keep Hollywood jobs in Hollywood, despite having a writer-producer husband who might reasonably have given her a particular appreciation for the industry; and her failure to adequately protect neighborhood children and parents from the realities of street encampments near schools, alongside a litany of other administrative breakdowns.
Yet, I realized a multi-page rap sheet isn’t necessary. The late-August blaze at an abandoned property on Babcock Avenue in Studio City serves as a single, devastating microcosm that encapsulates her seven years in office as the leader of Council District 4. It centers on her response to the homelessness in her own district.
There is a Grand Canyon-sized gap between the Los Angeles that Raman describes in her mayoral campaign press releases and the one Angelenos actually live in. For months, Raman has hit the mayoral trail armed with spreadsheets, metrics, and numbers gathered over a few nights, confidently telling voters that homelessness is down in her district. But spreadsheets, metrics and a single night’s homeless count don’t mean much when your neighborhood is actively under attack and eventually on fire.
The Studio City blaze was more than an unfortunate accident; it was, in my view, the foreseeable consequence of a problem that had been allowed to fester for years under the watch of City Hall, especially Raman’s office. For five years, neighbors pleaded, complained, and practically begged Raman’s office to do something about the hazardous, crime-ridden, trash-filled compound. They explicitly warned of an impending disaster. Their concerns produced, at best, minimal efforts to address the problem. The Los Angeles Times reported that residents had made dozens of complaints about the property and that Raman’s office had only minimally responded to their pleas.
What makes this failure particularly troubling is Raman’s background. This is an official who heavily leans on her technocratic and academic credentials—an urban planner with degrees from Harvard and MIT. She stresses beyond her degrees a vast amount of real-world experience. So, if anyone should know how to navigate municipal zoning, code enforcement, and land-use regulations to address a public hazard, it’s Nithya Raman.
The failure is particularly egregious because Raman has also positioned herself as the City Council’s authority on homelessness, serving for four years as chair of the powerful Housing and Homelessness Committee. Yet, with all that planning education, expertise and legislative authority, she couldn’t manage to resolve a single, glaring land-use and homelessness nightmare in her own district—one that everyday neighbors had been warning her about for years and who were counting on her office to help fix.
So, when the disaster finally arrived in a plume of thick black smoke, the finger-pointing began. Raman’s defense? She had sent emails and flagged the property to the mayor’s team. When Mayor Karen Bass pointed out that Raman could have called her directly to escalate this case as a clear neighborhood emergency, Raman shot back:
“I cannot call her about the 200-plus issues that we’re dealing with that are at this level of risk. Does she want me to call her about every encampment? Does she want me to call her about every single fire risk? Or do we actually deal with a functional city where departments can actually solve issues and where I use the policies that her office has sent me to identify the priority locations for nuisance abatement?”
Yes, Ms. Raman, she actually does expect you to call her – and so do the families in the Babcock neighborhood. But how would that help your campaign for mayor against Bass? It wouldn’t. Because, as finger-pointing goes, it was masterful political positioning. Mayor Bass had already become closely associated with Los Angeles’ devastating fires, making her an especially convenient target when another fire erupted. Raman appeared to recognize the political opportunity and capitalize on it. Blaming City Hall’s top executive allowed her to shift attention away from a problem that had festered in her own district for five years, regardless of any help from the mayor. It also gave Raman a convenient scapegoat in Mayor Bass and she took full advantage it.
But that response may be an excellent description of how candidate Raman thinks: point a finger somewhere else instead of accepting responsibility and learning from it. But that is not how a mayor should lead. When the system fails for five years and a known public-safety hazard finally catches fire, the answer from the elected official responsible for the district where the problem existed cannot simply be that the system should have worked and blame others for the failure.
Notably, only recently within the last year did Raman’s office involve the mayor on this issue. Raman stated that her office “called,” “emailed” and “escalated” the matter repeatedly to the mayor’s office stating that the property was identified as the second-most urgent of five nuisance properties in her district. But that raises the central argument: If her Council office had truly been fighting for the neighbors who depended on her and her staff for help, the situation should not have ever been allowed to escalate for five years until the property finally caught fire last month. Instead, her posture seemed to be one of powerlessness and an attitude that the mayor needed to be in charge of the problem.
But there is an important point that cannot be lost in Raman’s bureaucratic finger-pointing: a councilmember is not powerless; far from it. Los Angeles City councilmembers, especially senior members, wield significant influence over how city agencies and departments respond to conditions in their districts. Raman had the ability to press for enforcement, demand interdepartmental action and make the removal of dangerous or unlawful encampments like the one on Babcock Avenue a priority. Raman had the power to help the Babcock residents; she just elected not to use it.
