Bass

Nithya Raman has made Los Angeles’ struggle to combat homelessness a key plank in her mayoral campaign, yet her own record on the matter has itself become an issue with her ouster as head of the City Council committee seeking solutions to the crisis.

Mayor Karen Bass is at the helm of the city’s battle against homelessness, but since 2023 Raman has been the second-most powerful official as chair of the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee. That changed this month, when council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, a key Bass ally, split the committee in two and removed Raman as its chair, effective Sept. 1.

Raman claims that politics were at play, casting her removal as a hit job for her decision to challenge Bass. Harris-Dawson disputes that, saying Raman failed to lead the committee with the urgency needed to combat L.A.’s enduring homelessness crisis.

“The committee is behind in excess of more than 100 issues,” said Harris-Dawson in an interview. “There are very serious decisions to make over what happens with homelessness. We needed someone who could focus on that and get it done and get it done quickly and show ability to build consensus.”

Beyond the dispute over Raman’s leadership of the committee, there are clear policy disagreements between the mayor and the council member over the best way to combat the crisis.

A Metro bus passes by a man sleeping on the sidewalk on North Spring Street in downtown Friday.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Raman contends that Bass’ signature program Inside Safe, which dismantles encampments and moves people living there into motels, hotels and interim housing, is overly expensive and unsustainable. On average, the cost of housing these individuals runs about $82,000 a year, according to city reports.

Raman has repeatedly signed off on funding for the program, but has become more critical of it in the last year.

Despite the city’s efforts, L.A.’s unsheltered homeless population — those living outdoors or in their vehicles — went up by 7.9% after two consecutive years of decreases, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported last month.

“The approach to homelessness that Mayor Bass has led and defended has brought us here,” Raman said after LAHSA’s report was released.

Raman has called for the use of time-limited subsidies, or rental vouchers, to house homeless Angelenos in private residences — at a city-estimated cost of $30,000, less than half the price of an average Inside Safe bed. Raman says she would “significantly expand” the city’s investment in the vouchers if she became mayor.

“For the same amount of money, we could rent three apartments using a short-term rental voucher and provide intensive services — housing more people in a program that has delivered much better outcomes,” Raman says in her mayoral policy platform on homelessness.

Even so, the more than $60-million voucher program Raman has already pushed through her committee has so far struggled to get off the ground under a tight timeline, and Raman’s critics have seized on the delay as evidence of the council member’s ineffectiveness.

Pedestrians pass by a homeless encampment along the 101 northbound offramp, at right, near City Hall Friday.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

A city consultant on the program set a goal of having 600 households moved into leases by July 1 of this year, and 2,000 households moved in by next April. But as of that July 1 date, only three households had moved into homes via the vouchers, housing officials said in a report.

By Aug. 13, however, the number had jumped to 54 households, “with new move ins happening nearly every day,” the housing department said in a report.

Bass’ campaign spokesperson, Alex Stack, cited the sluggish start to the program and said subsidies are only a small part of the fight against homelessness.

“It’s not the silver bullet Raman’s selling,” Stack said.

In an interview, Raman said that the contracting process slowed the start of the program, but that time-limited subsidies are a great way to free up space in city shelters by moving those people into private housing.

“This is a cost-effective program that has very good outcomes in the past in terms of percentage of people moving on to permanent housing,” she said.

Nithya Rama listens to a question at the mayoral debate hosted by the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn.

(David Butow / For The Times)

Raman added that the council will continue to monitor data from the program and make fixes as needed if it doesn’t move fast enough.

Homeless services providers working with the city on the program said part of the challenge has been getting a completely new program off the ground.

“It’s definitely been slower than I think most people anticipated,” said Sasha Morozov, the regional director of supportive services for PATH, a nonprofit contracting with the city for the program.

But Morozov said the program is speeding up now and she believed the 2,000 slots will be filled on time.

A key plank in Raman’s platform

Raman said she ran for council largely to take on the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. She says she is running for mayor for the same reason.

She’s cited a 49% drop in street homelessness in her district over the past year as a clear sign that she is equipped to bring down homelessness citywide. Bass counters it was her efforts through Inside Safe that brought homelessness down in Raman’s district.

People living on the street in downtown L.A. gather cardboard for shelter during a heat wave last month.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

While chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee, Raman established monitoring of all the city’s spending on homelessness and tracking of 35 key performance metrics to see how effective the city’s investments are. She also stewarded the creation of a Bureau of Homelessness Oversight within the city’s Housing Department that is responsible for coordinating and overseeing the city’s homelessness system.

Her critics say that Raman’s tenure atop the committee hasn’t adequately met the moment facing the city of Los Angeles — with the Trump administration and county both moving to cut funding from LAHSA, the joint city-county authority responsible for homeless services. Meanwhile, the city is still managing a landmark federal lawsuit settlement, which requires it to invest in thousands of new shelter beds in its response to homelessness.

“She’s been in this building … longer than Karen Bass,” said Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who served on the committee under Raman. “It’s convenient now for her to saddle all blame on the mayor when she rubber-stamped Inside Safe and stood in lockstep with the mayor.”

Mayor Karen Bass, left, and City Council member Monica Rodriguez at City Hall.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Rodriguez has specifically accused Raman — as chair of the committee — of slow-walking Rodriguez’s proposal from 2024 for the city to study a plan to separate itself from LAHSA and form its own department that would directly contract with homeless services providers.

