Chapo Trap House - Bonus: Nithya Raman’s Runoff Return

Episode Date: July 17, 2020

Candidate for LA City Council Nithya Raman returns to the show to talk to Will about making the runoffs in her race, addressing LA’s homelessness in the time of COVID and taking on entrenched police power in the wake of June’s George Floyd protests. Join Nithya at the March for Mely starting 2pm Sunday, July 19th, at the Northeast LAPD (3353 N. San Fernando Rd.) station and ending at the Trader Joe’s in Silverlake. Donate to Nithya’s campaign: https://www.efundraisingconnections.com/c/RamanforCityCouncil/ Volunteer for the campaign: https://www.nithyaforthecity.com/signup http://www.nithyaforthecity.com

Hey, everybody. It's Will here. I've got a bonus episode for you. It's a bonus interview. And I am checking back in with LA City Council candidate Nithya Raman. Nithya, how's it going? It is going as well as it can be given the circumstances, but, you know, well. Well, yeah. I mean, there's many, many circumstances to discuss. But I guess just like for our listeners, would you give me just like a brief update on the status of your campaign and where you're at since the last time we spoke, which, you know, which was before the first election. But I believe now that you've gone into a runoff election. Is that correct? Yes, that's right. So in March, at the same time as the presidential primary, we also were on the ballot and we made it through to the runoff against a sitting incumbent, something which rarely happens in Los Angeles.

It was really exciting. We got more than 41% of the vote in a three-way race. We had huge amounts of voter turnout in the district. It was really fabulous to see. And now our runoff election, our general election is going to be in November at the same time as the presidential race. OK, well, that's great. I mean, I guess the broader question is everything else that's happened since the last time we've we've spoken. And now, you know, year zero has now commenced in America. And I remember, you know, the last time we spoke, I mean, we talked about your campaign and, you know, some of these issues surrounding homelessness, the housing crisis, lack of access to any kind of health care. But like, you know, ever since COVID hit, like, how has this pandemic brought to the forefront these issues in an even more stark way? Yeah, I mean, I think I think what has happened as a result of the pandemic is that at least for many, many residents in Los Angeles, I think it has really clarified the inability of our local government to address head on some of the greatest vulnerabilities that are facing residents here in LA.

So between the time that we spoke and now homelessness, we found out that homelessness in LA got even worse. We had a double digit increase in homelessness that was and the count was done before the pandemic happened. So now it probably will rise even further. But there was a 14 percent increase in our homeless population here in LA. Now it's 41,000 people living without a home in the streets of Los Angeles. And most of them actually don't have shelter beds, as we discussed last time. The city and the county actually did made a lot of promises to house people. As a result of the pandemic, there was a real panic in the early days about how COVID would spread in places like Skid Row,

where there were thousands of people living on the streets, and they made really big promises. I think there was a real sense of urgency there, the kind of urgency that I would have hoped to have seen in response to the crisis as a whole, just in under normal circumstances, but was so welcome in response to COVID. But what has happened is the same thing that's happened often with regards to promises around homelessness. We didn't meet those goals. We were supposed to add thousands of shelter beds to LA stock. We added less than 2000. We started something called Project Room Key, which was supposed to put 15,000 people into hotel rooms,

especially those who were particularly at risk of COVID or they were older. We've kind of stalled out at about 3,000 hotel rooms there. Well, I mean, I was going to ask you about it later, but I mean, since you brought it up, could we just talk a little bit more about Project Room Key? Yeah. It sounds like something that the CIA did after World War II, but it's actually not nefarious. It's actually a very good idea. So the idea was to under quarantine, a point of time in which no one was traveling or staying in any hotels.

There was this huge, huge glut of stock of available rooms. And the idea was that you were going to put homeless people or people who were housing imperiled in a room. Yeah. And so that was the goal. How exactly did it stall out? To be honest, it's hard to get a sense as an outsider why this project, which is so great, why it's stalled out, because it is still true that there is very little usage of hotel rooms in Los Angeles. It continues to be true that travel is significantly decreased.

Business travel is not happening right now. And so this is still a very good idea. But essentially what happened was that they started getting contracts together for these hotels. And then they kept running up against what they called staffing issues. So they weren't able to kind of service hotels that they had leased through this program adequately enough, I guess, to keep increasing the number of hotel rooms. This was what they told us is the problem. But the number has really, I mean, it grew for a while.

