Chapo Trap House - Bonus: Will Interviews Nithya Raman

Episode Date: January 22, 2020

Will talks to candidate for Los Angeles City Council, District 4, Nithya Raman. The discuss LA's housing crisis, socially just solutions for homelessness, and the right wing's increasingly cruel campaign against America's homeless.  Live in LA and wanna support Nithya's campaign? Come to their benefit show at the El Rey with Reggie Watts, Kristen Schaal, Paul F. Tompkins, and more: https://nithyaforthecity.com/elrey/ Follow the campaign on twitter: @nithyavraman

Okay, so I'm talking now with Nithya Raman, who is a candidate for LA City Council in District 4. Nithya, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me. I'm glad we have this opportunity to talk. I'd like to talk to you about your campaign, about why the LA City Council is a uniquely powerful and important position as far as Los Angeles goes, but mainly just what you've been doing with regards to the issues of the sort of very intertwined crises of the housing

market and homelessness in Los Angeles. And I'd like to kick things off with a statistic that Hayes Davenport told me about when he was telling me about you and your campaign the last time I visited LA that really stunned me. And he said that in Los Angeles, more homeless people die from exposure than in New York City. Yes. Yeah, we had over a thousand people die on the streets of Los Angeles last year, three a day, and that is more people than die in the city of New York, despite New York actually

having a larger homeless population than in Los Angeles. But more people die here because we have provided far fewer of the resources that they need to survive. I mean, that's shocking, not just because New York has technically a larger homeless population, but just the factor of weather, just the fact that it gets well below freezing in the winter months in New York City. What accounts for such a stark and tragic disparity between these two cities? In terms of the kinds of resources that are provided, well, in New York there is actually

a case, a court case that mandated that New York have the number of shelter beds that they needed for their homeless population. And so they have always had the number of shelter beds that we needed for people. But in Los Angeles, right now we have less than a quarter of the shelter beds that we need for our unhoused population. And they are adding more, but at the rate that we're adding beds, at the rate that we're adding housing units, it is going to take us decades before we're even able to house or shelter.

Shelter is not a house. Before we're able to shelter our current homeless population. Never mind all of the people that are falling into homelessness year after year. Yeah. I mean, it's just a matter of that New York has a shelter infrastructure that is able to, I guess, accommodate the homeless population in spite of the elements or at the worst of it. Right.

But in Los Angeles, the homeless population still remains mostly not just unhoused, but unsheltered entirely. Yes, that's right. So they're completely exposed to, and then even a light cold or something like that. I mean, that is a really shocking statistic about the level of death that is happening in Los Angeles. And I just want to, I want to also just drill down into that because it's not just exposure to the elements that is causing deaths.

So we have a situation in Los Angeles where the systems that we have set up to respond to homelessness have really involved LAPD being the first point of contact to people experiencing homelessness. They are the most frequent representatives of government that people who are living on the streets interact with. And we now have a situation where people are dying on the streets from interactions with LAPD. So on Saturday, for example, we, a man named Victor, died.

He was shot and killed by LAPD because they got a call that they thought that somebody was holding a gun, it turned out to be a part of a bicycle that he was holding. He has been a long time unhoused resident of the neighborhood that he was in. And he was shot and killed. And this is not, sadly, not uncommon. I mean, it, one out of three uses of force by LAPD last year were actually against people who were experiencing homelessness. So it's not just vulnerability to the elements.

It is also vulnerability to the incredibly deficient systems that we've set up here locally to respond to our housing and homelessness crisis. Could you talk a bit about why like LA is unique in the homeless crisis that it faces? The other thing I was talking about with people in LA was the, the phenomenon of a skid row in LA, which is like a sort of a city within the city and this mass population that to which like you said mentioned so far, to any extent to reach out or the point of contact is almost always through law enforcement or things just like sweeps where people's property of what little they have are taken and destroyed.

And of course, like many of the times that would include whatever, you know, documents that they have about themselves as individuals, which is like the key that you need to access any of the services that the city does provide that are just being like obliterated wholesale. Yeah. I mean, I think the interesting thing about skid row in the history of Los Angeles is that for many, many years, we had a large, incredibly large homeless population. We've had a large homeless population for a long time. Over the last four to five years, it's gone up by a huge amount.