Rodriguez said it took Raman months to schedule her motion in committee and that, while it was pending, the county removed most of its funding from LAHSA.

“The city has been left flatfooted because she wouldn’t lead our conversation. She wouldn’t schedule our items. She set us up for failure,” Rodriguez said.

Raman tried until the last minute to get the county to remain in LAHSA.

While Rodriguez’s motion was waiting on a report, Raman made her own proposal to create a Bureau of Homelessness Oversight within the Los Angeles Housing Department to keep track of the city’s more than $1-billion annual investment in homelessness response.

The council moved that bureau forward last year, and a spokesperson for the Housing Department said that seven positions have been hired within the bureau handling contracts and data oversight.

Harris-Dawson said a seven-person bureau isn’t adequate.

Raman said the bureau was a starting point that could one day lead to a department, which she said would be expensive and take a long time to stand up.

“This was not precluding [the creation of a department],” Raman told The Times. “This was trying to speed up that staffing faster than the departmental process normally takes in this city.”

Raman said she talked to Bass about creating a department for homelessness in late 2023 or early 2024, but the mayor told her to move ahead with the bureau instead. Bass representatives didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Paige Sterling, a spokesperson for the mayor, said that Bass and Raman discussed the bureau in 2025, during the budget process. The mayor opposed a standalone department at the time because it “would add to the bureaucracy,” and the bureau was a compromise, Sterling said.

“The mayor signed a budget with funding and positions for the bureau, which begins to give the city the capacity it needs to start overseeing homelessness as we evaluate what the future governance of this issue looks like,” Sterling said.

Raman has touted the bureau as a success that provides clear oversight of how the city spends its money, but has also claimed that the mayor’s office has moved too slowly to staff the bureau. The Housing Department still hasn’t hired an assistant general manager to oversee it.

The rotunda at L.A. City Hall.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Canceled meetings and frustrated colleagues

Raman hasn’t been endorsed for mayor by any of her colleagues on the council, and some of those who served on her homelessness and housing panel say she did a shoddy job as its chair. They complain that she frequently canceled meetings and allowed hundreds of motions to pile up without getting moved through council.

“It had started to feel less like a policymaking body and more like a scholastic seminar — a lot of philosophizing, a lot of talk about feelings, but not enough substantive questions or direction on policy to present to staff,” Councilmember Imelda Padilla said in a statement to The Times.

In response, Raman said her committee focused on data to make sure the city’s investment in fighting homelessness is paying off.

“That doesn’t feel scholarly to me, that feels like oversight and accountability — exactly what the public is asking for for one of our largest investments as a city,” she said.

The full council, meanwhile, has agreed to review its relationship with LAHSA and the county, and to study creating a new department to centralize homelessness oversight.

“This conversation that we’re having about this … is long overdue,” said Councilmember John Lee.

Raman will have a seat on the new homelessness committee, but it will be chaired by Councilmember Ysabel Jurado. Padilla was named chair of the new Housing Committee.

Raman’s final meeting as committee chair was supposed to be Wednesday.

She didn’t show up.

Community activist Karen Bass achieved a decisive victory in the Democratic primary for the 47th state Assembly district by assembling a coalition that extended beyond the traditional base of African American voters to include Latinos and organized labor.

That broader coalition, which allowed her to trounce two candidates who have long been part of the African American political establishment in the area, may signal a changing of the guard in South Los Angeles. The district extends from Westwood through Culver City to the Crenshaw area.

Bass captured 48% of the vote in the Democratic primary, while Nate Holden, who represented part of the area as a state legislator and city councilman for 20 years, received 21%. Attorney Rickey Ivie finished a distant third, despite support from many of the area’s most prominent black leaders, including current Assemblyman Herb Wesson (D-Culver City), County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, City Councilman Bernard C. Parks and state Sen. Kevin Murray (D-Culver City).

Bass and political experts said that her campaign had benefited from demographic shifts, grass-roots organizing and the power of organized labor.

The candidate said people had seemed to appreciate that, before running for office, she had toiled in the community for more than a decade as the executive director of the Community Coalition, a group that led the fight against rebuilding liquor stores in South Los Angeles after the 1992 riots, and championed education reform for schools in poor neighborhoods.

“I think the idea of new leadership resonated,” Bass, 50, said Wednesday. “People wanted a new style of leadership. I think they liked the fact that I was an activist who had been deeply involved in the community for years.”

Working in the community gave Bass a huge base of grass-roots supporters to draw on in one of the most ethnically diverse districts in the state, said Los Angeles City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, who, along with Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D- Los Angeles), formed a powerful group of Latino leaders that backed Bass.

“She has demonstrated that successful candidates in multiracial districts are going to have to build coalitions, and Karen Bass has been building coalitions for 30 years,” Villaraigosa said. Bass benefited from a $250,000 independent campaign by the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, which also flooded the district with 450 volunteers to get out the vote on election day.

“She is part of a new paradigm, of an African American/labor alliance for South Los Angeles,” said Miguel Contreras, head of the labor organization.

The 47th Assembly District was redrawn in 2002 to make it less heavily African American, making it imperative to build alliances beyond a single ethnic group. That’s an increasingly important skill in Los Angeles, where the growing Latino population means there are few areas where someone can be elected with the support of black voters alone.

Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas (D-Los Angeles), a Bass backer, said Bass had done the best job of reaching out to diverse groups. Bass said she had courted Jewish voters in the western end of the district, while organized labor had helped her by targeting Latino voters on her behalf. Ideology also played a role, Ridley-Thomas said, saying that Bass is more liberal than Ivie, Wesson and Burke.

“Ivie is a middle-of-the road, moderate Democrat and Karen is definitely left of center and progressive,” said Jaime Regalado, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute at Cal State L.A..

A Baldwin Vista resident who teaches health communications at the USC School of Medicine, Bass agreed that she was a better ideological match with voters in the predominantly Democratic district.

The 47th Assembly District was one of 100 state Senate and Assembly contests that drew California voters to the polls Tuesday.

Though Tuesday’s winners must still compete in the November general election, most districts have been drawn to strongly favor either Republicans or Democrats. As a result, odds are good that the people who will take seats as new lawmakers in December will include Van Tran, who would become the first Vietnamese American elected to the Legislature, and Lori Saldana, a San Diego community college teacher who shocked the Democratic establishment by spending just $50,000 to beat other Democrats who enjoyed hundreds of thousands of dollars of support from some of the biggest interests trying to influence the Legislature.

Saldana’s clear win over former Gov. Gray Davis aide Vince Hall and Democratic pollster Heidi Von Szeliski was the biggest decided upset in the state, but three races were too close to call Wednesday as counties tallied absentee ballots.

Interest groups, including trial lawyers, business groups and unions, sank nearly $7 million into races, either directly or through independent expenditure campaigns, but no special interest group emerged as a clear winner.

The election allowed some politicians to extend their careers, including Board of Equalization member Carole Migden, who won the Democratic primary in a liberal San Francisco state Senate district, and Assemblyman John Campbell (R-Irvine), who beat fellow Assemblyman Ken Maddox (R-Garden Grove) for the Republican nomination in a conservative Orange County Senate district. Johan Klehs, a Democrat who has served eight years in the Assembly and six years on the Board of Equalization, appears headed back to the Assembly. Unopposed, he won the nomination in a Democratic-leaning district east of San Francisco.

Another former assemblyman seeking a comeback, Democrat Tom Umberg, had a slight lead of 51.2% to 48.8% over opponent Claudia Alvarez in the heavily Latino 69th Assembly District, which includes Santa Ana. Alvarez held out hope Wednesday that the absentee ballot tally could swing the race her way.

Also awaiting absentee ballot results were the trial lawyers who sank hundreds of thousands of dollars into the 21st Assembly District south of San Francisco. A four-way race among Democrats has been narrowed to a neck-and-neck contest between Redwood City Councilman Ira Ruskin, with 37.4% of the precinct vote and attorney Joe Carcione, with 36.6%.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad reelection campaign just got worse after Wednesday night’s debate in Sherman Oaks.

Bass came in as the clear favorite after toying with City Councilmember Nithya Raman the two times they faced off on the debate stage during the primary, as easily as the Dodgers sweeping the Angels.

Her Honor just needed to do more of the same: hail her own accomplishments, deliver well-timed zingers and keep as cool as a cucumber while baiting Raman into self-immolation.

Bass did none of that, while Raman stepped up the way she needed to.

This time, the challenger offered concrete answers instead of word salads. She mostly stuck to the allotted time limits while Bass repeatedly whined that she wasn’t given enough time. Raman effortlessly turned the mayor’s rhetorical traps around like Bugs Bunny twisting Elmer Fudd’s rifle right in his face.

Take the moment when Bass pointed out that Raman had missed the second-most votes among councilmembers during her six years in office. Raman responded that she missed many meetings while representing the city on the South Coast Air Quality Management District and other governmental boards. Bass’ clap-back — that Raman’s colleagues also had other official responsibilities yet “they find their way to work” — drew “ooohs” from the audience at the debate, put on by the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn.

If this were still the primary, Raman would have flustered her way to a non-answer. This time, she calmly said that she must not be such a bad councilmember, since Bass had appointed her to those boards.

“Well, we really need to look at that,” Bass stammered before asking Raman if she was “getting ready to resign” from them.

“I’m sorry?” Raman asked off mic as Bass challenged her to step down from all her boards. “No,” Raman then said firmly before shrugging and letting the moderator move on to the next question.

The moment was par for the mayor’s night.

Again and again, Bass went after Raman in the pettiest, most personal ways. She kept mocking the MIT graduate as a clueless egghead with no idea what’s going on in the city, stating twice that Raman governed as if L.A. were “an academic institution” — a line that sounded like a MAGA talking point and that was originally trotted out by Councilmember Imelda Padilla.

Bass tried to paint Raman as a member of an ineffectual city establishment, not a newcomer, which fell flat, considering that Bass has held one elected office or another for 22 years while Raman has been in politics only since 2020.

Bass frequently resorted to her trademark nervous laughter and repeated obviously crafted lines with all the enthusiasm of someone gulping down cod oil. Her furrowed brow and exasperated looks, which she had effectively used in previous debates, made her come off as embittered, tired and unable to defend the indefensible mess that has been her first term.

At one point, the mayor even compared street taco vendors to homeless encampments, with both supposedly disrupting the fabric of a well-run city.

Somewhere, Jonathan Gold is shaking his head in disgust.

