homelessness

Two years ago, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass went to Sherman Oaks to cut a quick campaign ad for a trusted ally: Councilmember Nithya Raman.

Standing next to Bass, Raman looked into the camera and praised the mayor’s work on homelessness, saying she was “honored” to have her support.

“I couldn’t be prouder to work alongside her,” Raman said.

That video, recorded at a get-out-the-vote rally for Raman’s reelection campaign, feels like a political lifetime ago. On Feb. 7, Raman launched a surprise bid to unseat Bass, saying the city is at a “breaking point” and no longer capable of providing basic services.

Raman’s entry into the race, hours before the filing deadline, shocked the city’s political elite and infuriated the mayor’s supporters. Some observers called it a betrayal of Shakespearean proportions.

Raman’s name had appeared on a list of Bass endorsers just weeks earlier. Bass’ support for Raman’s 2024 reelection bid had helped the councilmember earn 50.7% of the vote and avoid a messy runoff.

“How can she treat a relationship like this, and dispose of it once it’s served its purpose?” said Julio Esperias, a Democratic Party activist who volunteered with Raman’s 2024 campaign at Bass’ request. “It’s a breach of trust, a betrayal, and it’s kind of hard for me to stomach at the moment.”

In 2024, Bass — then at the peak of her popularity — was featured prominently in Raman’s campaign mailers. She sent canvassers to knock on voters’ doors. A speech Bass delivered at Raman’s rally in Sherman Oaks was turned into a social media video with stirring background music.

Councilwoman Nithya Raman talks to attendees during an election night party held by the Democratic Socialists of America – LA chapter at The Greyhound on Nov. 4 in Los Angeles.

(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)

That video, along with other posts highlighting Bass’ support for her, still appears on Raman’s Instagram page, which now promotes her run for mayor.

Bass, politically bruised over her handling of last year’s devastating Palisades fire, now faces an insurgent campaign from one of the City Council’s savviest players.

Esperias said he regrets helping Raman claw back the endorsement of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party in 2023, after it nearly went to her opponent.

Bass, for her part, has downplayed any hard feelings, saying she intends to run on her record — including her collaboration with Raman. Asked if she viewed Raman’s candidacy as a betrayal, she responded: “That’s not significant now.”

Mayor Karen Bass speaks before signing a rent stabilization ordinance passed by the Los Angeles City Council, the first update to the ordinance in nearly 40 years, at Strategic Actions for a Just Economy in Los Angeles Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2025.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

“I will tell you that it was a surprise, absolutely,” Bass said. “But I am moving forward, I am going to run my race, and I look forward to serving with her in my second term.”

Raman has been delivering a similarly complicated message, expressing deep respect for the mayor while arguing that the city is in desperate need of change.

On the morning of Feb. 7, before filling out her paperwork at the city clerk’s office, Raman called Bass to inform her she was running.

The next day, the two women met privately at Getty House, the mayor’s mansion. Neither would say why they met or what they discussed.

At City Hall, both supporters and critics of Bass have been retracing recent events, looking for clues as to how things went wrong.

In November, while watching election returns for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Raman told The Times that Bass was the most progressive mayor the city ever had — noting that Angelenos “vote their values.” Last month, Bass twice announced that she had Raman’s endorsement.

On Friday, Raman said she could not remember exactly when she endorsed Bass, saying she believed it came during a phone call with the mayor “probably in the fourth quarter of last year.” At the same time, she said her exasperation with the city’s leadership has been building for months.

“I have been actually frustrated by the conditions in the city for quite some time, particularly over this last year, where we are both unable to deliver basic services, like fixing streetlights and repaving streets for my constituents, but also are not moving toward a more accountable, transparent and efficient system of addressing issues like homelessness,” she said in an interview.

Gloria Martinez, center, of United Teachers Los Angeles, speaks at a rally outside City Hall featuring opponents of the effort to rewrite Measure ULA, a tax on property sales to pay for housing initiatives.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Raman pointed to Measure ULA, the voter-approved tax on property sales of $5.3 million and up, as a catalyst for her mayoral bid. Although she has been a supporter of the tax, she has also concluded that it is a major obstacle to building new housing.