So over the last four years, our population in the city has gone up by 10,000 people, which is a staggering number. But we've had a significant population of people experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles for decades. But the thing is that because that population was concentrated in places like skid row, there were some in Hollywood and there were some at the beaches. And it was really limited to those areas for many years. And so politicians were able to ignore the issue because nobody went to skid row, you

know, and the numbers in other places weren't so large that it was an issue that was a political liability for them. Over the last five years, as the population has grown tremendously, encampments have now grown in every neighborhood in the city. And so I think what we're seeing now is a situation that has really become unignorable in Los Angeles. But the systems that we set up were actually, you know, they came out of that old way and we have not really caught up to where we need to be in order to be actually addressing the

needs of people experiencing homelessness in the way that we need to. I actually worked at City Hall in 2014 briefly. I wrote a report at that time on how the city was responding to homelessness. At that time, the population was 23,000, already a massive number. And I found that the city was already spending over $100 million on homelessness. We were spending some of that on moving people around from sidewalks to libraries to parks. We were spending some of that in terms of cleanups and things like that. But the vast majority of that money, something like $87 million, was being spent to put homeless

individuals in jail for three nights and releasing them afterwards, a policy which is both incredibly cruel and completely ineffective because it does not get anyone off the streets and encampments have only grown as we've been doing this kind of thing. Departments were also not talking to each other and really talking to each other about how the city needed to be responding to homelessness in ways that actually got people off of the streets. They were literally just moving individuals around from place to place. And that kind of response to homelessness, when you hear politicians speak, there is

a rhetoric that they use around crisis, around urgency, around this is the humanitarian crisis of our time. But when you have a peek behind the mirror, which I did when I worked at City Hall, and when you are able to look at it from the perspective of someone who's experiencing homelessness, which I regularly see because I started a homeless coalition in my neighborhood after I left City Hall and have talked to hundreds of people experiencing homelessness in my neighborhood and the neighborhoods around us, you see that the systems that we have set up to respond to this issue are simply not designed to help people.

They are just not. They are set up by people who don't care about humans and they don't care about people's access to resources. And so I think that there's just an incredible amount of, just an incredible gap between the rhetoric that's used by the government and the reality of people's experiences of homelessness on the ground. And that continues. You talk about the language of crisis as it's used by politicians and the fact that in

Los Angeles it's now become the problem has gotten much worse despite it being a long-running problem. But do you find that addressing this as a political issue, at least as far as politicians have tried so far, the idea of the crisis is that like the crisis is not the human beings that are living or sleeping rough or falling out of the housing market and further and further into precarity and despair, but the crisis is in fact the people themselves, the fact that they are seen as dangerous or unwanted and the crisis is not so much to deal with them as a health or social problem, but to deal with them as individuals that

must be removed or just sort of like, as long as we don't see them or just done away with them somehow. How do you find like, is there a way to bridge that kind of empathy gap in voters themselves? Yeah. And I think, so I started this homeless coalition in my neighborhood called CELA and it's an incredibly active coalition. And we provide opportunities for volunteers to come through and to go to encampments and meet people who are experiencing homelessness, we provide opportunities for them to cook

meals for them, for them to provide showers and safe spaces. And as I've been interacting with people who are volunteering for this, we've had hundreds of volunteers come through the program. And what we've seen is that actually once people actually talk to a person experiencing homelessness, once they see their humanity, I think that their approach to the issue is transformed, that they want to be compassionate and that given the choice, I think anyone looking at this issue, any resident of Los Angeles, even the most kind of somebody yesterday called it like a next door voter, like that kind of traditional complaining voice that

these encampments need to go. But I think if we were given a choice and if we were told that we could provide a compassionate response to this, an evidence-based response to this issue and get to the same outcomes that everybody wants, which is that people are no longer suffering on the streets, that everyone would choose that option. What we've had in Los Angeles is a political establishment who has refused to provide that option for us. And I think that's been an incredibly frustrating thing to see.

It's a false choice. Our choice is not between putting homeless individuals in jail or in faraway camps in the desert. People always talk about putting them in the desert and being compassionate. Our choice is really, I think we have a very good choice ahead of us. And it's up to our elected representatives to make that choice available to us, to put in the work, to bridge that gap between rhetoric and reality, to create the systems that we know can work to get people off of the streets.