“You have lots of plans and lots of ideas but have done very little,” Bass told Raman at another point.

And what have you done, Mayor Bass?

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass speaks with a woman after the end of a mayoral debate against challenger Nithya Raman in Sherman Oaks.

(David Butow/For the Times)

I’ve really tried to like Bass. Her trajectory from South L.A. activist to nonprofit founder to Sacramento, Washington and City Hall is impressive and important. Yet when Angelenos needed her to rise and succeed as their city faced one crisis after another during these past four years, Bass stumbled and stumbled again. Her flop of a debate performance left her sounding like someone with no vision or kindness — career suicide for someone who has made her reputation on both traits.

At this point, the architects of Bass’ campaign need to burn sage to drive out bad spirits or just bow out altogether. Any time something could go wrong, it has.

Bass placed first in the primary with 34% of the vote — an abysmal number for a Democratic incumbent in a deep blue city. Her campaign’s cynical gambit to boost washed-up reality TV star Spencer Pratt into the general election, because he’d be an easier opponent than Raman, failed. The Lineage fire in Boyle Heights brought back memories of the deadly Palisades inferno, angering a voting bloc Bass desperately needs — Latinos.

Then came news this week that a poll the Bass campaign had promoted, claiming that she held a commanding lead over Raman, turned out to be fake. Bass came out looking like someone incapable of overseeing paint dry, let alone running America’s second-largest city.

And now, this debate.

The audience, which was heavily pro-Bass, eventually started applauding more and more of Raman’s responses. Bass, desperate to trip up her opponent, talked over her so much that the councilmember responded with the line of the night and possibly the race:

“You gotta let me answer, Mayor Bass. This is my time.”

Raman still faces an uphill battle. Nearly all of the city’s power structure — elected officials, labor unions, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, business owners and even the three other democratic socialist councilmembers — has endorsed Bass. The mayor has outpaced Raman in fundraising. Raman has to win over voters who supported Pratt’s conservative stances while not alienating her progressive base. She did herself no favors with the Democratic Socialist of America’s local chapter, which didn’t endorse her in the primary and will decide next week whether to endorse her in the general election, by stating that the city needs to maintain the current size of its police force.

But in Wednesday night’s debate, she offered voters a distinct choice between how she would run L.A. and how Bass has.

Councilmember Nithya Raman speaks with staff and supporters after a mayoral debate with incumbent Karen Bass in Sherman Oaks.

(David Butow/For the Times)

All the mayor could sputter in her closing remarks was that Raman “does not have the support of [any] of her colleagues” — yet another line she had repeated ad nauseum.

When it was her turn, Raman said she keeps hearing from residents “that this city feels rudderless.”

“I have news for you, Angelenos. You’re right,” she continued. “No one is in charge right now.”

Then, instead of launching another fusillade against Bass, Raman went for something few people associate with L.A. nowadays:

Hope.

“You have every right to expect more from your city,” Raman proclaimed, her voice strong and clear. She urged Angelenos to “raise our expectations” of what’s possible and strive for a city that’s “affordable, functional, safe, joyful, ambitious.”

A few months ago, that would have sounded like the delusional ramblings of someone with no chance at winning. After tonight’s debate, Raman seems like L.A.’s final, best chance.

Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman is expected to lose her leadership role on the L.A. City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, which she has chaired since 2023, according to people familiar with the situation.

Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson is planning to announce this week that the committee will be split into a housing committee and a homelessness committee — neither of which will be led by Raman, the people said.

Harris-Dawson is a close ally of Mayor Karen Bass, whom Raman is challenging for re-election. He declined to comment.

“It’s hard to imagine that it’s not related to politics. The timing of it would be too much of a coincidence,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a former Los Angeles City Councilmember and Los Angeles County supervisor who now serves as chair of the Los Angeles Initiative at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Raman’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the impending shakeup, which was reported earlier by the California Post.

The move comes at a pivotal moment in the mayor’s race on homelessness.

The city’s unsheltered homeless population increased this year after two straight years of decreases, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported last month.

While the citywide number has increased, the number of homeless people living on the street in Raman’s district decreased by 49%, a fact she has touted as she challenges Bass.

Raman and Bass have presented starkly different takes regarding the situation citywide and in Raman’s district.

The mayor has posited that her signature program, Inside Safe, which addresses homeless encampments by moving homeless individuals into temporary housing, was largely responsible for the drop in Raman’s district and that federal and state budget cuts partially led to the increase citywide.

She also attacked Raman’s performance as the chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee.

“While Raman takes credit for the City’s work in her district, ignoring the fact that she’s the Chair of the Homelessness & Housing Committee for ALL of Los Angeles, Mayor Bass is working to move our city forward and address years of neglect,” said Bass’ campaign spokesperson Alex Stack in a statement last month about the homeless numbers.

Raman claimed that there have only been three Inside Safe operations in her district and that her committee has been stifled by inaction from the mayor.

“Council can pass legislation… move motions forward, but it is the mayor that has charge of the implementation and outcomes, she said at a press conference last month.

Abigail Aguirre has been sleeping terribly.

Too many times, she said, residents of a nearby homeless encampment have partied late into the night — sometimes yelling, sometimes blasting music. The noise is especially hard on her husband, who frequently leaves for his job before 5 a.m.