Last month, Raman tried without success to put a measure on the June 2 ballot that would have scaled back the types of properties covered by the tax, in hopes of jump-starting apartment construction.

Raman also told The Times that Inside Safe, the mayor’s signature program to move unhoused people indoors, needs to be redesigned so it is “fiscally sustainable.” She said she “simply did not see any progress” from the mayor’s office on that issue.

Asked whether she betrayed Bass, Raman said her decision to run was driven by the growing problems facing the city — and the need for change.

“My most important relationship in this role is with the people of Los Angeles, not the politics of City Hall,” she said.

Bass campaign spokesperson Douglas Herman pointed out that Raman is head of the council’s housing and homelessness committee — and that she repeatedly voiced support for Bass programs that have delivered back-to-back reductions in street homelessness.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman scans a QR code to get election updates during an election night party in March 2024.

(Myung Chun/Los Angeles Times)

“While we are developing more cost effective models, it is absolutely urgent that we get people off our streets immediately,” Herman said. “Nithya Raman is acting like a typical politician and knows it because she congratulated Mayor Bass for cleaning dangerous and long-standing encampments in her district.”

Raman’s decision has sparked an outcry from an unlikely combination of Bass allies. Danny J. Bakewell, Jr., executive editor of the Los Angeles Sentinel, condemned Raman’s actions last week in an editorial that invoked the O’Jay’s 1972 hit “Back Stabbers.”

“One of life’s greatest disappointments is discovering that someone you believed was a friend is not,” wrote Bakewell, whose newspaper focuses on issues facing the city’s Black community.

The Los Angeles Police Protective League, which represents rank-and-file LAPD officers and opposed Raman’s reelection in 2024, offered a similar take.

“If political backstabbing were a crime, Nithya Raman would be a wanted fugitive,” the union’s board, which has endorsed Bass, said in a statement.

Zev Yaroslavsky, a former county supervisor and City Council member, does not believe that Raman’s recent history with Bass — endorsing her and later running against her — will be an issue for the electorate. In L.A. political circles, however, it will be viewed as a transgression, at least in the short term, he said.

“As a politician, you don’t have much currency. What you have is your word,” he said.

Yaroslavsky, director of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, said he is certain that Raman and the other major candidates — community organizer Rae Huang, reality television star Spencer Pratt and tech entrepreneur Adam Miller — have looked at polls showing that Bass is politically weakened and vulnerable to a challenge.

“If Raman becomes mayor, nobody’s going to remember this, including the political class,” he said. “If she doesn’t, it’ll be a little more difficult for her. It’s not irreparable. But there will be a residue to this.”

On the council, Raman belongs to a four-member voting bloc, each of whom won office with support from Democratic Socialists of America. While Bass is generally considered more conservative than Raman on public safety issues, the two share many of the same policy priorities, particularly around homelessness.

In her first campaign for City Council in 2020, Raman ran on a promise to address the city’s homelessness crisis in a humanitarian way, by moving unhoused residents into temporary and permanent housing.

Bass, a former state Assembly speaker and 12-year member of Congress, took office two years later and made homelessness her signature issue, convincing the council to expand her power to respond to the crisis.

Raman backed Bass’ declaration of a homelessness emergency, which gave the mayor the power to award contracts and sign leases directly. A week later, Bass staged her first Inside Safe operation in Raman’s district, on a stretch of Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood.

As recently as July, Raman appeared on a Bass press release touting the city’s progress on homelessness.

Bass first announced that Raman had endorsed her on Jan. 27. Raman said she did not begin seriously contemplating a run for mayor until the following week, as the filing deadline approached.

Over a tumultuous 48-hour period, former L.A. schools Supt. Austin Beutner exited the race, while real estate developer Rick Caruso and L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath announced that they, too, would stay out.

“I realized we were potentially not even going to have a real competition, and that troubled me,” Raman said.

Esperias, the Bass supporter, said he is still processing Raman’s decision to run.