And I think it's very much within the realm of the possible. I also wanted to talk about one thing, which I think is interesting because your podcast isn't just listeners from Los Angeles. I think what we're seeing in LA, and what's interesting about this, is that people are forced to confront here because we've done so little to house people, because we have encampments in every neighborhood in the city. I think people are forced to confront the failures right now of our housing market in ways that they're not really forced to confront in maybe in a city like New York or Boston

or other places where you have a much larger infrastructure of shelter beds. And I think it's a really interesting opportunity because I think it speaks to the ways in which I think we need to find spaces, political spaces, organizing spaces, to think about making sure that our cities, our states, our country is providing for people who are falling out of that market, and to create solutions that are completely outside of this market to make sure that we are housing the people that we need to house. And I think I really have appreciated the fact that people like Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar have signed on to the Homes Guarantee that they're talking about massive investments

in public housing. These are things that haven't really been on our political table for years. And it's so important that they are. And I think what's interesting about Los Angeles right now and what's interesting about being a candidate in this space right now is that people see the emergency in front of them, people see the crisis in front of them, people see people suffering in front of them. And so suddenly all of these things which have never been really in public discussion before are suddenly able to be talked about and taken seriously and not just taken seriously

but seen as necessities to be able to address the enormity of what we're facing here. Well, let's talk about some of those solutions that have here to fore been largely ignored or taken off the table intentionally. Could you talk a bit about your experience of, prior to this campaign of working in City Hall on a commission about the homeless issue in LA? And what were some of the solutions that you proposed and what was the reaction to them? Well, so I wasn't on a commission. I just wrote a report for the city administrative officer's office.

It's kind of a body that manages the city's budgets and advises city council and the mayor's office on how they can take action on issues. And so my report was really about analyzing the city's response to these issues and trying to suggest ways in which they could better coordinate and kind of think more, push them along in the direction of thinking more about how they can respond to these issues. The thing I really want to emphasize here is that LA City Council is incredibly powerful. So we have in LA a weak mayor, strong council system, and we have a very, very small number of council members.

So we only have 15 council members for 4 million people. I think in New York, you have 50. In Chicago, you have 51. And so I think there's just a real difference in terms of the concentration of power among our elected representatives in Los Angeles. We have a budget of $10 billion. We control a huge swath of things that make up our city. So we have our own municipal utility.

We control LAX, we control the LAPD, we control the port. So we have so much under the control of our city government here. And so I think the key here and the thing that the campaign has really been trying to push is to get people informed about the power of our council. And to see that the council actually has so much power to fix the problems that we're facing. And I think it's beyond just homelessness. We've talked a lot about homelessness, but homelessness is really the most egregious

symptom, the tip of the iceberg in terms of a broader housing crisis that is absolutely transforming Los Angeles in every way. I mean, it is determining who gets to live here and who doesn't get to live here. It is changing the way in which we get around the city. It's increasing the number of cars on the street because people who work in LA can't afford to live in LA anymore. And our air is getting worse as a result. I mean, all of these things are so interlinked.

We've had a loss in our black population over the last two decades because black Angelo and simply can't afford to live here anymore. So in every aspect of our city, what we are seeing is a transformation of Los Angeles as a result of a housing crisis that is really within the power of the council to reshape and that is what our campaign has been about. It's been about telling people, you deserve better than what your council has been offering you so far, that they have the tools in their toolbox to be able to address these crises and they have chosen not to use that power.

And I think that's really been the premise of what we're doing and we've talked about all kinds of different solutions in our housing and homelessness platform. We've talked about reshaping how we offer services to people experiencing homelessness. We've talked about ways of keeping people who are currently housed in their homes because actually last year, we housed more people experiencing homelessness than we ever have before thanks to increased spending on these issues. But so many more people fell into homelessness last year that the homeless population increased by 16% in the city and by 53% in my district in one year.

Just astounding increases. So we talk about keeping people in their homes and we can do that by helping people who are facing evictions with rental assistance and with a lawyer. That's something that New York has actually already done and seen incredibly positive results from. We talk about using, in LA we actually have something called the rent stabilization ordinance. We don't have rent control but we have rent stabilization and the rent stabilization ordinance covers something like 80% of rental units in the city and we have allowed prices to

rise on those rental units year after year in LA despite the fact that when rent goes up by 5% another 2,000 people become homeless. We know that, research has shown that. And instead of using our power over these apartments to institute a rent freeze, a temporary rent freeze, till the crisis is over like New York did for two years in a row, we chose actually to let prices rise above inflation year after year, something like nine out of the last 10 years. This last year it went up by 4%, which is higher than it has been over the previous