“Oh my God, they don’t let us sleep,” said Aguirre, whose home sits just east of the 110 Freeway in South Los Angeles. “They do drugs in there. They play the loud music. They don’t care.”

Three years ago, workers with Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe program moved dozens of homeless people from Aguirre’s neighborhood into nearby hotels and motels. Sanitation crews cleared the streets and sidewalks of trash.

But more people, and their tents, kept arriving, not just near Aguirre’s home but on many of the east-west streets that pass over the 110 south of downtown: 43rd, 49th, 51st and Vernon Avenue, to name a few.

Unsheltered homelessness — people living on the street or in their vehicles — went up nearly 8% citywide in this year’s homeless count, dealing a setback to Bass, who is running for reelection and has made homelessness a core part of her agenda.

The streets that line the 110 Freeway between 42nd and 58th are a potent symbol of the challenges facing Bass and her program. According to records obtained by The Times, outreach workers carried out Inside Safe operations 25 times on that one-mile stretch during her first three years as mayor, returning again and again to bring people indoors.

Frank Gordon, 51, has been living on Cahuenga Boulevard at the 101 Freeway in Hollywood. Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe program has moved people indoors from that location several times since 2022.

During one operation, Inside Safe brought 42 people inside. A month later, 54 more people came indoors. On other occasions, progress was measured in single digits: two people during one visit, five on another, eight on the next.

Despite those efforts, many of the overpasses and side streets still have encampments. Things have been especially grim on the 51st Street overpass, where tents, makeshift structures and huge mounds of trash lined the sidewalks. In the street, a refrigerator missing a door was on its back, overflowing with garbage.

Joel Galarza, who lives in a house nearby, said the encampment has brought crime, fires, prostitution, open-air drug use and other problems. In May, a man was found stabbed on the overpass.

Galarza said his family has called the city and the LAPD many times, only to see the situation get worse.

“It feels like there’s no more hope, that your voice doesn’t matter,” he said.

Since taking office, Bass has made the removal of street encampments a top priority, arguing that they are unsafe both for unhoused residents and for the neighbors. She said early on that Angelenos will not view her work as a success until their communities are free of tents.

Inside Safe, her signature homeless program, has moved more than 6,200 people into hotels, motels and other interim housing. But by June 30, 43% of them were back on the street, with some getting kicked out and others walking away.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Traci Park, left, and residents of Venice thank Mayor Karen Bass in 2023 for overseeing efforts to move more than 100 people into temporary housing from sidewalks in Venice.

Bass, in an interview, said she understands the frustration of people who live near the encampments. She said she hopes to overhaul the city’s approach to the crisis in the coming months by securing greater control over services such as medical care, addiction treatment and case management.

At the same time, she contends that her administration has made major strides, keeping about 80% of the locations visited by Inside Safe free of tents in recent weeks.

“Inside Safe has been a success in terms of getting people off the streets and clearing encampments,” Bass said. “What Inside Safe has not been able to do is reach the scale that is needed.”

Bass said Inside Safe has conducted 137 encampment operations so far, when many more are needed. To expand the program’s reach, the city will need to move away from expensive hotels and motels and toward high-quality homeless shelters, the mayor said.

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1. A man sits with his belongings on Cahuenga Boulevard under the 101 freeway in Hollywood. (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times) 2. A torn copy of a notice announcing a cleanup of homeless encampments hangs from a stop sign along Grand Avenue at 51st Street in South Los Angeles. (Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

The repopulation issues have not been limited to the 110 corridor. By December, the end of Bass’ third year, 23 Inside Safe areas across the city — about a fifth of the total at that time — had received at least five visits from the mayor’s outreach team, records show.

Inside Safe went to a handful of streets just east of MacArthur Park 10 times over two years. In Hollywood, around Franklin and Argyle avenues, the program conducted eight operations over 18 months.

By the fourth quarter of 2025, 80% of Inside Safe encampment operations — 36 out of 45 — involved areas that had repopulated, records show. Nine were new to the program.

City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who is running for mayor against Bass, said Inside Safe is ineffective and too expensive, forcing taxpayers to pay a premium to “shuffle people around rather than get them housed for good.”

“When 40% of the people who participated in the program return to homelessness, and some locations need repeat outreach visits five, 10, even 25 times, it tells us that something is wrong,” she said in a statement.

Bass and her team said many of the most problem-plagued Inside Safe locations are at freeway overpasses, which are attractive to homeless people because they provide shelter from scorching summer sun and the winter’s pouring rain. Freeways and industrial areas are also popular because they provide some degree of privacy, they said.

In some cases, people move to an Inside Safe location hoping to be offered housing, just as previous residents were, Bass said.

In other cases, she said, people have returned to the street because they need intensive care, such as a psychiatric bed. Those beds, which are provided by L.A. County, are not always available, Bass said.

Estela Lopez, head of the Downtown Industrial Business Improvement District, which represents businesses in Skid Row, said repopulation happens for a simple reason: a lack of enforcement. Once an encampment is cleared and people are moved indoors, police should be allowed to enforce city laws and make sure an area stays clear, she said.

A pedestrian walks into the street to get around a homeless encampment on Alameda Street. The Inside Safe program went to that area 12 times over a single year.

Lopez said she regularly receives complaints about a row of encampments on Alameda Street between 4th and 6th streets. Inside Safe visited that two-block stretch 12 times last year, records show.