It grew very slowly. And now it is stopped at 3,000 rooms. Could you talk about this certainly in the context of the broader choices that the city government has made over the years? I mean, I'm looking here that they've spent about a billion dollars on hotel tax subsidies. But this program in the middle of a pandemic was somehow, I don't know, just undoable. Or it's just in terms of how the government, these things are not an accident in terms of what it chooses to spend money on and what prioritizes. Yeah. And I think that's absolutely right that they had a goal.

I compare often the ability of the city to meet goals around economic development and increasing our local business infrastructure. And they had this goal to get to, I think it was 8,000 hotel rooms in downtown LA to improve LA's ability to attract tourists to it. And not only did they meet that goal through offering these very, very generous tax rebates and subsidies, they actually met their goal early. Now, I compare that to not just a failure to meet ambitious goals around putting vulnerable people into housing during a pandemic. It is just a colossal failure. I mean, they have only gone a fifth of the way and they stopped. And now there's a new plan on the table to think about how we keep the people who we have housed so far in their housing. But we're not talking about meeting those very ambitious and very necessary goals that we set at the beginning of this.

I mean, it's odd to think about this in the terms of how much does a city like Los Angeles, one of America's largest cities, a global economic and cultural center, I mean, how much does the city really need to spend to promote itself for like, hey, come visit LA, you know, and then at least in terms of like when you have also like an actual crisis of 40, as you said, around 40,000 people who are unhoused, unsheltered living on the streets every single night. Yeah. And I think it's what has been laid bare as a result of the city's response to the pandemic is their priorities. It has, I think, become very clear what matters to Los Angeles. So, you know, in the beginning, both California and the city of Los Angeles, I think had a very good response. We shut down. We took it seriously. People really stayed home.

And after being very careful initially, after saving lives here in California, we, I think, bowed to business pressures and a push to reopen the economy. And we attempted to get back to normal very fast. We moved through those, we had phases of opening, and we started moving through those phases of opening much faster than I think any of us as residents who are watching this play out, expected to move through them. Certainly faster than many of the workers who worked in indoor dining establishments, in retail, in gyms, in tattoo polars, all of whom were called to go back to work, I think, months before they felt like they were ready to do that. I mean, and if you talk about, you know, bowing to the economic pressures or weighing, you know, the business of being a city and keeping people in business against a, you know, global pandemic and health and public safety. I mean, the economic pressures is not, you know, it's not false because, you know, when you're telling people that they can't go to work, you're telling people that they can't earn an income. So, like, you know, how do you balance those two and, like, what in your mind would have been, like, you know, over the broad course of time, over the last three or four months, what would have been, like, a more humane and effective response to this pandemic from the L.A. city government? Like, what would that look like as sort of a comprehensive package that took not just public health seriously, but also, like, the very real need of people to, you know, pay rent by groceries?

Well, you know, I think that is not a question that's for the past, you know, it is also for the coming months because what we're going to be seeing over the next few weeks and the next few months is two things which are really going to impact us locally. One is that the expanded unemployment insurance, the $600 extra that the federal government was providing to residents who don't want, who are on unemployment right now, that's going to expire at the end of July. And although there are hundreds of thousands of residents here in Los Angeles who weren't eligible for that, that did cushion, I think, the worst impacts of the economic fallout of this. The other thing that's going to happen is that the state, the city, the county, all of these places put certain kinds of eviction protections in place. And as we move forward, and whenever kind of the emergency period of the pandemic ends, those eviction protections are going to go away. And we're going to be left with lots of people who have massive amounts of rent debt or who are continuing to still be unable to pay their rent. And we're in a national context where it looks like the federal government is not going to be funding states and cities or individuals with the support that they need to make it through this period. So what I think we have to look at now is to look at our city governments and our L.A. city government.