years. I mean, it's astounding when you look at the kinds of things that the council has had control over, could have taken action on and at every moment chose not to act. And I think this is infuriating to me and it's been infuriating to people I've been talking to, which is what's been exciting about the campaign. I mean, we're really able to spread this message of what we should be doing. But when you're talking about housing, the skids being greased more and more for people to more and more easily fall out of the housing market through eviction, rent increases, or

even losing homes that they own, homelessness, there are just less and less breaks to stop people from falling into homelessness overall. And whether it's New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, the major urban capitals of America and these huge centers of wealth and culture in this country, we're beginning to see in every case more and more a savage inequality being highlighted, largely that's being driven by how expensive it is to live there. And the only thing that's going to stop these are major cities in America from becoming places where rich people work and make money and then leave is backstopping things like

housing. But all these things cannot really exist if housing and a right to housing or even houses themselves are kept within a paradigm of the free market or like a market context that has to be backstopped by the state or a government in some way. And that involves public investment or public funds in building housing. Absolutely. And just basically just giving it to people. Yeah, absolutely.

100% agree. In Los Angeles, we haven't invested in public housing since 1955. And actually in Los Angeles, we face a very different situation from New York. So I think here we have less than 10,000 units of public housing total. Compare that to New York where there's, I think, 165,000 units of public housing, if I'm remembering correctly. So the difference here, I mean, the backstop that you're talking about for people who are falling out of a ruthless housing market is nothing.

We have nothing for people. And so in this context to see a rise in homelessness like this, I think is completely unsurprising. And without that kind of investment in public housing, in filling this gap for people, we will not get out of this crisis. There's just no way. So there's public housing, but also providing public housing or keeping rents below. In New York City, our mayor, not just de Blasio, but Bloomberg and even Giuliani before him, the watchword for any kind of development was always affordable housing.

But the question is always affordable for who? Because those affordable housing, at least in New York City, is based on the median income of a neighborhood, which is often $75,000, $80,000, $100,000 a year. That's not affordable in any sense for certainly working class or even middle class in New York City. I mean, that is hugely expensive. I mean, that's a farce to call that affordable. And those are the houses that get built, the residential units that get built with public

money, but are not benefiting the communities that they're built in by any stretch of the imagination. But there's pure just public housing. But what about things something like single room occupancy, like hotels or like units that are just like that is like yet another like backstop between poverty and outright complete homelessness? So actually, we talk about that explicitly in this campaign all the time. So one of the reasons why in our homeless population in Los Angeles, the largest demographic

of people who are on the streets who are experiencing homelessness right now is single adult males. And in the past, we had tens of thousands of hotel rooms, single room occupancy hotel rooms that accommodated individuals who now, I think, are experiencing homelessness because those rooms in single room occupancy hotels have been redeveloped. In downtown LA, we've seen huge amounts of redevelopment where these rooms were once located and we've lost many, many rooms, not just here in LA, but in cities like San Diego and other cities across California. And so we've actually lost in a very, very important piece of our housing stock over

the last few years. And that has been devastating for people. And actually, that kind of housing, so housing with shared facilities, shared kitchens, shared bathrooms, housing that will never be subject to speculation because of the way it's built, housing that doesn't have any of the amenities that drive up prices in other kinds of building. We need that. Right now, that's illegal to build according to our zoning code. We have to change our code and make sure that we are making it possible for us to build

those that kind of unit again, whether it be through public funds, whether it be through nonprofit developers, like there's lots of ways to kind of get that kind of housing back, but we have to be clear that that is something that we need. And we do, that is what is deeply, deeply affordable housing, and it's absolutely necessary. There's no single housing response, like the kind of affordable housing that you were talking about before is also incredibly important to have. It's just that we cannot purely invest public dollars in that at the expense of these other kinds of units.

And I think the idea is, once someone drops out of the housing market, usually the next step is like living out of your car and then eventually living on the streets. And it's very, very hard to come back from that, whereas if you lose your home or are evicted, if there's just one more level of having a roof over your head, and let's be honest, just people around you who are aware of you or even concerned about you, it is much easier to come back from that or to pick yourself up or get help in a way that is very, very hard to do once someone has been completely unsheltered, unhoused on the streets for years and years.

