It’s not a great mystery why the man who slings gaudy mansions across Southern California would be opposed to a mansion tax, but it is appalling that a DSA-endorsed candidate running for the highest seat in LA would oppose it. Raman has always positioned her desire to “reform” Measure ULA as an objective review of the data to determine that newly constructed apartment and commercial buildings should be exempt from paying the tax. The problem with Raman’s proposed exemptions is that they would have ultimately cost ULA anywhere from $64 million to $145 million annually. This would directly mean fewer people getting eviction defense support and fewer truly affordable units getting built. There is no other term for that kind of gutting of essential social services than austerity. To pretend as though a politician proposing such extreme cuts is a socialist is an absurdity.

I have waited to write this piece until now out of a desire to see how the election would play out. I am grateful to Raman for running and blocking Spencer Pratt from advancing past the primary in June. I respect that Raman recognized how unpopular and ineffective Mayor Bass has been and made a Hail Mary attempt to intervene. Some of you reading this may know that I was a strong supporter of my friend Rev. Rae Huang, who also ran for mayor, but I have no ill will towards Nithya for running a better primary campaign and coming out on top. I’m a DSA-LA member, and while I strongly opposed Nithya’s endorsement, I respected that she earned the endorsement of the chapter and bit my tongue for the rest of the campaign. I even put in a canvassing shift for Nithya because I agreed Karen Bass had to go. Now that she’s (narrowly) won, the real work of pressuring her from the left has to begin.

Since the moment Measure ULA passed with 58% approval in 2022, it has been relentlessly attacked by real estate interests and the anti-tax right. It was immediately challenged in court, delaying the time when it could go into effect for months and causing a rapid sell-off by wealthy people before they had to pay the tax. (This was a major plot point in season seven of Selling Sunset.) Critics of the measure have tried any and every tactic available to the rich and well-connected to kill ULA. One of the most effective strategies this group found for undermining the legitimacy of ULA came through a study published by the UCLA Lewis Center, which asserted that ULA is depressing the construction of new apartment buildings and preventing 1,910 affordable apartments from being built every year. The study used a very limited set of data and failed to factor in the myriad of other issues beyond ULA that contributed to the construction slowdown over the last couple of years. There have already been other studies contradicting the findings and methodology of the UCLA study, but the study is more than enough for Nithya to claim she’s “just following the data.”

Nithya positions herself as “non-ideological” and more of a policy wonk than anything else. She and the broader Yes In My Backyard movement believe that tweaks to zoning requirements, environmental regulations, and other forms of deregulation will unleash the for-profit housing market to thrive and meet everyone’s needs. As a socialist, I fundamentally disagree with this analysis. YIMBYs believe that building market-rate housing will eventually “filter down” to create housing stock that everyone can afford as buildings age and rents fall. While we absolutely do need more housing units available, I fundamentally reject that those units can all be market-rate and possibly meet all Angelenos’ housing needs.

The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles is currently $2,765. At our current minimum wage of $18.42, a 40-hour work week earns you $2,947 a month before taxes. 27.6% of LA adults live in poverty. Seniors on fixed incomes are the most rapidly growing homeless population. None of the people most at risk of homelessness in the here and now are people who can pay market rents on newly constructed housing, and they cannot wait for some day in the distant future for prices to eventually fall. Measure ULA’s funding directly utilizes nonprofit developers and creates social housing projects that are permanently outside the for-profit, speculative market. To decide to ignore these impacts and insist that only the market can solve our housing crisis is an ideological commitment, and not one remotely aligned with socialist values.

These contradictions in purported ideological commitments are going to make it difficult for Raman to maintain her popularity. If you look at any of the comments on social media regarding this election, you see many people saying they were voting against Bass more than they were enthusiastically voting for Raman. It’s not hard to see why people are wary of trusting a candidate who was trying to claim that she’s both a capitalist and democratic socialist days before the election. Mamdani was able to win so decisively in New York because he is incredibly consistent in his messaging; you rarely get the sense that he is triangulating or hiding his true beliefs. Furthermore, Mamdani’s videos were such successes on the campaign trail because he relentlessly showed himself listening to working New Yorkers and understanding their struggles. Nithya’s YouTube page has no such videos. The time and attention she gave to Jason Oppenheim was never replicated with a tenant who faced eviction or a housing organizer. I take that as a very clear sign of who she will prioritize in office.

