Daniel Lichtenstein-Boris
I was door knocking a hillside neighborhood for progressive city councilperson Nithya Raman. We were within striking distance of east Hollywood in an upper middle-class enclave called Franklin Hills. Two- and three-bedroom homes in Los Angeles tucked away on a winding hillside, the average price? 1.5 million and up. One older Asian man jumped out of his car and began engaging me. “What about those stop signs? She should remove the stop signs so I can drive my BMW,” he fumed, when I mentioned I was campaigning for Nithya’s reelection. “I have to stop all the time; there are stop signs everywhere in this neighborhood. I can’t drive fast,” the self-described libertarian huffed. “To hit a pedestrian,” I mumbled.
Another, washing an old red car, seemed confused about politics. He mentioned the deep state and CIA. “The deep state. Some say it’s a conspiracy. But it’s real. We have three branches of government. They all defend themselves and check each other. But the CIA thinks they are above the law…” He remarked. “I don’t like his position on gays, but I’m voting for Trump this time.”
Another woman mentioned she supported universal healthcare but didn’t see why we have to give Russian immigrants everything while there are homeless vets sleeping in the streets. She also seemed disillusioned. Another man said, “you liberals, you are always so doctrinaire, ideological to a fault. My friends voted for Rick Caruso, they said, well you have all these homeless encampments in front of your house, technically it’s illegal, lock them up. Sweep them away somewhere. I’ll vote for her,” he lied with a straight face. “I’m just telling you what my friends say.”
An old white man with a long beard came to the door as I knocked. I mentioned her record on homelessness. “They spend 150,000 on each homeless person, what do they do with all the money?” “Everyone gets paid,” he remarked, “except the homeless shivering in a wet blanket on the sidewalk.”
Another, proud of his electric cars plugged into his driveway’s electric charging portal, spoke dismissively of Nithya Raman’s plans for RV encampments. We need to follow Venice and San Pedro, not her, the former neighborhood association chair stated, referring to the former police union and management side labor lawyer city council persons, Tim McOsker, and Tracy Parks. “I don’t know who’s running against her. But I’ll probably vote for them.”
Nithya Raman is running for re-election. She won as a Bernie Sanders supported upstart city councilperson, defeating an incumbent Democrat with Bernie Sanders on the ballot in 2020. A fighter for renters rights, criminal justice reform, and a green new deal, she tapped into the angst and fear of displacement of tenants in rapidly gentrifying Hollywood to win election to city council as a democratic socialist, environmentalist, and fierce opponent of the LAPD homeless sweeps program where Los Angeles spent over $100 million annually cleaning up encampments, arresting the unhoused, tossing their tattered belongings, only to have them reappeal a block or two away some days later.
Her district was obliterated in the redistricting process, and now encompasses the Hollywood hills. The first weekend in December, I door knocked for Nithya. The callousness and cruelty and jaded disillusionment of wealthy “Democrats” shocks the senses. It scares me.
Will she win? Garcetti, in a nod to her Hollywood liberal backers concerned about their lofty hillside views, appointed her to the board of the Southern California Air Quality Management District where she has been a steadfast advocate for heightened air quality standards, leading the charge against smog and fossil fuels. Through her advocacy, she helped pass legislation to ban new oil drilling in the city of LA, and to phase out fossil fuel extraction over the next twenty years. She has housed more than five hundred people through her district office, sending case workers doing aggressive outreach to homeless encampments and putting people up in hotels and other temporary housing.
But the former homelessness nonprofit director has been redistricted. She won the renter vote. Will the first socialist city councilperson in Los Angeles lose in a landslide, or will she put up a fight?
Let’s see what the scrouges of the city say in the Hollywood hills. Do they want clean air and human services, or just a nightstick and sanitation garbage truck to meet a child in a manger in a tent this Christmas eve? Will her position on Palestinian human rights scare away liberal hearts? Will she be defeated like a pedestrian encounter with a black beamer speeding through stop signs?
Maybe there is another story. One of an underdog claiming victory. Maybe the Hollywood hills and Sherman Oaks, are now united behind Hollywood labor. Famous actors, musicians, and screenwriters, members of SAG-AFTRA and the WGA, will look out from their decks sipping coffee on a crystal clear morning in late February, with their movie residual payments and mail-in ballots sitting on fake granite kitchen counter tops. They’ll fill in in the bubble for Nithya Raman, the crusader for clean water, clean air, and a clean place to stay for the homeless and outcast of the city of Angels.
Will you join her one weekend door knocking in the Hollywood hills? You won’t have that chance again. Maybe you’ll meet someone famous? Maybe Nithya might win.