In November of last year, as most Angelenos were getting their Thanksgiving grocery shopping done, LA City Council was considering the biggest overhaul of the city’s zoning in decades - the Citywide Housing Incentive Program, or CHIP. In an attempt to meet state-mandated housing targets, CHIP loosened the zoning on major boulevards and near transit stops - but it left untouched the 72% of the city where only houses are allowed. Activists from across the spectrum of housing groups vigorously objected to this omission. The Chamber of Commerce protested. A UCLA analysis concluded the watered down plan would fall short of state targets. In response to all the pressure, the Planning Dept. came up with a menu of seven options for legalizing apartments in single family neighborhoods that City Council could consider adding to CHIP. All eyes turned to our elected officials to see how they would respond.

I went to the planning committee meeting at City Hall where councilmembers considered CHIP and the seven options before it headed to the full council. Scores of housing activists and NIMBYs lined up to give one-minute speeches arguing for and against including single family neighborhoods. Suddenly, the parade of public commenters was interrupted by a surprise guest. Councilmember Nithya Raman had come to speak.

Raman, not a member of the committee, sat down at a table facing her fellow councilmembers and proceeded to give the most full-throated argument for building more housing I have ever heard an LA politician make. If you have six minutes, I encourage you to listen to it. She spoke eloquently about the housing shortage’s impact on families, on schools, on businesses looking for workers. She connected the housing shortage to our homelessness crisis. She reminded us of the stakes for people targeted by our current federal government - will they be able to live in a state where they have rights and are protected?

Raman went on to make the case for legalizing apartments where they are currently banned. She reminded us that single family zoning is a legacy of racist 20th century policies. She argued that banning apartments in single family zones makes it more likely that new buildings will be developed by demolishing older apartment buildings, displacing current renters. She made the case for giving more Angelenos the opportunity to live in the city’s best neighborhoods so they can improve their kids’ lives. And she reminded her colleagues that CHIP will fall short of our housing targets unless single family neighborhoods are included.

Raman wrapped up her speech to raucous applause from the gallery. The committee then proceeded to completely ignore her, not even bringing up the seven single family options for debate. When CHIP reached the full City Council in December, Raman introduced an amendment to add two of the more modest options to CHIP. Her colleagues voted the amendment down.

In defeat, her office released a newsletter angrily titled “Why are LA leaders voting to continue our housing crisis?” She signaled the fight over single family zoning was not over, telling LAist “it will come up again because the need for housing is so intensive and our shortfall is so extreme.” Then she hinted at something bigger:

What Nithya Raman did next is what’s really worth paying attention to.

Finding her voice

Raman didn’t start her career giving passionate speeches about housing production. When she ran for City Council in 2020, her urban planning background gave her an unusually informed perspective on housing issues and earned her endorsements from prohousing groups, but her campaign focused largely on homelessness. When she did talk about housing, she sounded like a Democratic Socialists of America candidate - which she was:

After she was elected, much of her energy went toward addressing the homelessness crisis, and she has become a true city leader on that important issue. When talking about housing, she would discuss the need to build more, but she was usually careful to emphasize that she mostly meant affordable housing:

In 2021, Raman voted with the rest of the City Council to oppose SB 9, the state duplex bill. Her letter of opposition provides pretty standard “it’s not perfect enough” left-wing objections - no units reserved for low-income families (impossible in a duplex!) and not enough protection for renters in single family homes (who are almost always high-income and don’t need our protection).

All this rhetoric was disappointing for prohousing people like me. We knew Raman could speak persuasively about the dire need to build more housing in LA, but she only seemed to be willing to do it in private. When would she muster the courage to show the city the YIMBY we knew she was?

Nithya unleashed

Last year’s CHIP battle gave Raman an opportunity to reveal her prohousing beliefs, and she took it. Perhaps she felt emboldened by surviving the scandalous attempt to gerrymander her out of her district and winning re-election in March 2024. Perhaps the changing politics around housing gave her courage. Perhaps all those prohousing activists speaking at City Hall during the CHIP fight helped convince her Angelenos broadly share her prohousing views. Or perhaps her defeat in that fight simply lit a fire under her.

Regardless, the way she talks about housing has changed in the past year. Here’s a video she posted a few weeks ago:

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She talks about how housing supply affects rent. She talks about how restrictive zoning chokes off housing production. When was the last time you heard an LA politician talking like this?

Here’s another recent video she posted, from an interview on the local news, in which she says we have to accept change in our neighborhoods for the city to have a future.

