Nithya Raman

that picture of yourself depicted as Jesus Christ?

Thank you so much for having me.

Well, the endorsement request had come months prior.

So I just want to be very clear about that.

It wasn't like an overnight change of heart.

But I will say that I had been getting really frustrated with the way that things had been going in the city and in the way that things had been going in City Hall.

On so many of the issues that I really cared about, on housing and housing production and the cost of housing, the extraordinary cost of housing here in Los Angeles, I felt like the city was actually fighting against state mandates to build housing.

The city was fighting affordable housing.

And we didn't have any clear direction or urgency around the issue at all.

On issues like homelessness, where people were demanding accountability, that is possible, absolutely possible to deliver things that I have actually made progress on in my own district and in my limited way as the chair of the committee.

We were just not doing on a system wide level and we didn't feel any urgency around it.

And I feel like that lack of urgency was everywhere in every issue that I cared about.

And I kept trying to push back against it and kept hitting a wall.

And I think I got increasingly frustrated.

And I'm not a traditional politician in that this is what I want to be doing for the rest of my life.

I actually didn't even really think that I would ever run for office.

But I really care about Los Angeles.

And the idea exactly like you said of having a mayoral election where we weren't even talking about the fact that L.A.

is struggling right now, that a lot of people feel like it's moving in the wrong direction, that the city hall needs to be doing things differently in order to address our biggest problems, that we weren't even going to have that conversation.

I mean, it made me crazy.