LA Squawk Box for Monday, June 8, 2026

Nithya Raman takes runoff spot from Pratt, The LA Reporter joins podcast chat with charter reform alums, Bunker Hill tenants in Chinatown raise awareness about rent increases, and more.

What’s happening today?

The LA Reporter tees-up LA city charter reform on podcast with charter alums: I spoke to Raphe Sonenshein for his latest podcast episode, out today, on the charter reform effort happening at LA City Hall, something that I have been covering at The LA Reporter since last year. Sonenshein was executive director of the appointed Charter Reform Commission that was stood up in the late 1990s and that helped lead the effort to make sweeping changes to LA city’s charter. Sonenshein is the author of Los Angeles: Structure of a City Government, which has long been the primer for understanding how LA city government is set up. (It’s a really easy read, and very short — and it is a primer that any regular Angeleno who needs to get stuff done around their community should read.)

On the podcast, I talk to Sonenshein about the scandals that prompted the reform effort, headline issues being taken up like policing and city services, and the shortened timeline this latest charter reform effort is being crammed into. Sonenshein also brought in his rival from the old days, Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law professor at UC Berkeley who served as the chair of the rival 1990s charter reform commission, which was made up of elected members (as opposed to appointed), to discuss the themes from the earlier reform effort. It’s much needed context for the current situation, and their chat lays out the big power struggles that occurred back then and that could be bubbling up in today’s reform effort.

What just happened?

Raman runoff prophecy very likely to be fulfilled: The big election news over the weekend was that Nithya Raman, who some had long projected to be headed to the runoffs, finally did overtake Spencer Pratt in the standings to get into the second spot in the LA mayor’s race, just behind Mayor Karen Bass.

More than 100,000 ballots are supposedly left to count for LA city races, so the election results still aren’t final yet. But it looks as though the vote by mail ballots that were dropped off late, primarily on Election Day, have been breaking for Raman. Even though Bass holds the lead (and based on The LA Reporter’s own back of the envelope projections, that lead should keep holding), Raman was the mayoral candidate of choice for these late voters. In the latest batch of nearly 48,000 ballots counted on Sunday, Raman earned nearly 40% of those votes, followed by nearly 33% that went to Bass, and then 17.75% that voted for Pratt. Obviously these later votes are just a subset of all of the votes, dwarfed those who cast their ballots early enough to get them counted by election night who number nearly 500,000 people.

It bears some repeating that Raman overtaking Pratt was expected, and not some type of anomaly or “cheating.” Pratt is a registered Republican, and no matter how much he may have tried to distance himself from that, Republicans tend not to do well in Los Angeles, except perhaps in certain precincts or districts. Those who follow LA politics even a bit know this, and they also know that typical voting patterns lead to these shifts in the election results standings — conservative voters tend to vote early, while those who favor progressive candidates get their ballots in last minute. Rob Quan, our resident LA politics Nostradamus, was highlighted today in POLITICO’s California Playbook for making an apt prediction about Pratt sliding in the results standings. There was also recently a really good — and detailed — profile of LA city’s voters that uses past election data to describe LA’s political geographies down to the neighborhood level, so that’s going to be worth a read.

A few concessions in LA city races: Hydee Feldstein Soto, who has been ousted from her City Attorney’s post, issued a concession statement on Saturday. You can read it here. Henry Mantel, a tenant’s rights attorney who has so far earned just over 24% of the votes in the 5th City Council District race on LA city’s Westside also posted a concession statement here. And Faizah Malik, a civil rights attorney known for her work on housing issues, also posted a concession statement here, after earning nearly 40% of the votes, which was not enough to oust the incumbent Traci Park in the 11th District City Council seat, which is also on the Westside.

Chinatown tenant association raises awareness of building issues, rent increases: The Bartlett Hill Tenant Association held a news conference on Saturday to highlight rent increases and habitability issues at their Bunker Hill apartment complex in the Chinatown neighborhood. The unit is owned by a nonprofit low-income housing builder Linc Housing. You can view the full news conference here. A representative of the management company for Linc was present at the news conference, but declined to respond immediately to questions by the tenants, and a reporter.

Motions from Friday’s City Council touch on bus shelter grant funding, anti-depressant drug regulations and affordable housing: Los Angeles City Council motions from Friday include a motion from Bob Blumenfield and Nithya Raman that calls for seeking grant-funding for bus shelters, a motion by Heather Hutt to regulate the anti-depressant drug Phenibut, a motion from Ysabel Jurado on the implementation of SB 79, which increases housing density around transit.