Yeah. And I want to talk a little bit too about people who are living in their cars because that's a really, that's part of that process of falling into homelessness, actually ending up in a tent in Campman. Because there's a huge number of people who are living in their cars in Los Angeles. I think in the city, in the last homeless count, it was something like 9,000 in the county, it was 16,000 people living in their cars. In most places in Los Angeles, this is, again, getting back to the question of how we have

created a system that is not just making it impossible to get off the streets, but actively penalizing people who are experiencing poverty and vulnerability. So in most streets in Los Angeles, it is actually illegal to sleep in your car. And if you are found sleeping in your car, you can get ticketed, and if you get enough tickets and you don't pay them, your car will get impounded at which point you are now far more vulnerable than you were before. And we have re-upped a law on the books that has made it illegal for people to sleep in their cars over and over again.

Our city council has done that, despite the fact that our numbers of people sleeping in their cars have gone up year after year. And we have also not provided any options for them. So instead of saying, okay, we're getting complaints from residents about RVs on their streets or whatever, let's make places available that are legal and safe for people. These are, you know, there's a nonprofit called Safe Parking LA, which makes these available. Instead of providing safe places for people, along with some kind of access to services, we have not done that at all.

So I think the entire city of Los Angeles, at the last I checked, there was something like 200 safe parking spots available. We have none in our district, zero, zero. These are so easy to set up, these are so cheap to invest in. You could partner with private enterprise to do this, so you could say to any of the major entertainment companies that have offices here, your parking lots are empty at night, make $100,000 donation, you know, set this up. But our government has to care enough about this issue to actually do that.

And they don't. You know, so it's like at every step of the way where we could be setting up a system that could help. We have looked away from it. And I think this is, you know, it's like, it is an incredibly, homelessness is an incredibly complicated issue. And the pads that people take to it are incredibly complicated. They are diverse.

The people who are on the streets are not monolithic. They are extremely different. And the reasons why they're there are extremely different. But I think if we're not responding to it with the nuances and the kinds of, the kinds of kind of variety of responses to catch all of these people and to make sure that we're supporting them in ways that help them to thrive, you know, we won't get anywhere. And we're just nowhere close to doing that right now in LA. I mean, you know, like when we think about this, like either as a city government, a

state government, or federal government at every level, politicians are the, you know, people who have to hear from voters about their concerns about, you know, the homeless people in their neighborhood or the increasing problem of homelessness would all proclaim that like, you know, we all want the same things, which is, you know, less people in extreme poverty, people giving people paths out of homelessness and back into the housing and job market. But at every single level, we see like at every single level, like we've created an economic and political system designed to make more and more people homeless every year.

And when we're talking about like, and then none of the solutions take into account that when you really get down to it, the only way to deal with it, and like you said, allay the concerns of the, you know, angry neighborhood voter who just doesn't want to see it or feels a, you know, a fear or revulsion about like, you know, they or their kids having to be around, you know, people who may be unstable or addicted to drugs, et cetera, et cetera. Any actual solution that really deals with that problem or would solve it just basically involves building and then giving housing essentially for free to the people or anyone who needs it.

Yes. Absolutely. And it would cost, it would cost less money than what the city, state, federal government, whatever you want to say, then we're currently paying for it to deal with it through the police or through whatever patchwork system of half measures that are being done now. I'm 100%. 100%. And that's what's so frustrating is that over and over again, what we're doing is allowing

people to fall through the cracks of the system and to get to a place where they're in crisis, where the entire system is in a state of crisis. And we're spending money in emergency rooms, fire department and ambulance, police. And now this, you know, social workers, it's like we're doing it the most expensive way possible instead of preventively making the city healthier. You know, that is ultimately the goal that we want to get to. And I think, you know, we're just, we're doing the exact opposite. We're spending the most money by treating at the point of emergency.

No, yeah. Well, if you think that like a hurdle to that, even though by all accounts, you know, countries other than America have basically implemented this very policy. Finland is a very recent example and they've seen, they basically solved homelessness in that country through just this. And I'm sure they don't have as dire a problem to begin with because Finland has a much stronger social safety net to begin with, but they've basically solved the problem of homelessness in like Helsinki or major cities by just giving housing to their homeless population.

