So, after all the votes were counted, the Los Angeles mayoral race is down to incumbent Karen Bass and city council member Nithia Raman.
Spencer Pratt, we are told, entered the race too late and was unlikely to overcome the heavy Democrat party registration advantage.
Yet the question remains – as it has for at least the past four years – what does the future portend for the City of Angels?
For an answer, we need to go back to 2022, when then-U.S. Representative Karen Bass ran against billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso – and barely won.
After making the runoff against Bass in 2022, Caruso pointed out that “only a couple months ago only 6% of the people knew who I was” and that it was not “some political genius” but because “we’ve been proposing practical solutions for very complex problems” that people voted for him.
Sound familiar?
Caruso said he ran for mayor because “Angelinos were feeling left out, worried, and hopeless” about how their city was being mismanaged and were “tired of excuses from career politicians” yet still eager to help revitalize the city they loved.
A major theme of Caruso’s campaign was “a better path forward” for the city’s burgeoning homeless population, which at the time was about 42,000. It’s about 44,000 today.
Caruso said, “If we allow people to live in their own waste and die in the streets, if we tolerate corrupt officials, if we allow crime to suffocate our communities and spiral out of control, and if we don’t allow second chances for those who deserve them,” we cannot proclaim that our city is the greatest.
Rep. Bass, said Caruso, admitted that she – a career politician - would be unable to solve homelessness. By contrast, he envisioned a more compassionate city “where we move tens of thousands of people off the streets and into housing and treatment”; a safer city “where our kids can actually walk to school without fear”; and a “cleaner Los Angeles” where people can enjoy beaches and parks and a walk in the neighborhood.
If that sounds like the Pratt campaign, stay tuned.
A related Caruso campaign theme was regulatory overkill and other city policies that resulted in a 45% drop in approvals for new apartment units between 2019 and 2024.
Have things improved? A brand-new report cites a vacancy rate of over 33% for Mayor Bass’ master leasing program – four times that of San Francisco’s program.
While some claim the Los Angeles commercial real estate market “is now poised for growth,” real-world data suggest that rent growth has turned the retail market downward, demand is cooling in the industrial sector, and there is weak demand in the office sector and slowing demand for multifamily housing despite flat rent growth.
Numerous large-scale commercial real estate enterprises have expressed that Los Angeles has effectively been "redlined", and planned projects which would provide inherent community empowerment and uplift have been scrapped due to festering bureaucracy. Generational corporations with proud roots in the city will move on if this scenario perpetuates.
And just last week, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced separately that it was cutting off funds to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which had received $1 billion in federal funding for the past 5 years (including Bass’ entire term and that of Nithia Raman, who chairs the city council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee).
HUD Secretary Scott Turner accused LAHSA of “repeated false statements and … irresponsible actions and failures” that included lack of financial management and safeguards even as homelessness skyrocketed.
Spencer Pratt was a late entry into the race. He was not even supposed to be the candidate representing Angelinos who had lost homes in the Palisades fire -- or the candidate of the LA real estate industry.
Disgruntled Angelinos’ first hope was that Caruso would run again, but even after issuance of a report critical of Bass’s mishandling of the Palisades fire, he held off, saying his family came first.
The second great hope – investment banker and former deputy mayor Austin Beutner – withdrew after the untimely death of his 22-year-old daughter.
Last fall, Beutner, who like Pratt saw his house damaged – and his mother-in-law’s house destroyed -- while Bass was in Ghana, had sharply criticized the Bass administration. “When you have broken hydrants, a reservoir that’s broken and is out of action, broken [fire] trucks that you can’t dispatch ahead of time, when you don’t pre-deploy at the adequate level … it’s a failure of leadership [and] … the buck stops with the mayor.”
Pratt therefore was the city’s third alternative choice. Like Caruso, he was a political outsider. Like Beutner, he was a victim of a cavalier administration.
Back in April, Los Angeles real estate magnate Jason Oppenheim said in an interview that, while homelessness remained one of the city’s biggest issues, an even bigger concern was that, as taxes rose “considerably,” “services and quality of life have gone down. We see $24 billion spent on homelessness and homelessness is up 40%.”
Oppenheim has largely bailed to Newport Beach after his Rolls Royse was first broken into and then stolen outright. Criminals are emboldened because they are unlikely to go to jail for property crimes. Wealthy people are leaving to avoid the mansion tax, and that shrinks the tax rolls even as spending balloons toward a death spiral.
Businesses are beset by regulations, bureaucracy, permitting timeframes, and a minimum wage that is driving restaurants out of business. On top of it all, a new rule prevents landlords from beginning the 3- to 6-month eviction process against nonpaying tenants until they are two months behind in rent – and from charging more than one month’s security deposit. Worse, raising the rent above a threshold leaves a landlord with a $20,000 tenant relocation fee.
With Pratt out of the race, these and other Angelino concerns are most likely off the table. Both finalists cater to the recipients of – not the contributors to – government revenues (including city and school district and other unionized employees).
Perhaps the greatest beneficiary – once again – of the Los Angeles mayoral election will be U-Haul.
And that’s not good for Los Angeles, for California, or for the nation.