Last month, the area had about a dozen tents, which forced pedestrians to leave the sidewalk and walk on Alameda, where large trucks travel to and from nearby industrial businesses.

Lopez offered another reason that homeless people keep coming back.

“That’s where the drugs are,” she said. “It’s Skid Row, and Skid Row is where the drugs are, and has the fewest consequences for open-air drug use and sales.”

Bass’ first Inside Safe operation, more than three years ago, hit a stretch of Cahuenga Boulevard under the 101 Freeway in Hollywood, an area represented by Raman.

Inside Safe went to Cahuenga and the 101 six times over 18 months, according to the city’s records. Two blocks south, the program made five separate visits to Franklin and Cahuenga.

Frank Gordon said that he and his girlfriend lived in an RV on Cahuenga next to the 101 during the COVID era, when the streets were lined with encampments. Outreach workers eventually moved them into the Stuart Hotel in Westlake, he said.

From there, the couple relocated to the Highland Gardens, a hotel in Raman’s district converted into homeless housing. Gordon said they left the facility after one of their rooms was destroyed in a fire, going to yet another interim housing site.

Last month, they were back at Cahuenga and the 101. He called it “familiar ground.”

Sanitation crews remove belongings from a homeless encampment during an Inside Safe operation on Laurel Canyon Blvd. in North Hollywood in March.

Kevin Paz, who has been sleeping on the 51st Street overpass in South L.A., said he used to live a few blocks away. He still has friends in the area, including high school classmates.

“It made more sense to stay here than to live anywhere else,” he said.

Seated on the overpass on a swelteringly hot day, the 32-year-old said he picked his particular strip of sidewalk for the shade it gets from the elevated 110 Freeway carpool lane. He said he would accept a motel room if offered one.

“Honestly, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, ‘Hey, I wanna go live on that street,’” he said.

Bass’ team has highlighted the scores of locations where encampments have not returned. They pointed to the success of an Inside Safe operation at 6th and Fairfax, where the sidewalk was later narrowed and new landscaping was planted, making it difficult to camp there.

West of downtown, streets and sidewalks also remain clear around Angelus Rosedale Cemetery, where 48 people were brought indoors in April 2025. To keep people from living in their cars at that location, city crews turned a stretch of Washington Boulevard into a no-parking zone, Bass’ team said.

Even some places that had severe repopulation issues are now clear of tents.

In Harbor City, Inside Safe went to the same intersection a dozen times between 2023 and 2025. That location has been free of encampments for 17 months, said Councilmember Tim McOsker, who represents the area.

McOsker credited the mayor’s team, as well as his staff, for going to the location over and over to offer interim housing to new arrivals. He also asked a group that delivers glass pipes and clean hypodermic needles to relocate, saying the service was attracting newcomers to an area that had been cleared.

In Baldwin Hills, Inside Safe workers went to Jim Gilliam Park 14 times over three years. Last week, encampments no longer occupied the grassy area around the tennis courts on La Brea Avenue or the sidewalks along the nearby Michelle and Barack Obama Sports Complex.

Johnnie Raines III, who serves on the local neighborhood council, knows some of the people Inside Safe brought indoors. He said the program has been “life-changing” for them.

Still, Raines, 79, has no illusions about the challenges the city faces.

“If you house these three people that are in this space today, three more will show up,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that you were not successful in housing the first three people. That just means that three more people come.”

Elmer Roldan, who lives in South Los Angeles, points out the spot where an encampment burned on Grand Avenue near 54th Street.

In the neighborhoods that abut the 110 in South L.A., some residents have lost patience.

Elmer Roldan, who lives on 55th Street, said some of his homeless neighbors have been causing fires — sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose. Earlier this year, he called 911 after seeing a man set fire to vines hanging from the freeway’s sound wall.

Roldan, who ran unsuccessfully for City Council in June, said he sees plenty of people living in their vehicles, but fewer tents. Still, he said, it’s been demoralizing to have so many come back.

“I certainly don’t want it to get worse,” he said.

Times staff writer Doug Smith contributed to this report.

Mayor Karen Bass said Thursday that the LAPD should stop working with Flock Safety, warning that the company, which operates AI-enabled license plate readers that allow authorities to monitor vehicles around the city, had lost public trust.

In her most forceful comments to date on the topic, Bass said while she supports license plate reading technology generally as a tool for law enforcement, Flock had “lost the trust of Angelenos and residents across the country, especially in immigrant communities targeted by the federal administration.”

“There are many companies that provide this technology to cities nationwide,” Bass said in a statement. “The LAPD needs to identify another company that doesn’t share data.”

LAPD officials have said Flock’s technology enables investigators to solve crimes, helping to find vehicles that have been reported stolen or linked to suspects. Last month, the department announced it was pausing its relationship with Flock, but police officials later said they were in the process of negotiating a new deal with the company that would include more data sharing and collection safeguards.

Dozens of mostly smaller cities have deactivated their Flock cameras or ended their contracts with the company over concerns that it provides data to the Trump administration that can be used to track down immigrants for deportation.

Bass joined the chorus of activists and local officials calling for the LAPD to end its relationship with the company outright.

Her opponent in the November mayoral election, Nithya Raman, said last week on the social media platform X that the city should “cut ties with Flock Safety.”