He said Bass tapped him to help Raman in 2023 after one of Raman’s opponents, deputy city attorney Ethan Weaver, cleared a key hurdle in his bid for the endorsement of the county’s Democratic Party.

Esperias, who lives in L.A.’s Vermont Square neighborhood, said he worked with Raman’s team on a plan to persuade party members to pull Weaver’s endorsement, then flip it to Raman. While Esperias and others called and texted party members, Bass sent a letter urging them to endorse Raman.

Weaver, in an interview, said he immediately felt the difference. After Bass’ letter, interest in endorsing him evaporated.

“It changed the amount of people that would take my call,” he said.

Once the election was over, Esperias said, Raman sent a text message thanking him for his help during a tough campaign.

“I put my credibility, I put my relationships on the line to help build this coalition to get that endorsement,” Esperias said.

Raman argued that the support has gone both ways.

During Bass’ first mayoral campaign, Raman held a fundraiser at her Silver Lake home and introduced Bass to key people in her district.

“I did help her in her election as well, just like she helped me,” she said.

Times staff writer Dakota Smith contributed to this report.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass was having a really bad week.

But then it turned into a pretty good week, and she must have breathed a sigh of relief.

Until the Saturday morning surprise.

I had to set fire to my scorecard, and to the column I had just drafted, which touched on all the expected big-name challengers who had bowed out of the mayoral race in the past several days: L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, billionaire businessman Rick Caruso (who forced a runoff with Bass the last time around), and former L.A. Unified schools chief Austin Beutner.

It was looking as though we wouldn’t get a badly needed, monthslong, toe-to-toe face-off about all that’s right and wrong in the sprawling metropolis of high hopes and low expectations. In a conversation I had with Loyola Marymount University’s Fernando Guerra, a decades-long observer of the local political scene, he made this observation about the dull political season that was shaping up:

“What is interesting to me is that no one from the establishment political class is running against [Bass] when she is clearly vulnerable.”

Vulnerable because of her handling of the Palisades fire and its aftermath.

Vulnerable because of limited progress on core issues such as homelessness, housing affordability and the shameful condition of streets, sidewalks and parks.

But then came Saturday morning, when, in an unexpected move, L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Raman decided to step up, injecting a new element of drama into the race.

It was a surprise because Raman and Bass are not political enemies. In fact, they’ve largely been allies and have endorsed each other’s reelection bids.

So what was Raman thinking in signing up for a challenge in which she is clearly the underdog?

“I have deep respect for Mayor Bass. We’ve worked closely together on my biggest priorities and her biggest priorities, and there’s significant alignment there,” Raman told The Times. “But over the last few months in particular, I’ve really begun to feel like unless we have some big changes in how we do things in Los Angeles, that the things we count on are not going to function anymore.”

There’s more to it than that, in political terms. Raman is to the left of Bass and the traditional left in Los Angeles. She and three other council members supported by the Democratic Socialists of America have changed the conversation at City Hall, with more emphasis on social service, housing and labor issues, and less on traditional law enforcement.

Among their supporters are renters, immigrants, young adults, the underserved, and the frontline workers in the minimum-wage economy.

Raman’s candidacy — along with DSA candidates for other city offices — makes the election something of a referendum on the evolving center of political clout in L.A. It raises the question of whether the city is ready to blow things up and move further in the direction of New York City, which just elected as mayor the ultra-progressive Zohran Mamdani.

And for all of that, it also raises the question of whether progressives can both deliver on their promises and also balance a budget. No easy task, there.

As for Bass, you don’t get as far in politics as she has — from the state Legislature to Congress to City Hall — without sharp survival skills and without collecting friends you can count on, even when the road to reelection is filled with potholes.

And even when an ally comes after you.

“Wow, what a surprise,” Guerra said upon Raman’s entry into the race.

He considers her a formidable foe who was the first to prove “that the DSA can win in Los Angeles” and who brings several advantages to a campaign against Bass.

For one, she has a record of some success on homelessness in her district and was involved in that cause in the Silver Lake area before she was in public office, when she identified a startling lack of coordination and continuity. And by virtue of her age, 44, she’s aligned with younger voters hungry for change in political leadership.

