Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman on Wednesday launched a sweeping homelessness platform for her mayoral campaign, seizing on new data showing that 40% of participants in Mayor Karen Bass's flagship Inside Safe program have returned to the streets and casting the initiative as an expensive failure that has left the city without a working system.
"Homelessness in Los Angeles is a humanitarian crisis," Raman said in a statement accompanying the plan's release. "Despite billions of dollars spent, 27,000 people sleep on our streets every night. The compassion is there. The money is there. What's missing is a system that really works — and leadership willing to do the work to build one."
The announcement comes as a Los Angeles Times investigation confirmed the 40% return-to-street figure for Inside Safe participants — a rate that has climbed every year since the program launched in December 2022. According to Raman's campaign, participants are staying in motel rooms an average of 362 days at a cost exceeding $80,000 per room per year.
Raman framed the problem not as a failure of resources or compassion but of management and accountability. "No one is in charge right now at City Hall," she said, "but it doesn't have to be this way."
A Record Under Fire
Bass declared a homelessness state of emergency on her first day in office, Dec. 12, 2022, and lifted it in November 2025. Inside Safe, launched nine days later, became the centerpiece of her strategy, sending outreach teams to encampments and moving residents into hotel and motel rooms while case managers worked to place them in permanent housing.
Through late 2025, the program had served roughly 5,800 people across more than 100 encampment operations citywide at a cumulative cost exceeding $300 million. Approximately 1,243 of those participants moved into permanent housing.
The city's annual point-in-time homeless count showed two consecutive years of decline — a first since counting began in 2005 — with the total falling from a peak of 46,260 in 2023 to 43,699 in 2025. Unsheltered homelessness dropped 17.5% over two years, and chronic homelessness fell roughly 22%.
But the 2025 figure remains 23% above the pre-pandemic 2019 count of 36,165, and a RAND Corporation study warned the official count may underestimate the unsheltered population by as much as 32%.
Scrutiny of the program has been mounting. A court-ordered audit by Alvarez & Marsal, released in March 2025, examined $2.3 billion in city homelessness spending and found auditors could not determine how much was actually spent and that the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority failed to verify whether invoiced services were delivered. A fraud investigation uncovered one service provider whose food inventory consisted almost entirely of instant ramen noodles despite receiving $110 per person per day. Human Rights Watch published a 300-page report in 2024 calling Inside Safe "unsustainably expensive" and documenting property destruction during encampment clearances.
Motel costs have run approximately $3,300 per person per month. Bass herself acknowledged the model is "not financially sustainable."
City Controller Kenneth Mejia announced his own Inside Safe audit in 2024 but was blocked by the City Attorney's office — a move a federal judge called "ridiculous."
Raman's Plan
Raman's platform organizes around three pillars: invest in what works, fix what doesn't, and deliver measurable results.
On accountability, Raman said she would fully staff a Bureau of Homelessness Oversight — a body the City Council established a year ago under her leadership that has yet to hire a single employee — and implement performance-based budgeting for every program in the homelessness budget. She also pledged to publish a real-time public dashboard tracking shelter beds, housing placements, encampments and spending, and to manage the city's transition away from LAHSA.
On shelter and housing, Raman argued that Los Angeles is operating well below the capacity needed. The city has roughly one-third of the shelter beds it needs, she said, with 61% of unhoused Angelenos sleeping outside, including more than 1,000 children. By contrast, she noted, New York City — which has a larger homeless population — keeps 97% of its homeless residents indoors because it has built adequate shelter capacity.
As mayor, Raman said she would significantly expand investment in Time Limited Subsidies, a short-term rental voucher program she described as far less expensive than Inside Safe with better outcomes. Her campaign argues that for the same $85,000 annual cost of a single Inside Safe motel room, the city could rent three apartments and provide intensive wraparound services. She also pledged to create more safe temporary housing for families, develop a strategy for the more than 6,500 people living in cars and RVs, and audit every stalled homeless housing project.
On mental health and substance use, Raman's plan calls for deploying street medicine teams citywide to deliver care directly in encampments, on sidewalks and in shelters. She cited data showing that only 4% of people across the county shelter system are currently receiving mental health care — 882 active clients across more than 20,000 countywide interim housing beds. She also said she would establish a citywide unarmed crisis response system for mental health and substance use calls.
A District Record as Foundation
Raman pointed to her track record in her own City Council district, where she said encampments were cleared because people got housed rather than moved from location to location. She said shelter bed occupancy in her district rose from 80% to 94%, and that all new permanent supportive housing in the district now exceeds 90% occupancy.
"Angelenos have done their part," she said. "They voted. They taxed themselves to respond to this crisis with care and resources. City Hall let them down. I will treat this crisis with the urgency and focus it demands."
The full platform is available at nithyaforthecity.com.
There are 14 candidates running for the LA Mayor’s race in the upcoming June election with reality star Spencer Pratt the only individual to poll in the double digits.
Pratt argues that Los Angeles' homelessness crisis stems not from insufficient funding but from misspent billions by what he calls the "Homeless Industrial Complex," which has prioritized bureaucratic process over tangible results. His proposed "Treatment and Recovery First" framework would shift resources toward mental health care, drug treatment, and stabilization services, require treatment participation as a condition of city-funded assistance, and tie housing access to demonstrated sobriety and stability. The plan would impose strict performance-based contracting, terminate failed programs, and enforce existing shelter and public-space laws to restore safety in parks, sidewalks, and neighborhoods.