It has to be the thing that saves people. It has to be the body that puts their money to help people stay in their homes. It has to be the body that enacts legislation that really protects tenants, that really protects the unhoused. We have to step up. You know, I think a lot of people think that the challenge is in the past. It's not. I think the challenge is really coming in the next few weeks and months. You know, just going back to like the last time we spoke, you know, we spent most of our time talking about the housing and homeless crisis in L.A.

but also nationally and sort of in the context of how like both as city, state, national government, we are just sort of greasing the skids to make it just ever quicker and easier to fall out of being housed and into living on the streets. As like every sort of single protection just gets sort of snipped away and people are left more and more completely adrift on their own. And, you know, and then just in light of now quarantine, a massive amount of people losing employee backed healthcare and then now a huge tide of evictions is coming. And I'm wondering if how this has affected sort of your constituents, but like sort of the political consciousness of L.A. citizens of in terms of things like advocating for tenants rights and stopping evictions. You know, I think it isn't just the pandemic, obviously, that has brought a light shown a light on the power of local government because there has been an upsurge in in in attention being paid to the power of local government and the importance of local government. And it's of course the pandemic and the kind of the fears that people are having with all of the attendant economic anxiety. But it has also been this recent uprising against police brutality against black Americans. People are understanding that local government is the reason why police forces across America have been allowed to kind of basically operate without enough accountability and have been eating up at larger and larger share of budgets, municipal budgets in California, you said you see that not just in Los Angeles, Los Angeles is a good example of this, but it actually happened in cities across California.

And so it was these two things happening at the same time, this pandemic and the these uprisings that I think have really focused people's attention on local government and on the importance of making sure local government is acting in ways that address their needs and act out their values. I mean, certainly, it's true here in New York City, and I'm sure it's absolutely just as true in LA. I mean, I think one of the things that has has come to the fore as a recently is just how big as institutions, the LAPD and NYPD are and like almost that they have evolved into almost like a kind of de facto government that like that they are kind of like the ones who are really in control of city government because of just how big and powerful they are. And it just said like before up until now, like, how was the issue of police violence or over policing? I mean, was that a subject that was touched by LA politics or the city council? No. And if so, like, you know, to what extent, like, yeah, would they even what were they offering nothing? You know, it like Black Lives Matter Los Angeles has been talking about these issues has been out on the streets protesting about these issues for years. But among local politicians, talking about policing, talking about police reform, certainly talking about defunding the police. I mean, these were things that would never have been talked about locally. And that was, you know, that was that is a direct product of the electoral system that existed in Los Angeles.

So, you know, I think we talked in the last conversation that I had that one of the reasons I ran in this in this race at this time was because federal elections and municipal elections are overlapping for the first time here in LA. But in the past, they didn't municipal elections happen on their own. And they saw incredibly low levels of voter turnout, which meant that groups like police unions had a huge amount of control over what happened in these elections, because they spent, they gave money directly to candidates, but even more importantly, they spent through PACs, through independent expenditure committees, that put tens of thousands of dollars. And more, you know, they've spent, I think, millions of dollars in total in the LA system on politicians supporting politicians. And so what you needed to win in prior elections was really the police union needed to send out a mailer and a few homeowners associations had to support you. And that's it. And now we're looking at a very, very different landscape. And I think the importance of police union money and being able to control the local landscape of politics has really been transformed. And that is very much due to the local leadership of Black Lives Matter. I mean, again, and just thinking about, you know, major metropolises like New York and Los Angeles, certainly two of the wealthiest cities in America. But I'm sure this is plays out to varying degrees. And basically every city and police department in America is that, like, the connection between the police and sort of the real estate business and development, and how the police are just sort of there to be kind of the gendarmes of real estate developers who, you know, or, you know, tie property value to, like, who is on the inside and outside of this line and, like, who gets policed, who doesn't, and who gets protected and who doesn't. So, like, how do you see, like, you know, this current moment of Black Lives Matter and the wave of protests and anger that's followed the killing of George Floyd? Like, how do you see the role of policing in city government?

