Who Really Controls Local Politics?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/opinion/raman-housing-los-angeles.html

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In November 2020, Nithya Raman, a 40-year-old former urban planner, unseated a well-funded fellow Democrat and thoroughly endorsed incumbent named David Ryu to win the Los Angeles City Council seat for Council District 4 (CD-4). It’s an amoeba-shaped area that encompasses the tony hills of Silver Lake, where Raman lives, sweeps down through the ultrawealthy avenues of Hancock Park, pushes out past the 18 high-rise apartment buildings of Park LaBrea, travels through working- and middle-class sections of the Los Feliz flats and Hollywood, runs up the Hollywood Hills and finally spills out into the suburb of Sherman Oaks.

Employing an aggressive door-knocking campaign, a young and enthusiastic staff and a good deal of celebrity endorsements and positive media coverage, Raman forced a runoff with Ryu, which she ultimately won by a comfortable margin. In doing so, she produced a collection of firsts: She became the first South Asian American woman elected to the council. She made Ryu into the first incumbent to lose his seat since 2003. She also collected the most votes for a City Council member in the history of Los Angeles. In 2015, roughly 24,000 people voted in the election for CD-4. In 2020, spurred in large part by a decision to pair the contests with national elections, over 130,000 people voted in the Ryu versus Raman runoff.

A former council member called Raman’s election a “political earthquake” and said it represented a new day in city politics where a group of young people energized by the Bernie Sanders campaign could upend business as usual at City Hall. Raman did not carry the co-signs from the typical politicians or the city’s big newspapers that are usually required to win races in Los Angeles. But she was endorsed and supported by progressive, left-leaning groups such as the Sunrise Movement and the Democratic Socialists of America. This set up what’s become an increasingly familiar showdown between young, leftist upstarts and Democratic machine politics.

Across the country, these organizers and political workers have managed to elect dozens of candidates who would have been seen as radicals as recently as the second Obama term. They have done so both nationally and locally, whether it’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman in New York; India Walton in Buffalo; Carroll Fife in Oakland, Calif.; or Cori Bush in Missouri. But upon taking office, many have come up against a different type of political organizing that stymies many of their more ambitious plans.

Raman has a wide range of progressive policy ideas, but as is typical in blue California cities, the real contention points come down to her stances on housing and, by extension, homelessness. She ran on an aggressive platform to decriminalize homelessness, freeze rents, strengthen eviction protections and build affordable housing throughout her district.

Her housing ideas are emblematic of a small but influential school of planning and land use that attempts to marry the concerns of tenants rights activists and the free market advocates who want to build, build, build. How do you make a city denser and more equitable without forcing out current tenants? How do you plan new construction in a way that ensures affordability but also doesn’t saddle itself with so much regulation and red tape that a shovel never hits the ground?

“We need to make it possible to build more housing in the central areas of the city,” Raman told me last week. “We need to make it possible to build more housing in areas of the city that are close to employment centers and economic drivers. And we need to build that housing more densely.”

“Land-use policies and the history of land-use policies, in a city like Los Angeles, shapes so much of what we see here. Residential segregation, racial injustice, policing — everything, at its root, comes back to land-use policies,” Raman continued. “Debates around land use are central to understanding almost everything about the history of Los Angeles and how it functions.”

Raman’s ideas to have more affordable housing and more services for the homeless, including “community access centers” where people in need can walk in, talk to a case manager and “have their basic needs for hygiene, food and health care met” have put her directly in the cross hairs of discontented residents in her district. In less than a year in office, Raman has already faced a failed recall bid that followed her proposal to raise the height restrictions on buildings in two sections of her district from three stories to five.

Today, Raman faces a much more serious challenge: Every 10 years, the city redraws the council districts to reflect demographic changes in the most recent census. In meetings with the public, the redistricting commission is currently presenting its redrawing of the map, a vast majority of which will remain more or less the same, reflecting a relatively stagnant period in the city.

