Karen Bass is taking the heat for the 3.4% rise in this year’s homeless numbers — but Nithya Raman shares the blame.

The socialist member of the City Council built her entire career around solving the homeless issue, from her career in the nonprofit sector to her tenure in local government.

Through most of that time, homelessness in LA rose and rose. And after a brief two-year dip, it has started rising again.

Raman even chairs the City Council Committee on Housing and Homelessness. She canceled meetings for several weeks this spring, as she focused on her run for mayor.

Also this spring, Raman introduced a new plan to deal with homelessness. She promised to “eliminate” all homeless encampments in her first term as mayor — something she failed to do in nearly six years on the City Council.

But Raman isn’t proposing to use law enforcement to end the encampments. That wouldn’t do — not for a candidate who once wanted to “defund the police.”

The core of Raman’s policy is to build more shelters with the same amount of money. But it’s hard to believe the council can achieve that, after the city and county have wasted a combined $3 billion a year on a failed “housing first” homeless policy.

And Raman and her colleagues continue to hand about $300 million annually to the LA Homeless Services Authority –– an agency so troubled that LA County voted to shun it in 2025 and the Trump administration has suspended the authority’s federal grant funding while investigating alleged conflicts of interest and financial mismanagement.

It’s worth noting too that Raman’s allies in the LA chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have their own ideas.

The socialists published a manifesto last year that calls for ending law enforcement against homeless encampments. They vow to “oppose all legislation, regulations, and policies that criminalizes homelessness or which turn temporary or permanent housing for unhoused people into a de-facto form of incarceration.”

The socialist manifesto also calls on the city to “expropriate privately owned housing” and to adopt a “vacancy tax on housing that landlords have kept unoccupied” — the kind of tax that voters in San Diego recently defeated.

Bass is the one in charge, so naturally her performance is under the most scrutiny.

She ran her entire primary campaign on the idea that she had reduced the number of homeless people in LA, and that she needed another four years to continue that progress.

So much for that.

Bass also tried blaming President Donald Trump — a pathetic effort to avoid blame.

Just a few weeks ago, Bass was posting photos of herself with the president.

But Raman should not be let off the hook. Both mayoral candidates share the blame.

As Shakespeare wrote: “A plague o’ both your houses!”

Download The California Post App, follow us on social, and subscribe to our newsletters