It’s possible that with Raman in the race, and the nuts-and-bolts issues of governance now center stage, there will be slightly less emphasis on Bass’s handling and mishandling of the Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of properties, wiped out a vibrant community and killed 12 people.

When I said at the top of this column that Bass was having a really bad week, I was referring to the Palisades fire and the latest story from Times investigative reporters Alene Tchekmedyian and Paul Pringle. They had already established that the Los Angeles Fire Department had failed to pre-deploy adequately for the fire, and that it had failed to extinguish an earlier fire that later triggered the epic disaster.

The reporters had also established that the so-called “after-action” report on the fire had been altered to downplay failures by the department and the city, all of which was scandalous enough.

But on Wednesday, Tchekmedyian and Pringle reported that Bass was involved in the revisions despite her earlier denials. The mayor “wanted key findings about the LAFD’s actions removed or softened before the report was made public,” according to sources.

Bass vehemently denied the allegations and blasted The Times. But even before the latest story, Bass’s Palisades report card was one that a prudent person might have fed to the dog. She had left the country just before the fire despite warnings of potentially cataclysmic conditions. And multiple other missteps followed, including the botched hiring and early departure of a rebuilding czar.

Raman has not targeted Bass’ handling of the fire, and we’ll see if that changes. I don’t consider the response to the ICE raids to be a point of contention between Raman and Bass. One of the mayor’s strengths in office has been her defense of the city’s immigrants and her pushback against President Trump.

“Bass gets high marks resisting ICE,” Guerra said of polling and public opinion surveys he has either conducted or reviewed. “But on other issues, including homelessness, she does not do well.”

Two-thirds of voters in one poll said they would not back Bass in the June primary, Guerra said. But that poll did not offer an alternative to Bass, and now there is one.

Actually, several. The others include Brentwood tech entrepreneur Adam Miller, who’s got money to spend; reality TV personality Spencer Pratt, a Republican who lost his Palisades home and has been hammering the mayor; and minister/community organizer Rae Huang, a Democratic socialist.

Do they matter, given the odds against them and the entry of Raman into the race?

Yes, they might. Bass needs more than 50% of the June primary vote to win outright. But with Raman and the others grabbing varying percentages of the vote, a two-person November runoff is likely and the candidates will almost surely be Bass and Raman.

After a crazy week in L.A., allies are now foes.

And the race for mayor just got interesting.

steve.lopez@latimes.com

Lindsey Horvath will not run for Los Angeles mayor, becoming the latest political heavyweight to decide against a challenge to incumbent Karen Bass.

Horvath, who as an L.A. County supervisor represents 2 million people in a sprawling Westside and San Fernando Valley district, ended weeks of speculation about her political intentions, saying her work in the county “is not finished.”

“Over these past few months, you have shown me all the reasons you love Los Angeles —and why it’s worth fighting for,” Horvath said Friday in a statement. “I am grateful to the many leaders, organizations, and every single Angeleno who urged me to run for Mayor of Los Angeles.”

Horvath’s announcement, issued the night before the deadline for candidates to file, comes days after former L.A. schools superintendent Austin Beutner ended his mayoral campaign, citing the death of his 22-year-old daughter. Real estate developer Rick Caruso also removed himself from contention, saying for a second time Thursday that he would not run.

The filing period for mayoral candidates in the June 2 primary closes at noon on Saturday.

Horvath, 43, has been one of the mayor’s most outspoken critics over the past year, assailing her record on homelessness and last year’s Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and left 12 people dead. On social media, Horvath stoked speculation about her political future while calling the city’s record on homelessness “indefensible.”

Bass, in turn, has criticized county officials for pulling hundreds of millions of dollars out of a city-county agency on homelessness — a move spearheaded by Horvath — and into a new county agency. More recently, the mayor spoke out against the county’s plan to cut $200 million in homeless services.

Bass, 72, still faces several other challengers from across the political spectrum.

Reality TV star Spencer Pratt, a Republican, has received praise from an array of Trump supporters, including Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, of Florida. Pratt has focused heavily on the city’s handling of the fire, which destroyed his home.

