Nithya Raman: From India to Los Angeles, an urban planner’s journey into politics

Born in Kerala and educated at Harvard and MIT, Nithya Raman moved from urban planning and grassroots homelessness outreach to the Los Angeles City Council. Now in the November 2026 mayoral runoff against incumbent Karen Bass, she is making housing, homelessness and city services central to her bid to lead one of America’s largest cities.

When Nithya Raman first became involved in neighbourhood work in Los Angeles, she was not looking for a career in politics. She was concerned about what she saw around her. More people were living in tents in places where she had not seen them before, and she wanted to do something to help.

Nithya began organising volunteers, drawing residents together to support people experiencing homelessness and contribute to their neighbourhood. The response made her realise that people wanted more opportunities to participate in civic life. She also began to see a gap between the willingness of residents to help and the city’s response to the problems they faced.

That eventually took Nithya, an urban planner with degrees from Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), into electoral politics. In 2020, she defeated an incumbent to win a seat on the Los Angeles City Council, becoming the first South Asian and the first Asian American woman to serve on the council. Re-elected in 2024, she has since entered the race to become Los Angeles mayor, advancing to the November 3, 2026, runoff against incumbent Karen Bass.

Her work has consistently focused on how cities respond to the needs of their residents, particularly those struggling with housing, homelessness and access to essential services.

 

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From Kerala to the United States

Born in Kerala, India, Nithya Raman grew up in a Tamil Iyer family. When she was six, her family moved to Louisiana in the United States before settling in Burlington, Massachusetts. Reflecting on her early years and the women who influenced her, she remarked in a message marking Women’s Heritage Month:

I spent the first part of my youth in India and then moved to America. As an immigrant with my parents and I really admired both the strength of my grandmothers and my own mother.

Nithya Raman

Having grown up between two countries and cultures, her experiences as an immigrant would later intersect with her interest in communities, social justice and the role of public systems in people’s lives.

From Harvard and MIT to India and back

After graduating from Harvard University in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in Social Studies, she went on to complete a master’s degree in urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2008. She then moved to India, where she worked on issues affecting slum-dwellers and informal-sector workers in Delhi and Chennai. In Chennai, she founded Transparent Chennai, a research initiative that used maps and data on urban poverty and civic infrastructure to help improve access to basic services.

Her work in India gave her an opportunity to examine how urban planning and public administration affect underserved communities. In 2013, she moved to Los Angeles, where she worked for the city’s City Administrative Officer, gaining experience of local government from within the system.

Her career was bringing together three strands that would remain central to her work: urban planning, community engagement and public administration. Over time, her work in urban planning and public administration would intersect with a more direct form of community engagement, beginning with efforts to address homelessness in her Los Angeles neighbourhood.

Turning neighbourhood volunteering into public service

Nithya’s move towards elected office began with her involvement in local homelessness outreach. She served for several years as co-chair of the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council Homelessness Committee before co-founding the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition in 2017.

The organisation worked on homelessness outreach in Los Angeles, connecting community involvement with the needs of people experiencing homelessness.

Nithya saw a gap between the scale of the problem and the city’s response. Her experience working with residents and outreach volunteers convinced her that local communities could contribute more if they had better ways to engage with public services.The experience showed her that civic participation did not have to be limited to voting or attending public meetings. Residents could organise around a problem, work alongside one another and press for solutions.

When she decided to run for the Los Angeles City Council’s Fourth District in 2020, this community-based approach became central to her campaign. More than 83,000 doors were knocked on by grassroots volunteers supporting her challenge to incumbent David Ryu. Nithya won the November runoff with 52.9 percent of the vote, becoming the first South Asian and the first Asian American woman to serve on the council. She secured re-election in March 2024 with more than half the vote.

I ran for office after I was a neighborhood volunteer. I saw a lot more homelessness in my neighborhood… there was this incredible outpouring of support for volunteerism in my neighborhood, for civic engagement, for giving back to the neighborhood… That spirit is really what encouraged me to run…

Nithya Raman

Nithya recalled that residents joined her volunteer group both to help people experiencing homelessness and to connect with one another. Their enthusiasm showed her the potential of community involvement and encouraged her to bring that spirit of civic engagement into City Hall. She wanted residents to have more opportunities to support their neighbourhoods and fellow Angelenos.

The women who shaped her outlook

For Nithya, public service has roots in her family. She has credited her mother and grandmothers with shaping her understanding of courage, civic engagement and public life.

