Members of the Democratic Socialists of America will soon lead the nation’s two most populous cities, plus D.C. They’ve tapped into legitimate anger that housing costs too much and urban governments have failed to effectively deliver services. But their preferred answers — price controls, public ownership, more spending and more regulations — would worsen those problems.
That is the danger of overreading DSA member Nithya Raman’s victory over Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) last week. Angelenos did not vote for Marxism. They voted to fire an incompetent incumbent. After Republican Spencer Pratt finished third in June’s nonpartisan primary, the two candidates who advanced to the November ballot were both progressives.
Bass’s defeat was primarily a repudiation of her mishandling of the wildfires in January 2025, particularly the Palisades fire, a disaster for which the city bore direct responsibility. She was in Ghana when the blaze erupted, despite forecasts of dangerous winds and wildfire conditions and her campaign promise not to travel overseas as mayor. The fire killed 12 people and destroyed more than 6,800 structures.
After Los Angeles lost 33,335 residents in 2025, the city desperately needs to figure out how to expedite housing construction. Raman’s strongest proposals leverage market forces. She wants to triple housing construction, impose a 60-day deadline to approve applications for zoning-compliant projects, allow more housing near transit, ease office-to-apartment conversions and let qualified professionals certify straightforward plans. She proposes firm permitting deadlines for small businesses.
But much of Raman’s agenda flows from the failed impulses of central planning. She wants strong rent controls, publicly owned “social housing,” city purchases of private rental buildings, rent subsidies and a new tenant-protection bureaucracy. The evidence is overwhelming that tighter rent controls make housing scarcer.
Nor can Raman spend the city’s way out of the supply problem. City-financed affordable and supportive housing had total development costs of more than $782,000 per unit on average in 2025. At that price, $1 billion produces fewer than 1,300 apartments in a city with more than 45,000 homeless people.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles has found other ways to chill private investment in construction. Its “mansion tax” levies up to 5.5 percent on expensive property sales, including apartment buildings. The Rand organization estimated that this tax reduced high-value sales by 31 percent and construction of large apartment buildings by 30 percent. Raman campaigned for the tax in 2022 but changed her mind after seeing its “real negative impacts” on construction, and she now backs exempting new apartments.
Like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D), Raman has distanced herself from some of the DSA’s most radical stances. After calling to “defund the police” in 2020, Raman says that Los Angeles does not need fewer officers. She rejects the DSA’s calls to abolish prisons and the U.S. Senate. Last month, Raman told CNN that she identifies as both a democratic socialist and “a capitalist.” The DSA says the systems are incompatible. The City of Angels would be much better off if she leans into the latter as mayor.
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