Like, what would a reformed Los Angeles police department look like? I mean, like, what, or just like the idea of policing in general? Where does it need to go in your, in your opinion? Yeah, you know, I, we talked about this a little bit in the primary. Actually, we talked about it a lot in the primary, because we talked about reforming the system that responded to homelessness here in LA. And I mentioned in our last conversation that when I was working at City Hall briefly, I wrote this report that looked at the city's expenditures on homelessness. And I found that almost 90% of what the city was spending on homelessness, this was in 2014, went to putting, went to enforcement, went to policing and jailing people experiencing homelessness, primarily for crimes of poverty. And that system, we have a system basically that we've built up here where cops, where LAPD is the front lines of our homelessness response here in LA. And that system was, in some ways, I would say a deliberate creation of how politicians have wanted to respond to homelessness for so many years. So if politicians got calls about homeless encampments coming up, they never wanted to say, you know, let us work with those people experiencing homelessness, let's send out outreach workers, let's have patients, and let's move those individuals into housing. You know, let's get to the best outcome, not just for you, but for the individuals who are experiencing homelessness as well. Let's get people permanently into housing.

And they never said that what they wanted was a quick response for people and that meant enforcement, that meant that LAPD went out, often with the sanitation facilities and they would do a clean clean up a sweep of an encampment. And that was an immediate respond to constituent concerns. And, you know, a lot of what I go out and do when I talk to residents here in LA, people often say, Oh, people experiencing homelessness are resistant to services, they don't want to accept services, you know. But that was because of the system that we put together because the most frequent points of contact between our city government and people experiencing homelessness was the police or was accompanied by policing. And so these were moments when people were not able to accept those services, right. And so what I think you could set up in response to homelessness would be something that would be completely different, where you could have community access centers set up in neighborhoods across the city, where the most frequent point of contact between people experiencing homelessness. And many people experiencing homelessness, and our city would actually be outreach workers and service workers who are trained to walk people through the process of actually getting housed through actually addressing homelessness. So this is I think, would be a transformation in how we respond to homelessness in Los Angeles and would be one way of reimagining the role of police here.

It would remove them from our homelessness response almost entirely. But I think there's lots of ways in which you can think about kind of places where our local police force has gone beyond I think what what we think of as its traditional role as as, you know, in responding to violent crime. And there are lots of ways in which you can think about reducing that role significantly. Like, I mean, it just does seem like we have, you know, in cities and like I said, but also across America have created a system in which, because of the strength of their unions and how necessary they are to like I said, policing the boundaries of real estate development and property value, that the police are really in a lot of places like the only thing left is in terms of like social services offered by the state. And as a result, they end up policing a lot of things in the name of like public safety, that they have no business being involved in in the first place or like that money could be spent elsewhere on, you know, on agents of the state that are there to help people with, you know, mental health or housing problems or just like we just simply need help who that need that need to be, you know, contacted in a way that is outside of this context of these highly charged aggressive and as they like to really proactive policing measures. Yeah, and you know, I think here in LA, one way in which policing has interacted with processes of gentrification and real estate development has been through something like a gang injunction, you know, which is a an order that prevents people from getting together in particular neighborhoods and often these are neighborhoods where there is a significant amount of real estate activity happening. So the idea of policing, kind of happening alongside these processes of real estate investment and gentrification

is a very, very real one. And I want to also just go back to research that has come out. There was a recent LA Times analysis of calls for service for LAPD. It looked at, you know, millions of calls and found that only 8% of calls for service for LAPD were actually related to violent crime. The rest were related to so many other issues that I think could in a reimagined system of public safety here in LA could be handled far more humanely, far more compassionately and far more effectively by people who are trained to address it. But also far more cheaply as well, if you're talking about the cruel, you know, the cruel logic of like city government and budgets and things like that. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, I think this is something that the city itself has talked about. This is not even, you know, the city has talked about how we there are so many positions within the LAPD that could easily be civilianized. That is to say these you don't need armed officers doing so many of these jobs. The city itself has identified hundreds of these positions that could be changed, which would yield significant savings in the budget. And yet those I think only one of those positions has been changed. This is a controller identified list of priorities for reforming the LAPD locally. Why don't those changes happen? Why don't any of these changes happen? Why does in response to, you know, the biggest crisis that LA has faced ever, I think, in response to this pandemic, why did we increase the LAPD budget, you know, and decrease other kinds of social services? This is really because of the power of the police unions, the power of the police here in LA with politicians. Well, I mean, if you're talking about budgeting line items here, this is this is an astonishing statistic that I found out. Could you talk a bit about the the fleet of helicopters that the LAPD is in service?