Democratic socialist Rae Huang is running against the mayor from her political left. Huang has called for more public housing and for a reduction in the number of police officers, with the cost savings poured into other city services.

Brentwood tech entrepreneur Adam Miller, who describes himself as a lifelong Democrat, said the city is on a downward trajectory and needs stronger management. The 56-year-old nonprofit executive plans to tap his personal wealth to jump-start his campaign.

Also in the race is Asaad Alnajjar, an employee of the Bureau of Street Lighting who sits on the Porter Ranch Neighborhood Council. Alnajjar, who has already loaned his campaign $80,000, said he would do a better job than Bass at running the city.

“I’m a leader. She’s a manager. That’s the difference,” said Alnajjar, 61.

With so many candidates in the mix, Bass and her political team do not expect she will clear the 50% bar to avoid a November runoff.

Bass has been running on her record, touting a major drop in homicides and reductions in street homelessness since she took office in 2022. She has talked up her efforts to speed up the approval of affordable housing and permits for rebuilding projects in Pacific Palisades.

The mayor has positioned herself as a check on Trump’s agenda. During last summer’s immigration raids in Los Angeles, she regularly called on the president to end the crackdown and remove the California National Guard from the city.

From the beginning, a mayoral run would have been a risky move for Horvath, who is not expected to face any major challengers to her own bid for reelection.

Horvath would have had to forfeit her seat to run against Bass, while facing a tight timeline for fundraising. Her campaign had already scheduled a reelection fundraiser for next week — after the filing deadline for mayoral candidates.

In political circles, Horvath is viewed as a strong candidate in 2028 for county chief executive, an elected office created through a ballot measure that Horvath championed.

The will-she-or-won’t-she events of the past week elevated Horvath’s political profile, as she aired her criticisms of the mayor on CNN and other news shows.

Relations between Bass and Horvath have been chilly at least since the Palisades fire broke out. The two were at odds over the press conferences that were held to update the public on the disaster and on efforts to reopen the burn area to traffic.

The relationship deteriorated further after Horvath and her colleagues voted to shift hundreds of millions of dollars out of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a city-county partnership, and into a new county agency on homelessness.

Horvath, on social media, accused Bass of putting out “misinformation” about the new county agency. Bass, in turn, warned the county’s actions could cause the city to backslide in its fight against homelessness.

Horvath has been in elected office on and off since 2009, when she joined the West Hollywood City Council. She left the council in 2011, then rejoined in 2015, staying for about seven years.

In 2022, Horvath won her supervisorial seat, defeating former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg, a political veteran.

Had she entered the race, Horvath would have faced questions about an array of issues bedeviling the county, including a $4-billion legal payout over sexual abuse that was later marred by allegations of fraud.

She was also a major force behind Measure G, a 2024 ballot measure that will expand the number of county supervisors and create the county CEO position but also is on track to inadvertently repeal a criminal justice reform measure passed by voters in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

A tech executive who made a fortune developing education software, then waded into the fight against homelessness, is now entering the race for Los Angeles mayor.

Adam Miller, co-founder of Better Angels, a nonprofit focused on preventing homelessness and building affordable housing, filed paperwork on Wednesday to run against Mayor Karen Bass in the June 2 primary election.

Miller, in an interview, said the city is on a downward trajectory and beset with problems — and needs someone with strong leadership skills at City Hall.

“A lot of the issues we face in the city are management problems, and I know how to manage,” he said. “I’ve managed effectively teams that are big and small. I’ve managed teams that are domestic and international. And I’ve managed programs at every stage, so I know how to scale things up and make them operate at scale for a big system.”

The 56-year-old entrepreneur and nonprofit executive is making his move at a moment when the candidate lineup remains unsettled. Even with Saturday’s deadline for filing candidate paperwork fast approaching, some are still undecided on whether to run.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath has spent several days hinting that she may jump into the race, while also taking shots at Bass on CNN and elsewhere.

