Los Angeles is about to test a new kind of housing politics

It’s notoriously hard to govern Los Angeles, a city that gives its mayor less direct authority over the government than in a city like New York or Chicago. But even so, it’d be hard to do much worse than Karen Bass.

Elected mayor of LA in 2022, Bass campaigned on promises to solve the city’s homelessness and housing affordability crises (which are really part of the same underlying crisis). She then spent her term undermining her own administration’s affordable housing policy and fighting the state of California’s efforts to compel cities to allow more housing production. She lost her bid for reelection this week to Nithya Raman, an LA City Council member, rising progressive star, and nationally prominent YIMBY. 

Los Angeles has the highest home-price-to-household-income ratio of any large city in America, and the second fewest homes per adult of any major city. It has a highly suburbanized and car-oriented fabric, like much of the rest of the country — all of which makes it a kind of proving ground for whether America’s sprawling cities can build their way out of their housing shortages.

Everyone in the city’s political leadership notionally agrees that LA needs to permit a lot more homes to meet demand — the only true way to make housing affordable — but not all of them have evidently had the policy discipline to follow through.

Raman may be different. She has gained a following in housing reform circles over the last few years with her brisk, direct-to-camera social videos explaining how LA’s housing shortage drives up rents and criticizing city policies that make it so difficult to build more homes (perhaps it’s no surprise that she has plenty of friends in Hollywood).

“There has been an overall lack of urgency in addressing housing supply in [Bass’s] administration,” Raman told me in an interview in July. How best to accommodate LA’s need for more housing, she said, is “a question that the city has actually turned away from.”

Even given LA’s relatively weak mayoralty, Karen Bass’s failures on housing were often a matter of political choice. As The Atlantic’s Marc Novicoff put it, “Bass seems to have gone out of her way to exercise as little power as possible.” Where she did go out of her way to wield her influence, it was often to stop denser housing from being built. Some of her bewildering housing policy choices while in office include:

• Days into her term, Bass signed her first executive order, known as ED1, to fast-track housing developments where 100 percent of the apartments are affordable. Applications for these projects were to get approvals within 60 days instead of being dragged through excruciating permitting processes. It was a good idea — and it seemed to be working, quickly attracting developer applications to build thousands of affordable apartments. It was working so well, in fact, that a backlash from vocal NIMBYs followed. Less than six months after signing ED1, in June 2023, Bass weakened it to exclude projects in single-family neighborhoods — which make up three-quarters of LA’s residential land — from the fast-track approval process. Her administration even tried to apply that restriction retroactively to developments that had already applied to build in single-family areas under ED1, a breathtaking display of bureaucratic dysfunction; a judge later ruled that this violated California law. Bass has since added more restrictions to the ED1, and one observer has described it as “functionally gutted” for many developers. To be fair to Bass, even after she weakened it, the program has still resulted in more than 7,700 affordable apartments under construction, according to her campaign.

• Bass opposed SB 79, a landmark California law that passed in 2025 requiring cities and suburbs to allow construction of denser housing near transit stops. Permitting apartments near public transit is one of the most basic principles of sensible urban planning. But in LA, it was controversial enough that Bass urged state governor Gavin Newsom to veto it. After he signed SB 79 into law anyway, Bass worked with LA’s city council to delay much of the law’s most ambitious upzoning until 2030, while permitting smaller apartment buildings near some transit stops.
• After the devastating January 2025 fires, some property owners whose homes had burned down in the Pacific Palisades had applied to rebuild under SB 9, another important California law that allows single-family lots to be modestly densified into up to four housing units. In response to backlash from some neighbors, Bass reportedly pressed Newsom to restrict SB 9 in fire-damaged areas; she then banned SB 9 applications in parts of the Palisades. (There are certainly legitimate questions about whether rebuilding in such a fire-prone area is a good idea at all. But Bass offered no publicly available analysis that the modest increase in density allowed by SB 9 posed a special danger, even as she worked to accelerate the rebuilding of single-family homes.) 

All of these point to a leader who is not serious about changing the conditions that led to LA’s housing shortage, and lacks the courage to take on what is arguably the city’s most defining political challenge.

Raman has promised to fundamentally break from that approach. That will make her mayoralty an important experiment for the rest of the country. Even modest progress in a city as resistant to housing as LA could help crack open a way forward for new approaches to housing in the many other cities that face affordability crises.

This won’t be easy for her — she’ll face the same anti-building political pressures, and will need to maintain a cooperative relationship with the city council. When I spoke to Raman over the summer, I noticed that she treaded gingerly around the topic of adding density to single-family neighborhoods. Because of the uniquely American obsession with keeping single-family homes segregated from other types of development, it can be a real political third rail in LA and nationwide. But research has suggested the city can’t fill its housing shortage without building more in those neighborhoods. Raman will, at least, have an important ally in California’s newly elected governor, Xavier Becerra, who is also a strong YIMBY.

Raman’s affiliation with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) makes her emblematic of a fusion that’s been emerging in Democratic politics, between supply-side abundance and left-wing economic populism. It’s also evident in politicians like Zohran Mamdani and some of the young Democrats who won elections across the country this week.

From talking to Raman, I have the sense that she’s more at home with the YIMBY part of her politics than the DSA part. Her relationship with the DSA’s LA chapter has been strained (though it did endorse her candidacy). But her social-democratic commitments are also sincere — she’s been a strong champion of rent control and tenant protections in LA, for example, and helped shape a stronger rent stabilization law the city adopted last year.

The new political syntheses taking shape on the American left are exciting and intriguing. Whether it will finally make a breakthrough in LA’s — and California’s, and America’s — housing crisis, of course, remains to be tested. But it’s a welcome sign that American politics need not remain trapped in the same orthodoxies and failures.

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