This is a politician finding her voice on an issue she is passionate about. But Raman is also putting the talk into action. She has gone on an absolute policymaking tear in 2025, submitting City Council motion after motion to address a wide range of housing bottlenecks in LA. Here are the highlights:

Single stair reform - Allows apartment buildings with 2-6 stories to have only one staircase instead of two. This tweak would make it easier to build smaller, more affordable apartment buildings, especially on smaller lots. It would also make it possible to build bigger, family-sized apartments in those smaller buildings. The motion passed City Council last month, and the resulting ordinance should be voted on in the next week or two, pending the resolution of some drama that I may cover in a future post.

Elimination of parking requirements - In memory of Donald Shoup, this allows developers to decide how much parking to include in a building. Parking is expensive to build, and tenants pay the price in higher rent - around $200/month for each parking space, according to one study. This change will allow developers to decide, if they want, to build apartments with less parking that they can charge lower rents for. The motion passed City Council on Tuesday and will come back there after city staff report back on how to implement it.

Simplifying plan check, permits, and inspections - This might be the biggest one. The post-wildfire rebuilding effort has laid bare how dysfunctional and slow the city’s processes are for reviewing building plans, issuing construction permits, and inspecting the construction process.

It’s gotten so bad that the city is looking to use AI to review plans. If you want a peek into how insane the city’s human plan check process is, check out this interview with one developer on what it took to get permission to plant a tree. This motion would instruct city departments to overhaul their processes, coordinate better, and consolidate the up to 175 clearances projects have to navigate. The motion passed City Council last week and will come back there after city staff report back on how to implement it.

LADWP reform - LADWP has become one of the worst housing bottlenecks in the city. The department routinely makes developers wait multiple years for permits, requires them to make multi-million dollar power upgrades to the entire neighborhood, and refuses to schedule electrical hookup until after a building is complete (forcing finished buildings to remain vacant for months waiting for the power to be turned on). They have also gotten in the habit of requiring huge ugly transformers to be situated in the front of new buildings.

This motion asks LADWP to report back with how it plans to address all these issues. The motion passed City Council on Tuesday and will come back there after LADWP reports back.

Streamlining CHIP special cases - CHIP makes many projects “by-right”, bypassing all the appeals and hearings that give developers headaches. However, plenty of exceptions can trigger more rigorous review - if the project is in a special zoning area, if it needs waivers from burdensome zoning rules, or even if it needs to remove a street tree. This motion will eliminate all these exceptions, and it will also implement the new state law requiring all by-right projects to be approved in 60 days. The motion passed City Council last week and will come back there after city staff report back on how to implement it.

Finally there are two motions on ADUs - one to allow homeowners to sell their ADU, and one to expedite approvals for pre-fab ADUs. Allowing ADUs for sale will be particularly exciting for first-time homebuyers when they see how low asking prices will be. Both motions passed City Council last week and will come back there after city staff report back on how to implement them.

Two motions to make housing more affordable (single stair and parking reform), three to get housing built faster (CHIP streamlining, permitting reform, LADWP reform), and two to make a successful housing production policy (ADUs) even better. None of these motions are particularly sexy, but all play a meaningful part in making it easier to build more housing in LA.

What about single family zoning, which Raman vowed to bring up again? Word is that she is working on a proposal and will announce it soon. I assume she has been waiting for the process to play out on SB 79, which would allow apartment buildings in single family neighborhoods around LA’s train stations and a few bus stops. The legislature passed SB 79 last week, and assuming the governor signs it, the new law will undo the apartment ban in just a tiny portion of the huge swaths of LA currently zoned only for houses. More work will need to be done, and I’m looking forward to seeing what Raman comes up with.

Are LA’s housing politics changing?

Our city has been stuck in a slow-growth mindset for so long that it’s tempting to wishcast the evolution of one councilmember as a trend. But if you squint, you can see real change. In 2019, when a bill similar to SB 79 was being debated at the state level, City Council opposed it unanimously. This year, Council voted to oppose SB 79, but the vote was 8-5, Raman being one of the five dissenters. Five councilmembers also voted in favor of Raman’s amendment to add single family neighborhoods to CHIP last December, which is probably four more than would have supported it when Raman was first elected in 2020. It’s going to take a lot more work to get a prohousing majority on City Council, or to get a Mayor committed to solving the housing crisis. But LA’s housing politics are moving in the right direction, thanks in no small part to Nithya Raman.