Maryam Zar, who founded the Palisades Recovery Coalition in the wake of the Palisades fire, is also weighing a run. Even real estate developer Rick Caruso, who publicly ruled out a mayoral bid last month, told KNX on Wednesday that he may reconsider.

Former L.A. schools Supt. Austin Beutner, who launched his campaign in October, has been out of the public eye since the death of his 22-year-old daughter on Jan. 6. Reality TV star Spencer Pratt has spent the last several weeks promoting his book “The Guy You Loved to Hate,” and emerged earlier this week to file his candidate paperwork.

Community organizer Rae Huang has been courting the city’s left-leaning voters, appearing with podcaster Hasan Piker in a conversation about housing policy.

Meanwhile, Bass has been using the trappings of her office to promote her work, scheduling two State of the City speeches in a three-month span. The first of those, delivered Monday, sounded in many ways like a campaign stump speech, except longer.

After Miller filed his paperwork, Bass spokesperson Douglas Herman immediately derided him, describing Miller as a “wealthy venture capitalist” who sold software that helped large companies “systematically lay off workers.”

“The last thing Los Angeles needs now is another self-funder who doesn’t understand the crisis of affordability in our city,” Herman said. “Mayor Karen Bass will continue working to solve the biggest problems facing our city with groundbreaking efforts on housing affordability, reductions in street homelessness and public safety stats sitting at 60-year lows.”

Miller pushed back on the mayor’s statement, saying his company’s software was used for training and helping employees build their skills. He said that, although he will provide a loan to his campaign to get things started, he will be raising money like any other campaign.

Miller is the former chief executive of Cornerstone OnDemand, the global training and development company that he built over more than two decades, growing it to more than 3,000 employees. The publicly traded company was sold in 2021 to a private equity firm for $5.2 billion, he said.

The Brentwood resident has been heavily focused on philanthropy, serving as chair of the nonprofit 1P.org, which is a charitable foundation that provides funding to other nonprofit groups.

Miller said he and his wife, Staci, while mapping out their philanthropic work, chose to focus on intractable problems at the local, state, national and global level. Locally, he said, homelessness was the issue they identified as the most intractable.

1P.org has been providing funding to Better Angels, which has been working to build affordable housing while also distributing micro-loans to families facing eviction. In addition, the nonprofit has developed an app to help homeless outreach workers stay connected.

Sara Reyes, executive director of SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition, said its 700 volunteers use Better Angels’ outreach app to maintain relationships with one another and their clients in neighborhoods stretching from Hollywood to Atwater Village.

The app is not integrated with the homeless database maintained by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, a city-county partnership, and would be more effective if it was, Reyes said.

Miller said the city needs help with issues that go well beyond homelessness. For example, he said, city leaders have made L.A. “one of the least developer friendly cities in the country,” hindering the construction of new homes.

“We have a major housing shortage,” he said. “We have an unacceptable number of people who are unhoused. We have affordability issues. I’d say city cleanliness is on the decline. We are not well prepared for disasters, as was clearly seen last year.”

The Los Angeles City Council has again increased what it will pay Gibson Dunn to represent it in a contentious homelessness case, bringing the law firm’s contract to nearly $7.5 million.

In mid-May, the council approved a three-year contract capped at $900,000. The law firm then billed the city $1.8 million for two weeks of legal work, with 15 of its attorneys charging nearly $1,300 per hour.

In a closed-door meeting Wednesday, the council voted 9-4 to approve an increase of about $1.8 million from the current $5.7 million, with Councilmembers John Lee, Tim McOsker, Imelda Padilla and Monica Rodriguez opposed. It was not clear why the additional money was needed.

Rodriguez said that spending resources on outside lawyers instead of complying with the settlement terms in the case is “simply a waste of public funds.”

“In the face of a mounting homelessness crisis, it’s misguided for the City to continue pouring our scarce resources into outside counsel instead of housing the most vulnerable Angelenos,” Rodriguez said in a statement.

The contract “has expanded significantly beyond its original scope,” Lee said in a statement, later adding, “I believe the Council has a duty to demand transparency and closely scrutinize costs.”