Yeah, this was just something I found when we were doing some research and looking at police budgets for the campaign. LAPD has invested in a lot of helicopters. And we've heard that apparently there are two helicopters in the air 24 seven here. Chicago, in contrast, has two helicopters. Philadelphia has four. New York City has eight. We have 39 between the police and sheriffs. You know, it's 40 helicopters, two of them are in the air at all times. And like, how much does that cost just in terms of keeping them fueled? I think it's like $13,000 a day and just fuel. But, you know, but I think there's this this is one specific. But I think this kind of math can be done, you know, across so many different aspects of the budget. And I think we can think about in a really kind of robust way how to reinvest that money in programs that can advance community safety in real ways. So, I mean, I guess like, so looking forward to the election in November, I mean, you're in sort of a unique position because it's sort of you, you had this, you've run this incredible sort of grassroots campaign, you've turned out an astonishing number of people for a city council election in LA. You got over 40% of the vote, like you said, in a three person race. But then but you're in this weird position where you sort of have to like keep people engaged and strung along because it's sort of like you have to do like a do over again. So like going into November.

How are you keeping your constituents, your campaign, and just a voter outreach like sort of motivated and going like have you, have you started to like update your message at all or is it just like you're hitting home the same points but just like underscoring, you know, how the dire circumstances of our reality right now dictate the need for these kind of things. Yeah, you know, and, you know, I think everyone has had to do a lot of rethinking and reading and learning in response to the uprising. I think everyone has had to kind of go back to issues, rethink them, be explicit about some of the things that I think people didn't talk about, right. But I do think that in many ways, our campaign was able to highlight things like tenant protections, things like addressing rental hikes, things like preventing evictions. Now, these are all things that have become so much more important now. And so yeah, you know, of course, we have to continue, you know, gathering volunteers continue doing constituent outreach in new ways, either through phone calls or texts or through social media or through kind of other ways of neighborhood outreach that's safe for the pandemic. But in so many ways, the message that we were sharing before in the primary, those priorities have become all the more important for Los Angeles.

And in fact, we have seen that some of the policies that we proposed in the primary, which were dismissed as too radical, have actually now been implemented. We, we pushed for because there's been a 67% rise in rents here in LA over the last decade, while renter incomes have barely gone up. So we talked about a rent freeze in rent stabilized units. This is something that the city has immediate control over. Well, in response to the pandemic, they passed this rent freeze, despite this idea being dismissed over and over again during the primary. So, you know, I think in some ways, the ideas that we were talking about have not only become essential to keeping people housed to making sure that people are able to get through this pandemic, but also have become things that people have sought out because they need it in ways that they didn't before. You know, this is something that has become essential to people's survival. So, yeah, like as the immediacy of these things becomes more vivid.

And like I said, you are in this weird place of having to kind of do it all over again a second time. But as, you know, perhaps annoying as it is to like just sort of have a this deferred ending continuing to go on, I, I would imagine that your opponent is even more annoyed and not being able to have sort of dispensed with this, this foolishness. Earlier on, I mean, he's having to continue to spend a lot of money, I imagine, and is, I think, takes a lot of takes a lot of donations from things like real estate developers. Like, have they changed their response to you? Like now that you've pushed them to this brink, are they getting more desperate? Are they trying to ignore you? How are they dealing with this with your, you know, persistence and keeping this campaign alive? Yeah, I mean, I want to get just a little bit of context from Los Angeles, because, you know, I think Los Angeles City, like, compared to other cities, these council district races are like congressional races.

They're so big, they require so much money. We have 250,000 residents in this district. We have to get the word out to so many people. This is way bigger than most city council races in other parts of America. Oh, yeah, and just to remind, and also just to remind our listeners as well, one of the things we touched on last time we talked is the unique sort of structure of L.A. city government of the weak mayoralty system, where it's actually the city council, unlike a lot of other cities, that actually holds the keys to a lot of power, even more so than the mayor. We're talking about 250,000 people in your district. I mean, like, that's you represent that you would represent more people than like half of the people in Congress. Yeah, I mean, it is, it's a massive undertaking here. And that's why what we did was so unique.

