My book, Build or Die: How America Suffocates Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.
This weekend brought the welcome—and to me, at least, unexpected—news that Los Angeles Councilmember Nithya Raman will face incumbent mayor Karen Bass in the November election, having jumped ahead of ex-reality TV star Spencer Pratt in the jungle primary. Raman is going to be the underdog against Bass, but my sense is that she has a real shot. And if Raman does, in fact, manage to become mayor, it could augur the start of a genuine renewal for America’s most dysfunctional big city.
Raman gets a lot of comparisons to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and for good reason: both are young, highly charismatic DSA members running longshot campaigns. (Both are also of South Asian descent.) Their most significant commonality, in my view, comes down to how they think about city planning: Raman and Mamdani are both unambiguously of the left, but they reject the New Left-inflected allergy to private housing construction that remains prevalent among a lot of their ideological compatriots. Instead, their platforms are more reminiscent of the New Deal-era left: a left that builds things to advance the common good and raise everyone’s standard of living.
Like Mamdani, Raman is a YIMBY who understands that her city’s housing and homelessness crisis is the product of a severe housing shortage. They both treat private housing development, public investment, and tenant protections as complementary programs instead of mutually exclusive avenues. And they both understand that transportation policy and housing policy must necessarily move in the same direction: if Los Angeles needs much more dense housing construction, it also needs the transit and active transportation infrastructure that enables circulation through dense cities.
But Los Angeles has a steeper uphill climb than New York. The latter city has solid bones: it’s already the least car-dependent big city in the United States, with what is by far the most robust and extensive transit network. And even before Mamdani assumed office, the city had taken some important steps in the right direction; the long-delayed implementation of congestion pricing, Eric Adams’s City of Yes initiative, and the passage of Questions 2, 3, 4, and 5 in the same election that propelled Mamdani to Gracie Mansion. That means the new chief executive of New York started off with a few key things already going his way.
If Raman becomes mayor of Los Angeles, she won’t be similarly blessed. Los Angeles is a city built for cars, at least as much as it is built for people; unlike Mamdani, she’ll be working against the city’s existing layout and built environment as she tries to make it more hospitable to non-drivers. And Los Angeles has nothing like City of Yes or Questions 2-5 in its recent past; the closest equivalent is probably Executive Directive 1, a Bass administration measure that streamlines 100% affordable projects. (Characteristically, Bass substantially pared back ED 1 after it threatened to produce a decent amount of new housing.)
But that just goes to show why electing a YIMBY in Los Angeles would be so transformative. The city has been stuck for a very long time; the existing Democratic establishment has spent decades fighting dense housing construction, even as the city’s shortage has led to widespread overcrowding and a large-scale epidemic of unsheltered homelessness. Things have been a little better on the transportation side, but not by much.
When Bass was first elected in 2022, I held onto some dim hope that she would be different from her predecessors. ED 1 in its original form seemed promising. But everything since—including the confounding decision to defang ED 1 just when it was starting to work—has demonstrated Bass’s firm commitment to the untenable status quo in Los Angeles.
A couple of weeks ago, I took a work trip to downtown Los Angeles for the first time in a little while. Every time I visit that neighborhood, it feels a little more broken. The unsheltered homelessness, poverty, and human suffering is a little bit more in your face on each visit; Skid Row always seems a little bit larger than the last time I was there. And while individual LA neighborhoods are eminently walkable, I’m always struck by how hazardous getting between neighborhoods can be. One late afternoon, I decided to take a walk to Echo Park to meet up with a friend, and quickly found myself marooned on a dead-end sidewalk with no crosswalk to the other side, cars whizzing by at high speeds.
Bass is the candidate of letting conditions continue to deteriorate. Spencer Pratt was the candidate of reactionary LA’s shrieking id, a creature of the same malarial swamp that gave us Howard Jarvis. Only Raman has real ideas about how to bring down housing costs, house the city’s enormous homeless population, and open up the city to people who don’t own cars.
One might reasonably wonder how much she can accomplish in the face of such long-metastasizing crises and a deeply entrenched NIMBY political culture; the answer is probably not enough, but a lot more than anyone else has done for the city. For starters, she could restore ED 1 to its original strength. And perhaps even more importantly, she could reverse the city’s long-running official opposition to the YIMBY legislation coming out of Sacramento. Under Bass, Los Angeles fought SB 79 (last year’s big transit-oriented development bill) tooth and nail; she also moved to nullify the state’s duplex construction law in post-fire Pacific Palisades. Raman could instead endorse pro-housing bills that would benefit her city, giving them a boost on their way to passage. Even if she implemented them faithfully instead of actively undermining them, that alone would be a significant change. Simply getting Los Angeles out of its own way would be a huge improvement. Doing more than that could bring about a new era for the city and the people who live there.