And not only that, but, you know, in the housing, it's not like a, to get the housing you have to enter some program or be like preached to or like a kind of paternalistic approach. But in those locations, there is access to interact with social or health or mental or drug treatment or mental health services that are there for you if you need it. And what they found is that people will take advantage of it and it really, really does help. Yeah. And I think actually that this is in its stated policy, the approach that you're talking about,

which is called Housing First in America, this is the stated policy of our federal government. This is supposed to be the policy that we're following across the country to respond to homelessness. It is to provide housing, no questions asked to people who are experiencing homelessness. But we're just doing it at a scale that is nowhere near what is necessary to actually address what we're facing, particularly in a city like Los Angeles. But I think what's been really exciting about kind of the broader political context that we're in right now, the national political context, is that talking about entitlements,

talking about things like a right to housing, talking about things like building a lot more public housing. All of these things are within the realm of possibility again. And I think there's this real opportunity to expand our imagination for what Los Angeles can be and how it can be a place that supports all of its residents. And what has been incredibly exciting as I talk to residents here is really like people are on board with that and people see that as a real option. So I think it's been a really interesting moment in our local political history for

sure and a really interesting political moment for me to be a candidate here and having those kinds of conversations. I want to talk about the national political context for this in just a second. But before then, I would just want to bring something up. You mentioned public housing and like, for instance, New York City has a lot more public housing than Los Angeles and like in New York City, they're much more a feature of the city and its kind of culture, like public housing, the projects. Do you find that, do you think there's a hurdle in addressing problems like this through

just flatly saying we need public housing that is like built by the government and which rents are kept at a below market rate? When the fact of the matter is, I think for a lot of people, when they think of public housing or the projects, they think of places that are dangerous, unclean, badly kept and you know, just things that are bad all around. And certainly in New York City, a lot of that is not untrue. Like our NYSHA, like the city, the department that's responsible for maintaining public housing is awful and like there are people who have had ponds in their living room for

months at a time or black mold or pestilence or things like that. It's just like these things don't get taken care of because I think there's an unspoken thing that if you're in public housing, you deserve, if you're accepting a rent rate that is apart subsidized by the taxpayer, you are somehow worth less than someone who can pay their full share. Yeah. I mean, I think you're right that the term public housing certainly has negative connotations and that I think that if that were the only option on the table that there might be push

back to it. But I do think that I think that there was ways to talk about like in Los Angeles, we have a, we paid for a bond, a municipal bond a few years ago called HHH, which was supposed to build 10,000 units of permanent supportive housing. And so that is essentially public housing. But because it was called permanent supportive housing, because it was in this broader conversation around homelessness, it simply didn't have the same kind of negative connotations that I think a conversation on raising limits around public housing or investing more in public

housing in Los Angeles could have had. And I think it's like, I think it's less a question of using particular terminology or thinking through that, thinking through how that language is received by residents, but rather thinking through kind of how we think about solutions and how we think about alternatives to having encampments on the streets and how we talk about it as something that can actually address our problems right now that we're facing in Los Angeles. Like I think in the LA Times at a poll recently where they found that homelessness was the top issue for voters, the hands down, it was the absolute top issue for voters.

And so I think it has opened up a kind of political space to talk about housing entitlements, to talk about public housing, to talk about permanent supportive housing in ways that I think are really exciting. And I think that might be different from the conversation in a city like New York. So like I said, you mentioned a kind of national political context to this and in many ways it's a very exciting moment right now because of you mentioned someone like Bernie Sanders or Elon Omar or a nascent or dawning kind of rekindling of this idea of sort of collective entitlements and rights to things like housing that these are things that are your basic

standard of living or a right to have a roof over your head is what you are owed as a citizen of this country and not that just that as a society we can just wash our hands of any of these things. But at the same time, there's also at a national level like another way in which homelessness is being addressed or talked about and I'm wondering if you've noticed how President Trump for instance and much of I don't know the right wing media like for instance Fox News or Tucker Carlson is someone I'm thinking about has made homelessness especially in California as a kind of centerpiece of their attacks on I guess liberal government and

their portrayal of Los Angeles and San Francisco in particular is kind of infested by filth and disease that's spread by the homeless who are like themselves a kind of an infestation or just a subhuman population that needs to just be done away with. Yeah, I mean we not only is that reflected in our local kind of political context here, it's not just a national issue, I mean I think our city government, our mayor and one of our supervisors is actually in active discussions with the Trump administration to bring federal resources to LA, something I think they are discussing bringing more funds in, bringing use of federal lands in, but essentially the Trump administration is saying to our elected

representatives we'll give you that but only if you increase law enforcement, only if you, it's conditional on our local representatives changing their policies to be more in line with how the Trump administration wants to respond to this issue, they want from everything that we've heard what they want to do, the response that they want to set up here is to set up camps like they've set up at the border to house our homeless residents and to remove them from the streets forcibly and so it's not just a national political context that we're seeing on Fox News, it is very real for Los Angeles and there hasn't been an announcement on what exactly they're planning or what is coming but it is a reality that