My grandmother on my father’s side had a second grade education but read the newspaper beginning to end every single day and was more politically informed and engaged than almost anybody I knew and I see my work now as a direct line from her enthusiasm to what inspires me to do this job.

Nithya Raman

The recollection offers a glimpse into how Nithya understands her own entry into public life. Her education and professional experience equipped her to analyse urban problems, but her interest in civic engagement also grew from watching the people around her take an active interest in the world.

She has also spoken about the significance of women bringing different experiences and priorities into public office. During her Women’s Heritage Month address, Los Angeles had a majority-woman City Council for the first time in its history.

For Nithya, the value of that representation did not lie in the expectation that women would always agree with one another. It lay in their ability to work together towards shared objectives despite their differences. “We’re going to work together because we care about Los Angeles and making Los Angeles better,” she said.

Housing, homelessness and the limits of quick fixes

As a city council member, Nithya has pursued a two-pronged housing agenda: expanding the supply of homes while protecting tenants from harassment and steep rent increases. She has also argued that homelessness requires access to housing and support services, not simply the removal of encampments.

In 2021, she helped advance changes to Los Angeles’s tenant harassment ordinance, expanding its definition to cover threats to report false information to law enforcement and certain cash buyout offers.

She opposed a city ordinance banning homeless encampments within 500 feet of schools and daycare centres, arguing that moving people from one location to another would not resolve homelessness. Her approach has emphasised the need to address housing shortages alongside the immediate concerns of safety and neighbourhood conditions.

Nithya has also advocated allowing more homes in areas traditionally zoned for single-family residences. In 2024, however, the City Council rejected her proposal to permit mid-sized apartment buildings near public transport in some of these neighbourhoods. In November 2025, the council passed her motion to cap annual rent increases for rent-stabilised apartments at 4 percent.

Her position on housing funding has also evolved. She supported Measure ULA, known as the Mansion Tax, in 2022 to raise money for affordable housing and homelessness programmes. By January 2026, she was calling for reforms, arguing that the measure needed adjustments to support housing construction and reduce the risk of repeal while preserving essential revenue.

Challenging conventional approaches

Nithya has also taken positions on environmental justice and civil rights. Appointed to the board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District in 2022, she pledged to prioritise public health and environmental justice. She was removed from the board in early 2026, although the reasons have not been publicly established.

In 2024, Nithya accepted an endorsement from Democrats for Israel Los Angeles. The Los Angeles chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America censured her over the endorsement but retained its support for her re-election campaign, highlighting differing expectations among groups that had supported her political rise.

She has also called for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, joining fellow councilmembers in introducing a municipal resolution in June 2024.

Alongside policy, Nithya has emphasised constituent services, with her council office proactively reaching residents on renter protections, neighbourhood improvements, community initiatives and fire safety.

From City Council to the mayoral race

Nithya’s decision to run for Los Angeles mayor in February 2026 came as a surprise. She announced her candidacy just hours before the filing deadline, having endorsed incumbent Karen Bass for re-election only weeks earlier.

Her campaign has focused on increasing housing production, improving city services and revitalising Los Angeles’s film industry. She has criticised the city’s handling of homelessness, questioning the financial sustainability of Bass’s Inside Safe programme, which aims to move people from encampments into temporary accommodation.

She has also argued that Los Angeles needs to do more to retain film and television production, an important source of employment and economic activity. Her husband, television screenwriter Vali Chandrasekaran, works in the entertainment industry. Nithya has explained that she recused herself from several City Council votes on streamlining film production to avoid a potential conflict of interest.

Having advanced to the November runoff against Bass, Nithya faces the challenge of persuading voters across Los Angeles that her approach to housing, homelessness and city services can deliver results on a citywide scale.

She lives in the Silver Lake neighbourhood with her husband and their twins, Karna and Kaveri. Her journey from Kerala to Los Angeles has taken her through academic training, urban research, community organising and local government. Across these different roles, the question of how cities can better serve their residents has remained a consistent concern.

For Nithya, the starting point is the belief that people want to participate in the places where they live. As she recalled in her Women’s Heritage Month address, her grandmother’s daily engagement with the news helped inspire her own interest in public life. Her work with neighbourhood volunteers gave that interest a practical direction, turning concern about homelessness into a wider commitment to civic engagement and public service.

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