And in the history of Los Angeles, it has been because of the size of these districts. It has been very hard to push incumbents even into a runoff. So you keep saying, I can't believe that you have to do this for a few more months. This is exciting. This is huge for L.A. and particularly for a challenger who has come from a very, very progressive policy platform. This is really unique for Los Angeles. And I'm so proud of what we've done so far. And we did that against an incumbent who spent the most amount of money in a city council campaign ever in the history of Los Angeles. So it is huge. And we did that because of people power. We had over 600 unique volunteers. We knocked on 83,000 doors, which is a record breaking number of doors for a city council race.

Like this was, this is big for L.A. and I'm very, very proud of it. And I'm very proud of the fact that, you know, we did that. We were only able to do that because of the support that we got from residents. And for sure, the incumbent is moving. He has had to move to the left. He has had to be pushed in his policymaking from City Hall right now to be far more progressive than he has ever been before because he sees the electoral potency of that policymaking. He sees through the success of our campaign and not just him. Every seated council member, I think, has had to take into account the fact that talking about these issues, that putting these values at the center of our campaign has had real resonance here in L.A. And that's really exciting, you know? So rather than attack you or your platform outright as being some sort of like threat to the fabric of society, are they doing kind of the standard democratic thing of looking at your platform and then splitting the difference between what they were running on four years ago?

Yeah, I mean, it's really, there was actually something funny that happened because I signed a no-cop money pledge. And then a few hours afterwards, the incumbent, David Rue, signed the same pledge, took a picture in almost the exact identical way. And this kind of spawned a series of comments on social media called the Copy Nithya Challenge, which I found very funny. But I think that is what has happened also in his policymaking. And that's really exciting. We welcome that. You know, I think that there's a reason we've put our policies out there in such detail is because I hope that people are excited about the ideas that we're putting out there because residents are. And if those kinds of ideas are passed, I do think that we can do a better job of making sure people stay in their housing in Los Angeles, making sure that people are not falling into homelessness at the numbers that they have been. I mean, I guess like if you're thinking about the success you've had with your campaign and the success, you know, here in city politics in New York, we've had a few, you know, Elliot Engle being defeated, longtime Democratic congressmen being knocked off by a much younger, more progressive challenger. In terms of like the overall energy of the Democratic party, I'm sure they're very hot to get, you know, younger, cooler, sort of more cutting edge candidates. But they seem to, the way they talk about it, they just seem to think it's a matter of like, hey, Jamal Bowman, like he wore a Wu Tang t-shirt. Like, don't you want more of this kids? Where it's just like, no, it's the message that sells the candidate, not the other way around. It's the policies. So like, have you had any like to struggle with that? Just being like, no, it's not just that like, hey, like, you know, we're a cool young campaign. It's like, no, like I could be, I could be, you know, some sort of like ancient boomer figure.

But like, if I had the same messages, if I had like, that was just simply like, we need to give people money so that they can live that like, yeah, that the young people and the energy would still be there. Oh, yeah, 100%. I mean, I should think that the success of Bernie Sanders should have taught people that age does not matter. It is about what values you bring. And you know, I really do think that this movement, the movement that you're just describing, I think it really does start in cities and I feel really privileged to be a small part of what I think is a movement that's happening across America to transform what our policymaking looks like as a country. But I think that, you know, LA is a really good place to start. New York is a great place to start. I'm very, very happy to be a little part of that. Well, Nithya Raman, I want to thank you once again for spending some time talking to me. I want to wish you the best of luck going into this next election in November. But until then, for our listeners in Los Angeles or anywhere else in the country, what can they do now to get involved and also like what did you have any like events coming up that people can go to or watch online or anything? Yeah, well, if people want to get involved in our campaign, they should. You can donate to us. If you don't live in LA, it's Nithya for the city.com is our website and you can donate there. Follow us on socials. I'm Nithya V. Raman on Twitter, Nithya for the city on Instagram. Get on our mailing list, get involved. We're doing tons of constituent outreach and actually because it's COVID time, you don't have to be here in LA to do that outreach.

And then this Sunday, I'll be participating in a march in honor of Melly Corrado, who was an employee at Trader Joe's who was shot and killed by the LAPD after a car chase. This march starts at 2pm on Sunday, July 19, I believe, and starts at the police station in Atwater Village. And it will be walking to Trader Joe's. So if people want to be part of something, they can join us there or get involved with the campaign in other ways. We will have links for all of those in the show descriptions. Nithya, once again, great job. Please keep it up. We're all rooting for you. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me again. My pleasure.