“Cities across the country are canceling their Flock contracts over the risks its license plate readers pose to privacy, civil liberties, and immigrant communities,” Raman’s post read.

Last month, Bass signed an ordinance that prohibits city personnel from providing anyone outside local government access to data that can be used to determine someone’s immigration status.

A recent Washington Post report uncovered at least 50 instances nationwide in which law enforcement officials were accused of misusing their access to the cameras, largely to stalk former romantic partners or citizens.

A report issued last month by the LAPD inspector general’s office found numerous “limitations” in the department’s existing agreements with its three plate reader vendors — Flock, Axon and Motorola — including a lack of clear language about how long the data are retained and how they are shared with third parties or other law enforcement agencies.

The inspector general recommended that the department update its current license plate reader contracts to address data security and privacy concerns, conduct regular audits and develop standardized rules for traffic stops based on plate reader hits.

Flock has said its customers decide who can access data from their cameras. The company said it doesn’t have contracts with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, adding that has taken other steps to assuage public concern, such as barring federal agencies from its lookup tools and restricting immigration-related searches to ensure compliance with laws in California, Washington and other states.

In an interview with ABC7 last month, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said the company had to “tighten up the police and make sure everyone’s aligned and then turn it back on. He said the company retains the data from its plate readers for only 30 days and denied that its cameras employ facial recognition software as some of its critics have suggested.

During a virtual listening session hosted last week by the inspector general’s office, dozens of people sounded off on the department’s use of Flock cameras.

Some speakers, mostly from the fire-ravaged community of Pacific Palisades, supported the use of cameras to deter burglars who have repeatedly hit homes and construction sites in the area.

Jennifer Wolfe, who identified herself as a teacher in Altadena, another community devastated by the 2025 wildfires, urged Flock’s supporters to consider how “surveillance systems can grow far beyond their intended purpose.”

Locating stolen cars is important, she said, but people should be more concerned by this newfound and unchecked ability for the government to collect “vastly more information, with far less effort.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass ordered city agencies on Friday to delay the processing of rebuilding permits for the Lineage burned-out cold storage warehouse in Boyle Heights until regulators have found ways to subject the project to strict environmental review.

In an executive order, Bass said the city’s planning and building and safety departments must also determine whether the application to rebuild the Lineage facility — which was destroyed in June, leaving behind an estimated 85 million tons of smelly, rotting food — should be subjected to a lengthy “discretionary review” process.

The mayor also asked the council to approve a moratorium on large cold storage facilities in proximity to residential neighborhoods and sensitive uses, such as parks and schools.

The moratorium, depending on the actions of the City Council, can be kept in place for up to two years, according to the mayor’s team.

Clean-up continues at the Lineage cold storage warehouse on Friday in Boyle Heights.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

“They shouldn’t even think about rebuilding until they’ve cleaned up the mess they’ve created,” Bass said at a Friday news conference. “This is why I am directing city departments to put their plans up on a shelf while a thorough investigation of the property and any future use is conducted.”

Bass stood in front of a display that accused Lineage of refusing to provide sufficient support to help nearby residents relocate to other parts of the city. The display also said the company had refused to address unsanitary conditions, including odors and the spread of flies and rodents into nearby properties.

Bass’ team said 3,800 complaints about Lineage have been lodged with the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which has issued 19 violation notices to the company.

The city and county secured $1.6 million for emergency housing relocation through Airbnb and housing nonprofits, sheltering more than 1,300 residents and hundreds of pets. Bass said Lineage provided only $100,000 for those efforts.

“That’s less than 7% of what we’ve provided,” she said Friday.

Silvia Corona joins Boyle Heights residents to voice her frustration during a rally Friday demanding Lineage permanently shut down the facility and leave Boyle Heights.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

In a series of statements posted to Lineage’s website Thursday and Friday, the company said it disagrees with the characterization of its cleanup efforts, and company officials said they submit daily reports to authorities and regulators and post frequent updates online.

“Since gaining full access to the site on the evening of July 6, Lineage has removed more than 60% of food waste and continues to execute the fastest and safest possible cleanup,” the company said. “Lineage has been going door-to-door to the nearly 800 households closest to the warehouse — those designated by the city and county as closest to the site.”

In doing so, the company maintains that it has provided hundreds of air purifiers, air conditioning units, N95 masks, drinking water, grocery vouchers, cash assistance and relocation support to 85% of those households.

Amid this week’s recovery efforts, Lineage representatives filed permits with the city to rebuild the warehouse to its “pre-fire condition” Monday. The move drew swift condemnation from locals and Bass, who decried the application as “a slap in the face” to Boyle Heights families.

Bass said the Friday directive will not be her last executive order mobilizing resources for Boyle Heights following the fire.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis said she felt like she “was in a war zone,” after visiting the warehouse site.

Solis said that she was planning to present a motion at a Tuesday Board of Supervisors meeting aimed at increasing consequences for businesses that commit public health violations, and expanding support for affected residents.

The county is also taking steps to expand access to landfills beyond normal operating hours to allow Lineage to remove noxious debris around the clock.

“We know that the money is going to run out in terms of Airbnb and providing assistance,” Solis said. “That has to come in right away.”

A day earlier, city officials announced that cleanup efforts at the Lineage cold-storage warehouse in Boyle Heights were nearing the halfway mark, six weeks after a fire at the depot left millions of pounds of rotting food to pollute the Los Angeles neighborhood.