The L.A. city attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

The city reached a settlement with the nonprofit LA Alliance in 2022, agreeing to create 12,915 homeless shelter beds or other housing opportunities, while also clearing thousands of encampments.

Since then, the LA Alliance has repeatedly accused the city of failing to comply with the terms of the settlement agreement.

Gibson Dunn was retained by the city a week before a federal judge called a seven-day hearing to determine whether he should take authority over the city’s homelessness programs from Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council. Alliance lawyers said during those proceedings that they wanted Bass and two council members to testify.

The judge later declined to put Los Angeles’ homelessness programs into receivership, even as he concluded that the city failed to adhere to the settlement.

Theane Evangelis, a Gibson Dunn attorney who led the firm’s LA Alliance team, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto has praised Gibson Dunn’s work in the LA Alliance case, saying the firm helped the city retain control over its homelessness programs while also keeping Bass and the two council members off the stand.

She commended the firm — which secured a landmark Supreme Court ruling that upheld laws prohibiting homeless people from camping in public spaces — for getting up to speed on the settlement, mastering a complex set of policy matters within a week.

Faced with lingering criticism from council members, Feldstein Soto agreed to help with the cost of the Gibson Dunn contract, committing $1 million from her office’s budget. The council has also tapped $4 million from the city’s “unappropriated balance,” an account for funds that have not yet been allocated.

On Thursday, Matthew D. Umhofer, an attorney who represents LA Alliance, called the Gibson Dunn contract increase “predictable.”

“It’s a taxpayer-funded debacle designed to help city officials avoid being held accountable for their failures on homelessness,” Umhofer said in a statement. “The amount will keep going up as long as the City is more interested in ending oversight than ending homelessness.”

San José Mayor Matt Mahan announced he is running for California governor Thursday, pitching himself as a pragmatic Democrat who would prioritize state residents’ quality of life over the principled progressivism that has become entrenched in California politics — including on crime, homelessness, housing and affordability.

“I’m jumping in this race because we need a governor who is both a fighter for our values and a fixer of our problems,” said Mahan, one of the state’s most outspoken Democratic critics of departing Gov. Gavin Newsom. “We can fix the biggest problems facing California, and I believe that because we’re making real progress on homelessness, public safety [and] housing supply in San José.”

Mahan claimed policies under his watch have reduced crime and the number of unsheltered residents, helped police solve every city homicide for nearly the last four years, and should be emulated statewide.

“I want to follow through on that work by holding state government accountable for partnering with cities and counties to deliver better outcomes,” he said.

Mahan, the father of two young children whose wife, Silvia, works in education, said last year that it wasn’t the right time for him to run for governor, despite calls for him to do so from moderate forces in state politics and business. But he said he changed his mind after failing to find a candidate among the already crowded Democratic field who he felt he could support — despite meeting with several of them to discuss their plans if elected.

“I have not heard the field embrace the kinds of solutions that I don’t think we need, I know we need, as the mayor of the largest city in Northern California,” Mahan said. In “the current field, it feels like many people are more interested in running either against Trump or in his image. I’m running for the future of California, and I believe that we can fight for our values on the national stage while being accountable for fixing our problems here at home.”

Mahan, a 43-year-old Harvard graduate and tech entrepreneur from Watsonville, was elected to the San José City Council in 2020 and then as mayor of the Bay Area city in a narrow upset in 2022. In 2024, he was reelected in a landslide.

More recently, he has been pushing a concise campaign message — “Back to Basics” — and launched a nonprofit policy organization by the same name to promote his ideas statewide. His former chief of staff, Jim Reed, recently left his office to lead the initiative.

Although he isn’t well-known across the state, influential Californians in politics said he’s nonetheless a candidate who should be taken seriously — including progressives who have not always seen eye to eye with him, such as Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont).

“Matt Mahan is a person of integrity who has made great progress on housing in San José, cost of living, and public safety. He is a terrific Mayor and would be a formidable candidate for Governor,” Khanna said in a statement to The Times.

While in office, Mahan has cut a decidedly moderate path while eschewing some progressive policies that other party leaders have championed in a state where Democratic voters far outnumber Republicans.