Nithya’s entire case for her candidacy in running for mayor was built on the claim that she was going to make LA’s government work better for everyone. She claims to be someone laser-focused on making sure city programs are serving the people who need them and that tax dollars are being spent effectively. She’s a good-government progressive much more than a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist, which is fine. But it’s also precisely why it’s been infuriating to watch her attack Measure ULA repeatedly. ULA is arguably the government program in LA working the best with the greatest accountability mechanisms. This September, Los Angeles approved $466 million in affordable housing funding, the majority of that money coming from Measure ULA. There is a Citizens Oversight Committee that tracks ULA spending in the most robust and transparent program in the history of the city. All ULA-funded projects are required to use union labor and pay fair wages. The funding for ULA cannot be diverted to other programs or police funding, and it is money we as the city of LA raise ourselves, meaning we don’t have to rely on Sacramento or DC to make investments in solving our housing crisis. It is a fantastic, real-world example of how progressive taxation on the wealthy can meet some of our most immediate needs.

This is where my deep frustration with DSA-LA’s endorsement of Nithya comes in. The national housing justice commission for DSA has a detailed platform for permanently decommodifying housing through transitioning to all housing being social housing that is democratically controlled by the people living in it. Measure ULA does not perfectly map onto this vision, but it is a step in the process of transferring money and resources from real estate capitalists and putting that money directly towards supporting tenants. Even more locally, DSA-LA’s own Housing and Homelessness Committee spells out in its mission statement: “As socialists we affirm that housing should be a human right for all. We reject the capitalist system which creates and allocates housing as a commodity on the basis of its ability to generate surplus value for capitalists.” This is unambiguously at odds with Nithya’s criticisms of ULA and her broader YIMBYism.

Raman has obviously been at odds with DSA for other reasons lately. The National Political Committee has been weighing rescinding Raman’s endorsement because she has been inconsistent at best in supporting Palestinian liberation. In a city with significant investments tied to Israel and where weapons routinely ship out of LAX and our ports, having a mayor with strong, consistent commitments to opposing genocide is an essential moral benchmark anyone governing as a socialist should have to clear. But I will say that as the campaign has gone on and the pressure from DSA has increased, Raman has firmed up her support for pro-Palestine policies and has called Israel’s actions genocidal. I think this pressure on Raman is good and healthy, and similar pressure needs to be applied to her by the LA left to support Measure ULA and social housing policies.

With Nithya opposed by most of the City Council and facing relentless attacks by the right-wing media machine in LA, she will need all of the allies she can get. DSA and other left-progressives should make it clear to her that part of her earning their ongoing support is contingent on not touching ULA. ULA is already dealing with a major blow after this election. My piece of shit councilmember, Traci Park, one of ULA’s strongest opponents, put Measure TE on the ballot to exempt houses sold in the wake of the Palisades fire from having to pay the ULA tax. That measure passed decisively on Tuesday, and will now cut anywhere from $35–$66 million annually from ULA’s funding. An anonymous Palisadian wrote for Mar Vista Voice recently opposing TE, stating: “Measure TE is designed for the ultra-wealthy. It has no owner-occupancy limits, which means that people with second or third homes in the Palisades would be rewarded much more than the average homeowner.” With these cuts to ULA already guaranteed, it would be absolutely disastrous if Raman also goes through with her proposed ULA amendments; she would effectively be killing ULA even if she claimed to be “mending not ending” the measure.

I am not writing these criticisms as someone who wants Nithya to fail. But I do want to directly spell out that Nithya’s attitudes about ULA make it clear that she is not a socialist and should not be expected to govern as one. Being a socialist is fundamentally about believing that class war is central to politics and building a more just and democratic world. It means standing with the interests of the working class and taking money and power away from the capitalist class through every means available to us. Measure ULA is a solid step in that direction, a foundation that can be built upon alongside the class struggle of tenant unions to truly build the power that we need to permanently decommodify housing and enshrine it as a universal human right for all Angelenos.

As my friend Chelsea Kirk put it in the LA newsletter No Bad Days last week: “I want to see the next mayor of Los Angeles get behind a program of social housing for all … I mean something that can take on the threat of global real estate capital. I mean the City of Los Angeles actually building, owning, and operating housing.” To me, that is the terrain of struggle for the LA left over the next four years. Nithya claimed in a subsequent interview with No Bad Days that: “I love social housing, and I love publicly funded housing. The city should be using every single dollar it gets for building housing as effectively and efficiently as possible.” Gutting ULA would directly contradict that statement. She should be ruthlessly and publicly criticized by the LA left if she tries to.