Los Angeles is notoriously difficult to govern, a city that gives its mayor less direct authority over government than in a city like New York or Chicago. But even so, it would be hard to do worse than Karen Bass.
Elected mayor of Los Angeles in 2022, Bass campaigned on a promise to solve the city’s homelessness and housing affordability crises (which are actually part of the same underlying crisis). She then spent her tenure undermining her own administration’s affordable housing policy and fighting efforts by the state of California to force cities to allow more housing production. She lost her re-election bid this week to Los Angeles City Council member Nithya Raman, a rising progressive star and nationally prominent YIMBY.
Los Angeles has the highest housing price-to-household income ratio of any major U.S. city, and the second lowest number of housing units per adult of any major city. Its fabric is heavily suburban and auto-oriented, like much of the rest of the country, making it a kind of testing ground for whether America’s sprawling cities can extricate themselves from the housing shortage.
All of the city’s political leaders theoretically agree that Los Angeles needs to allow a lot more housing to meet demand — the only real way to make housing affordable — but clearly not all of them have had the political discipline to follow through.
Raman may be different. She has gained popularity in housing reform circles in recent years thanks to her lively, direct-to-camera social videos explaining how Los Angeles’ housing shortage is driving up rents and criticizing city policies that make it so difficult to build new housing (perhaps not surprisingly she has many friends in Hollywood).
“There has been a general lack of urgency in managing the housing supply in (Bass’s) administration,” Raman told me in a July interview. She said how best to meet Los Angeles’ housing needs is “an issue that the city has actually moved away from.”
Even given Los Angeles’ relatively weak mayorship, Bass’s failures on housing were often a matter of political choice. As Marc Novicoff of The Atlantic puts it, “Bass appears to have done everything possible to exert as little power as possible. » When she did go out of her way to exert her influence, it was often to prevent the construction of denser housing. Some of his puzzling housing policy choices during his term include:
- Days into his term, Bass signed his first executive order, known as ED1, to accelerate housing developments where 100 percent of apartments are affordable. Applications for these projects were required to get approvals within 60 days instead of being dragged through excruciating permitting processes. It was a good idea – and it seemed to work, quickly attracting applications from developers to build thousands of affordable apartments. In fact, it worked so well that a backlash from vocal NIMBYs followed. Less than six months after signing ED1, in June 2023, Bass weakened it to exclude projects in single-family neighborhoods – which constitute three quarters residential land in Los Angeles – through the expedited approval process. His administration even attempted to apply this restriction retroactively to subdivisions that already had single-family zoning under ED1, a stunning display of bureaucratic dysfunction; a judge later ruled that this violated California law. Bass has since added more restrictions to ED1, and one commenter described it as “functionally gutted” for many developers. To be fair to Bass, even after weakening him, the program still resulted in the construction of more than 7,700 affordable apartments, according to his campaign.
- Bass opposed SB 79, a landmark California law passed in 2025 requiring cities and suburbs to allow denser housing to be built near transit stops. Allowing apartments near public transportation is one of the most fundamental principles of sound urban planning. But in Los Angeles, the issue was controversial enough that Bass urged Gov. Gavin Newsom to veto it. After signing SB 79 anyway, Bass worked with the Los Angeles City Council to delay much of the law’s most ambitious zoning until 2030, while allowing smaller apartment buildings near some transit stops.
- After the devastating fires of January 2025, some homeowners whose homes burned in the Pacific Palisades applied to be rebuilt under SB 9, another important California law that allows modest densification of single-family lots into up to four housing units. In response to backlash from some neighbors, Bass reportedly pressed Newsom to restrict SB 9 in fire-damaged areas; she then banned SB 9 applications in parts of the Palisades. (There are certainly legitimate questions about whether rebuilding in such a fire-prone area is a good idea. But Bass offered no public analysis that the modest increase in density permitted by SB 9 posed any particular danger, even as it worked to speed up rebuilding of single-family homes.)
All of this points to a leader who doesn’t really want to change the conditions that have led to Los Angeles’ housing shortage and who lacks the courage to take on what is arguably the city’s most defining political challenge.
Raman promised to fundamentally break with this approach. This will make his town hall an important experience for the rest of the country. Even modest progress in a city as housing-resistant as Los Angeles could help pave the way for new approaches to housing in many other cities facing affordability crises.
It won’t be easy for her: she will face the same anti-construction political pressures and will have to maintain a cooperative relationship with the city council. When I spoke to Raman over the summer, I noticed that she cautiously approached the topic of adding density to single-family neighborhoods. Because of the typically American obsession with separating single-family homes from other types of development, this can be a real political third rail in Los Angeles and across the country. But research suggests the city can’t address its housing shortage without building more in these neighborhoods. Raman will have at least one important ally in newly elected California Governor Xavier Becerra, who is also a strong supporter of YIMBY.
Raman’s affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) makes her emblematic of an emerging fusion in Democratic politics, between supply-side abundance and left-wing economic populism. This is also evident in politicians like Zohran Mamdani and some of the young Democrats who won elections across the country this week.
In talking with Raman, I get the impression that she is more comfortable with the YIMBY part of her politics than the DSA part. His relationship with the Los Angeles chapter of the DSA was strained (even though it approved his candidacy). But her social democratic commitments are also sincere: She has been a staunch advocate of rent control and tenant protections in Los Angeles, for example, and helped craft a tougher rent stabilization law that the city passed last year.
The new political syntheses that are emerging within the American left are exciting and intriguing. Of course, it remains to be tested whether it will finally make a breakthrough in the housing crisis in Los Angeles, California and the United States. But it is a welcome sign that American politics need not remain trapped by the same orthodoxies and the same failures.
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