He has backed Newsom, a two-term governor and potential Democratic presidential candidate, on some of the governor’s signature initiatives — including Proposition 1, a plan to ramp up and in some instances require people on the street to undergo mental health treatment. He also joined Newsom in opposing a proposed wealth tax on California billionaires, saying it would “backfire” by driving business out of the state — including in Silicon Valley’s tech sector, where many of his constituents work.

However, Mahan has not been shy about criticizing Newsom, either — including for taking a brash, President Trump-like online demeanor in pushing back against Trump and other critics of California, including in the business world, and for not doing more to solve entrenched issues such as crime, drug addiction and homelessness.

He broke with Newsom and other Democratic leaders to back Proposition 36, the 2024 ballot measure that increased penalties for theft and crimes involving fentanyl. After the measure was passed overwhelmingly by voters, he accused Newsom of failing to properly fund its statewide implementation.

Mahan also pushed through a plan in San José to arrest people on the street who repeatedly decline offers of shelter, which some progressives lambasted as inhumane.

San José, California’s third-most populous city after Los Angeles and San Diego, has a growing reputation for being a safe big city — with a recent report by SmartAsset ranking it the safest large city in the U.S. based on several factors including crime rates, traffic fatalities, overdose deaths and median income.

Mahan said income inequality is “a very real issue” and “a threat to our democracy.” But he said the solution is not the proposal being floated to tax 5% of the assets of the state’s billionaires to raise funds for healthcare. He said the proposal would have the opposite effect and diminish state tax revenue by driving wealthy people out of the state, as similar policies have done in European countries that have implemented them, but he did not specify how he would backfill the impending federal healthcare funding cuts that will affect the state’s more vulnerable residents.

He said he has heard directly from business leaders and others in Silicon Valley who are worried about the impact of such a tax, which they believe “strikes right at the heart of Silicon Valley’s economy, which has been an engine of prosperity and economic opportunity for literally millions of people in our state.”

He said California should instead focus on “closing loopholes in the tax code that allow the wealthiest among us to never pay taxes on their capital gains,” and on finding ways to make government more efficient rather than “always going back to the voters and asking them to pay more.”

Mahan said San José has made “measurable progress” on the issues that voters raise with him at the grocery store: “crime, the high cost of living, unsheltered homelessness, untreated addiction.” But the city is limited in what it can do without “state leadership and real accountability in Sacramento and at the county level,” he said.

Mahan has already elicited early support among wealthy venture capitalists and tech industry leaders, who would be able to bankroll a formidable campaign.

In response to a post in early January in which Mahan said the wealth tax would “sink California’s innovation economy,” the angel investor Matt Brezina responded, “Is Matt running for governor yet? Silicon Valley and California, let’s embrace Matt Mahan and his sensible policies. Matt understands how wealth is created, opportunity is created and society is advanced.”

Brezina did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Newsom.

Others would prefer Mahan not run.

Santa Clara County Democratic Central Committee Chair Bill James said Mahan “hasn’t engaged” with his group much, seems to consider “the more centrist and even the more conservative population in the area to be his base,” and frames his policy agenda as that of a “moderate Democrat” when “it’s a little Republican too.”

“Matt may run as a Democrat and feel like he is a Democrat, but his policy positions are more conservative than many Democrats we interact with here in Santa Clara County,” he said.

Assemblymember Alex Lee (D-San José), chair of the Legislative Progressive Caucus, said he also would prefer Mahan focus on San José, especially given the “very big year” ahead as the region hosts several major sporting events.

“Our mayor is right that there needs to be more focus on the city getting ‘back to basics,’ and I don’t know how running for governor and doing a big statewide race really brings the core governance needed for a city,” Lee said. “Everyone and their mom is running for governor right now, and I just think it’s better-suited for us to have his focus here.”

Lee said the Democratic Party is a “very big tent,” but voters should be aware that Mahan has aligned himself with the “most MAGA conservative” voices on certain issues, such as Proposition 36.

“He bucks the Democratic Party,” Lee said.