And for many of her critics who see her as failing to use the significant power she holds in City Hall as a senior councilmember, the Babcock incident reflects something deeper and more upsetting than simply whether she had the authority to remove encampments. It speaks to a political philosophy in which protecting the rights and interests of people living on the streets can take precedence over protecting the neighborhoods those encampments affect. Raman herself has characterized the city’s efforts to clear encampments as “political theater,” arguing that Los Angeles has too often relied upon simply moving people “from one block to another, from your block to your neighbor’s block and back again.”
The distinction does matter though. Compassion for people experiencing homelessness does not require indifference to the consequences imposed on everyone else. Residents should not be expected to tolerate crime, drug use, fires, sanitation problems and the deterioration of their public spaces simply because more aggressive intervention might infringe on the rights of those living in encampments. To the families and businesses living with those consequences, that can feel less like compassion and more like disconnect and an abandonment of their own right to safe and functional neighborhoods. A mayor has to balance both obligations—not treat one population’s rights as automatically outweighing everyone else’s. It is this rigidity in Raman’s approach to the homeless crisis that frustrates many of her critics most.
That perceived disconnect became even more pronounced after activists staged a mock homeless encampment outside Raman’s Silver Lake home in May, bringing the reality of city sidewalks to her own front door. Raman dismissed it as a “political stunt” and said, “I’m glad my kids didn’t have to see that, luckily, this morning.” The reaction was understandable as a parent—but it also underscored the very point her critics were making. While Raman expressed relief that her own children had not been exposed to the conditions of an encampment, the activists were trying to hold a mirror up to Raman—to show her what countless other families throughout Los Angeles face for real, every day, in their own neighborhoods.
The Babcock Avenue incident is a prime example of this continued disconnect. Raman may have been given a mirror and had it held directly up to her face, but she apparently didn’t get the message. Babcock Avenue families have spent years pleading with Raman and her office to protect their children from those same conditions. The contrast is difficult to ignore: what Raman found unacceptable outside her own home, Babcock families—as well as countless other families citywide—have been expected to tolerate outside theirs.
But perhaps the most revealing moment came when Raman showed up in Studio City for a press conference after the fire. Standing in front of the charred ruins of a disaster that residents had spent years warning her and her office about, Raman attempted to shift the blame to the mayor’s office. The furious neighbors, however, weren’t having any of it. They confronted her directly, cutting through the political spin to demand to know why they had been forced to live with the problem for years. A local resident named Nestor repeatedly interrupted Raman’s prepared remarks, frustrating the councilmember as he demanded answers from her:
“YOU CAN’T EVEN HANDLE THE COMMUNITY THAT YOU’RE REPRESENTING. HOW THE HELL ARE YOU GOING TO HANDLE THE MAYORAL OFFICE? THIS IS A GREAT NEIGHBORHOOD! WE SHOULDN’T HAVE TO BE DEALING WITH THIS!”
The neighbors didn’t want bureaucratic excuses or finger-pointing. They wanted accountability. They wanted a simple solution: the homeless encampment gone for good.
The contradiction is hard to ignore. Raman wants to lead the second-largest city in America, yet her defense for a five-year neighborhood nightmare is that a paperwork pipeline broke down. Was the problem really that the paperwork pipeline failed—or that Raman didn’t push hard enough to get the bureaucracy moving, escalate the problem, or, perish the thought, bother the mayor with another call? A real leader doesn’t file a claim ticket and walk away; a real leader demands results for the constituents who elected them. A real leader takes charge and finds solutions.
If Nithya Raman can’t even get a single nuisance property in Studio City resolved, is she really ready to manage all of Los Angeles? Angelenos don’t need a mayor who blames the bureaucracy when things go wrong. They need a mayor who takes responsibility and dismantles it. Because in the end, what Los Angeles desperately needs is a mayor whose finger points forward toward solutions—not backward toward excuses.
Perhaps instead of asking Angelenos to promote her to City Hall Room 300, Raman should first focus on repairing her own leadership deficiencies as the councilmember in Council District 4. Maybe by 2030, she’ll have a better overall record that gives voters more assurance and reason to believe she’s ready to lead the entire city.
(Thomas Glick is a former Los Angeles City Planning Department Planner with over three decades of municipal expertise. Since 2017, they have served as a Board Member for the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association, continuing their commitment to local land-use policy and community advocacy.)