we are going to have to grapple with and I think unless our local elected representatives can put forward a vision that is strongly in contrast to this, a vision that stems from compassion, that stems from rights and entitlements, I just do not think that we are going to be represented well in this debate, I mean this is a real risk for Los Angeles right now. I mean correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't at least one of these proposals basically just involved deporting the homeless and putting them in internment camps in the middle of the desert like what was done with Japanese Americans in California during World War II? Yeah, they were looking at a big, I think it was like some kind of an unused federal

building in Hawthorne which is on the outskirts of LA County and yeah essentially just removing people there and the thing is sometimes I feel like this is the outcome that some of our elected representatives want, they want homeless people to disappear because then they don't have to think about this anymore, the Trump administration will have solved the problem for them and I think that is beyond disappointing, it is such a disavowal or moving away from their responsibility to take action and to take the right kind of action that will actually protect people and to help Angeli knows. I mean yeah, I guess just to wrap this up, I mean what I find so important but also very

frightening about this issue, like I said, is this fundamental kind of inhumanity in the way we think about this and the criminalization of entire populations of people whose crime essentially is that they are not contributing to the economy or the market or they've no longer become useful to our society and I think that the way a lot of people think about homelessness is just like something totally alien or something that could never happen to them or the people suffering from it are there because of their own choices or actions but I think as we talked about earlier when you really look at the housing crisis in America, this is a real there but for the grace of God go I problem and it's like if we don't

change a lot about this country's politics and economy, many, many more people are going to be finding themselves in a situation in which they are now kind of if not criminal than a kind of a non-person legally who can just be kind of rounded up or just exported at will for just for not having a job or a place to live. Yeah, exactly. Like if you are not able to participate in the market that we have set up for you, what we are saying to people essentially is that you are useless for our cities and that you don't deserve to live here anymore and I fundamentally disagree with that.

I think we can have a much better vision and we desperately need that. Well, Nithya, I want to thank you so much for your time and for the campaign you're running. Just real quick, if anyone would like to know more about your campaign or get involved, what should they do? They can come to our website, it's nithyaforthesity.com. They can follow us on Twitter and on Instagram, Nithya for the city on Instagram and Nithya Viraman on Twitter.

We're very active on social media. We're doing a show actually at the L. Ray. It's a comedy show on the 29th of January and so if there's residents in Los Angeles who are interested, they can come to that. And yeah, one quick note I wanted to say to people who are looking at our campaign and wondering especially if they may not be residents of District 4 in Los Angeles, I just wanted to say that we're fighting a very tough race here in some ways, we're fighting against an incumbent.

I just got a press release from our city yesterday and it turns out across all the races that are happening in Los Angeles, I think there's something like 25 candidates running and multiple districts that are up for reelection, all of the candidates together have raised something like four and a half million dollars. The person I'm running against, the incumbent, has raised a fourth of that. He's raised a million dollars for this race and he's raised that from people who want to profit from the city. He's raised that from the real estate industry mostly, but also cannabis, also people who

want to fight styrofoam bands, people, you know, all of these people who have a stake in having access to a council member and to making sure that those council members are indebted to them in some way. We're trying to run a very different kind of campaign, so I would just say that if people want to get involved with us, making a donation to our campaign is incredibly helpful and I think we can fight for a better future in LA together. And also just real quick though, for any of our listeners who are not from Los Angeles but are interested or care about the issue of housing or homelessness, is there anything

just real quick that any advice or like, where would you begin if you were them to start getting involved or, yeah, active in this issue? Oh, that's a great question. I think I would say that if they can, you know, get involved, like I started this homeless coalition called SELA in my neighborhood, but there are programs like that across LA and also in other cities where you can actually go and talk to people experiencing homelessness and where you can understand the barriers that they face in moving out of those situations. You know, not just a feeding program but something which is, you know, much more like systemically

set up so that it's actually moving people into services, into access to regular kind of contact with social workers and things like that. That's the kind of program that I would advise getting involved in so that you have the ability to get to know people and you can understand for yourself why systems are failing them and then you can shape your advocacy around that because I think that's really the best kind of advocacy that you can be doing. Nithya Raman, candidate for Los Angeles City Council District 4, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you so much for having me. This was awesome. I really appreciate it. And yeah, please give our best to Josh. I will. Thank you.