Nithya Raman

And I think you have to do what it takes in order to deliver those results.

On homelessness, I happen to believe that for the encampments that I've dealt with in my district, housing, shelter, services-focused work has been what has reduced street homelessness significantly in my district at almost every encampment that we've worked in.

And that is the work that I would be doing, is create that system of sustained effort to generate results

on reducing street homelessness, on addressing mental health issues, on making our streets safer, cleaner, brighter, fixing street lights, whatever it is, you have to push on these issues.

And I think that is really, I think for me, my governing principle as an elected representative and as someone who is a very proud progressive is like, I want people to feel like the government is working for them.

So initially I thought the kind of the emergency response of the Inside Safe program was necessary for LA.

I also supported declaring a state of emergency on homelessness.

I think street homelessness is a crisis.

It is an emergency and we should respond to it at that scale.

And the kind of effort that it was where you, again, it was renting hotel and motel rooms and using those as shelter to go to encampments and get off for that shelter and then moving an entire encampment off the streets.

That's called encampment resolution.

It's not unique to Inside Safe.

It's something that I've done in my district.

In fact, we did it years before the mayor came into office.

We've done it in Venice.

It's been pioneered across the city, and it's very effective by really focusing encampment by encampment and offering real shelter to people that we're able to actually –

Move people indoors and then clear those encampments and then those areas stay clear because you've actually addressed the reason why people are on the street in the first place.

So to me, that kind of an encampment resolution focused response is really important.

The issue becomes when the intervention that you're using is enormously expensive.

And you're not doing the work to ensure that you are making it into a fiscally sustainable response.