Pirate's Cove

Or is that her global boiling plan is about housing?

This LA mayoral candidate’s climate plan starts with housing

Los Angeles City Councilmember and mayoral hopeful Nithya Raman isn’t sugarcoating the state of the city’s climate policy.

The progressive stalwart, who launched a late challenge to unseat incumbent Karen Bass, has watched her 2020 campaign promises to build an all-electric fleet of city vehicles fall short and council efforts to ban gas appliances in new construction be struck down by litigation. Her term on the powerful South Coast Air Quality Management District ended on Jan. 15, just months after the agency rejected a proposal to phase out gas water and space heaters in Southern California.

Raman is attempting to link her climate vision to Los Angeles’ housing shortage, which she blames on opponents of high-density development. She’s supporting a Sacramento-led effort to require more multi-unit housing around public transit, which Bass and eight other council members oppose. She’s also leading an effort to reform Measure ULA, the city’s tax on the transfer of properties worth over $5.3 million, which developers say is stifling apartment construction.

Raman spoke with POLITICO about her vision for changing LA’s housing market, federal attacks on climate policy and the tension between electrification and affordability.

Her entire schtick is about forcing Everyone Else to listen to the Elites, mostly through forcing through legislation and rules from unelected bureaucrats. This is the climate cult in a nutshell. Tiny homes jammed all together, and everyone forced on public transportation. Want gas appliances? F*** you, peasant. EVs for government, public transportation for peasants? Check.

Opposition to new housing has defined the shape and character of Los Angeles today and shaped its politics in many ways in the past. I’ve represented a district that’s primarily single-family homes for the past five-plus years that I’ve been on the council. I do think there are ways of preserving what I love about LA’s neighborhoods, what residents love about LA neighborhoods, while still accommodating significantly more density on our major boulevards and thoroughfares and along our major transit corridors. I feel like if we grapple with the question of our housing needs more responsibly, we would have less intervention from Sacramento, which feels like it’s imposing an outside will on Los Angeles.

She wants to jam huge multifamily buildings into nice single home neighborhoods. I bet not in her own, though.

Let’s really talk about what it would take to generate the number of units that we need, and let’s put that in place locally. And that would include not just putting the new zoning in place, but making sure that we’re reforming our appeals process, making sure that we’re reforming our permitting process, making sure that we are reforming Measure ULA.

Who’s paying for it?

So does that mean building multi-family dwellings in single-family neighborhoods, and not just in areas like downtown?

We cannot rely exclusively on downtown LA to generate all our density. And frankly, the economics of building right now are such that high-rise buildings in downtown are not even getting financed. There are no cranes in the air in downtown LA, right? So, how are we going to build this housing?

Told ya! Anyhow, the cult keeps going on.