Only two of the city’s 15 districts may undergo a comprehensive change: District 2, currently represented by Paul Krekorian, and Raman’s District 4. If the City Council votes to approve the current proposal without any changes, Raman would effectively lose her base of renters as well as the members of wealthy neighborhoods and powerful homeowners association who most fervently opposed her housing policies. These residents wrote letters and submitted draft maps to the redistricting committee, asking to be cut out of the district and reconnected with adjacent “communities of interest.” Raman would still sit on the City Council, but she almost certainly would be representing constituents who had not voted for her, or for her opponent, for that matter.

It should be said that redistricting isn’t anything new, but it rarely leads to such drastic voter displacement. What’s truly bizarre is that the proposal under review does not determine which of the proposed new districts will be which — they are currently titled “2 or 4,” which means that neither Raman nor Krekorian have any idea who they will be representing.

Raman’s district could move 20 miles to the northwest into the farthest reaches of the San Fernando Valley, where she would suddenly become the councilwoman for the communities of Canoga Park, Winnetka, Reseda and Lake Balboa. Under the second option, Raman would keep a small part of Silver Lake, where she lives, but she would also be taking on the homeowner district Shadow Hills. If she gets the district in the valley, she will preside over exactly 0 percent of the people who voted for her in the election. According to analysis done by Raman’s campaign, the Shadow Hills option will include only 29 percent of her current voter base.

Either result would effectively disenfranchise thousands of voters. It would be as if you took President Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada out of office, told them they would now be presiding over France and Germany, but told them they had to wait to figure out which.

How all this happened should tell you quite a bit about how politics actually works in cities and how the people in charge aren’t always the ones sitting in city hall.

For Raman, resistance came well before she won her seat. In his first go-round in the City Council, Ryu, who was first elected in 2015, proved himself adept at forging the types of insider relationships that pave the way for long political careers. Less than a month before the 2020 election, none other than Hillary Clinton came out to endorse him. (Nancy Pelosi, whose home district is San Francisco, also endorsed Ryu.)

Why would Clinton take the time to weigh in on a Los Angeles City Council seat?

There’s no clear answer, but it should be noted that CD-4 is home to a great deal of Hollywood’s biggest stars and executives. Over the course of the election, some of the most famous people in the world took sides. According to reporting by Kirsten Chuba in The Hollywood Reporter, Natalie Portman, Tina Fey and a number of Raman’s prominent fellow Harvard alumni like the television writer Mike Schur publicly supported Raman while many of the industry’s executives and agents backed Ryu.

Ryu versus Raman ultimately became a fight between homeowners and renters. Electoral maps bear that out: Raman’s largest areas of support came from the Los Feliz flats, home to many renters, the more working-class areas of Hollywood and the thousands of renters in Park LaBrea. Ryu won a vast majority of the Hollywood Hills, Hancock Park and large parts of Sherman Oaks. Under the new proposed district map, Sherman Oaks, the Hollywood Hills and Hancock Park may no longer be under Raman’s stewardship.

In America’s big cities, where housing has become an increasing priority, and the dividing line between the haves and the have-nots, it’s worth asking whether part of the future of civic politics might be defined by a new type of identity politics: homeowners versus renters. The competing interests of both groups have always been present — as we’ll see in the next newsletter, much of the history of Southern California has been dictated by well-organized homeowners associations — but these questions have been largely relegated to the metro pages of newspapers or wonky conversations about zoning.

Who ultimately wins in a fight between motivated homeowners and a politician who has pledged to fight for renters, affordable housing and protections for the homeless? And how do politics actually function after an election? In Thursday’s edition of the newsletter, I will be writing about two prominent, historic and powerful organizations that have been trying to influence the redistricting for years: the Hancock Park Homeowners Association and the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association.

Have feedback? Send a note to kang-newsletter@nytimes.com.\

Jay Caspian Kang (@jaycaspiankang), a writer for Opinion and The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “The Loneliest Americans.”