A Democratic candidate for Los Angeles mayor has made tackling homelessness a pillar of her campaign, but she has yet to spend millions of dollars allocated to address the problem while in her role as a city councilmember.
Nithya Raman is head of the LA City Council's Housing and Homelessness Committee, which received a $4 million grant from the state to clean up a sprawling encampment by the LA River, according to records reviewed by the California Post.
She is one of three frontrunners in a tight mayoral race. A recent UC Berkeley-LA Times poll has incumbent Karen Bass at 26 percent, Raman at 25 percent and Republican first-time candidate Spencer Pratt at 22 percent among likely voters.
The LA River encampment is home to about 90 people living in tents and makeshift shelters as they battle with addiction and cycle in and out of prisons and public housing programs. One resident was found dead in a tent there last month.
The multi-million dollar grant Raman's homelessness committee received was funded by California’s Encampment Resolution Fund, a state-run program intended to move homeless people into permanent housing.
But although Raman's campaign website says 'desensitization to homelessness is a moral failing and a stain on any leadership that would call itself progressive,' the public funds she received to help homeless people at the LA River have languished.
The encampment has been around for years. Some of its residents told the California Post they have been living by the river for decades.
A community advocate named Cameron Flanagan told the outlet that she is aware of the grant and has repeatedly asked Raman's office for help, but the only outreach she has witnessed was after headlines drew attention to the problem.
Once media attention dies down, she said, outreach drops off, and the encampment continues to operate as usual.
That sporadic assistance is a far cry from the proposal Raman received funding for, which pledged that LA Family Housing would conduct daily outreach to the people living on the banks of the LA River.
The proposal stated its goal was to serve 90 people in the encampment by moving 75 of them into interim housing before transitioning all 90 into permanent accommodations.
Los Angeles has the second-largest homeless population among cities in the US, but the problem is particularly visible because around two-thirds of the population experiences unsheltered homelessness and live on the streets.
New York City, by comparison, has a total homeless population around twice as high as LA, but only around four percent of them are without shelter due to a decades-old NYC law that mandates shelter be provided to any homeless individual who applies.
A spokesperson for Raman told the California Post that the $4 million grant has been 'caught in administrative and contracting processes.'
The spokesperson noted that Raman 'has consistently treated homelessness as the urgent crisis it is' and called the bureaucratic holdup 'deeply frustrating.'
The money will begin going towards tackling the LA River encampment by the end of the month, the spokesperson added.
'The Encampment Resolution Fund is intended to support rapid outreach and housing interventions, not sit idle while City departments work through bureaucracy,' the spokesperson's statement said.
'We remain focused on making sure this funding translates into real outreach, real housing placements, and visible progress for both unhoused Angelenos and the surrounding community.'
The Daily Mail has reached out to Raman's campaign for further comment.