The city’s focus is shifting from providing immediate relief to removing noxious debris, reducing foul odors and tainted air, and putting affected residents into interim housing, said Jon Brown, assistant general manager of the Los Angeles Emergency Management Department.

Lineage states the fire started during rooftop solar testing by subcontractor Altus Power. Altus has denied responsibility, stating that the cause is undetermined and accusing Lineage of finger-pointing instead of focusing on community relief.

Residents served Lineage a lawsuit seeking medical damages, noting a similar rooftop solar fire occurred at the facility in 2024.

Bass clarified that the investigation into who is responsible for the fire is still underway, but said Lineage needs to answer for what followed. She accused the company of failing to properly disclose that meat products were stored at the site to begin with, and said the company has been too slow to remove the waste.

She remains skeptical that she’ll ever allow the company to operate in Los Angeles in the future.

“It would be very hard for me to imagine the day that we would welcome Lineage back,” Bass told a Times reporter Friday.

Solis and Los Angeles City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado concurred with the mayor’s assessment, with Jurado going as far as to say she definitely” [wants] to stop any rebuilding permit” for Lineage.

As the mayor’s news conference came to an end, Boyle Heights residents rallied outside the Lineage warehouse facility, briefly shutting down a stretch of Olympic Boulevard just north of the disaster site.

Protesters demanded Lineage’s unconditional removal from the community and said that aid from the city, county and local nonprofit organizations has dried up.

“We’re asking for Lineage to leave our community now and forever,” Estuardo Mazariegos, a candidate for City Council District 9, said at the rally.

At the protests, dozens chanted slogans, including “afuera Lineage! (Lineage out)” and toted signs reading “clean water over profits” and “you’re poisoning us.”

Many at the rally called for Lineage to pay every bill that comes out of the crisis, including waste remediation, interim housing costs and lofty medical bills. Emergency room visits for smoke inhalation and throat pain spiked following the first days of the fire, and residents want the company held financially responsible.

Antonia Montes, an area resident, said she was relieved that Bass was stepping up, but more needs to be done.

“I’m glad she’s now saying that she doesn’t want them here, but we’re saying, ‘what’s the plan to make sure they’re not here?’ ” Montes said. “The next step is to stop it right there and not let them renew their permit and make sure they’re gone.”

Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who is running for mayor against incumbent Karen Bass, seized on significant decreases in street homelessness in her district Friday while blasting increases citywide.

Street homelessness — people living outdoors or in their vehicles — went down by 49% in Raman’s district compared to the previous year, she said at a press conference Friday.

Citywide, street homelessness increased nearly 8%, while overall homelessness, which includes those living in shelters and other temporary facilities, increased 3.4%, according to numbers from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s January point-in-time count that were released Friday.

The contrast between her district and the city overall offered Raman an angle to present herself as more effectively handling the homelessness crisis than Bass.

An estimated 45,194 homeless people live in the city, with about 36% of them in shelters, according to LAHSA.

“Far fewer people living outside. Far more people indoors,” Raman, who has served on the council since 2020 and is chair of the City Council’s housing and homelessness committee, said at the press conference. “As mayor, that is the approach, and the results, that I want to deliver citywide.”

The numbers across the city were a setback for Bass, who has made homelessness one of her signature issues and previously touted two straight years of drops in street homelessness.

Raman cited her office’s homelessness team and their “aggressive interventionist” approach as reasons her district — which extends from Los Feliz and Silver Lake into Studio City, Sherman Oaks and other parts of the San Fernando Valley — did not suffer the same increases as other parts of the city.

She said her team is very familiar with homeless individuals in the district and knows many by name. The team tracks homeless encampments on a map and makes sure that empty shelter beds are filled, she said.

Bass’ campaign said Raman was attacking the mayor’s Inside Safe program, which moves homeless people from the streets to shelter and motel beds, at the same time that it contributed to the decreases in her district.

Raman has critiqued Inside Safe as too costly and insufficiently transparent.

“Nithya Raman is taking credit for the results of Inside Safe while campaigning against it,” Alex Stack, a spokesperson for Bass’ campaign, said in a statement. “While Raman takes credit for the City’s work in her district, ignoring the fact that she’s the Chair of the Homelessness & Housing Committee for ALL of Los Angeles, Mayor Bass is working to move our city forward and address years of neglect.”

Raman responded to those critiques at her press conference, saying that her district only had three Inside Safe operations over the past four years — fewer than some other districts.

She deflected when asked Friday about her responsibility for citywide homelessness, as chair of the city’s housing and homelessness committee.

“Council can pass legislation … move motions forward, but it is the mayor that has charge of the implementation and outcomes,” she said.

Citywide, Inside Safe has moved more than 6,000 people into hotels, motels and other types of interim housing since Bass took office in December 2022. But by May 31, 41% of those people had returned to homelessness, according to LAHSA figures collected separately from this year’s homeless count.

Bass attributed the citywide homelessness increases in part to funding cuts by the state and federal government. She also said the county has not provided adequate mental health or substance counseling services.

“This crisis was ignored by city leaders for decades, it’s only now that we’ve seen a historic decline,” she said in a statement Thursday. “I will never stop fighting until we end street homelessness, because no Angeleno should be sleeping on the street.”

Times staff writer Doug Smith contributed to this report.

Mayor Karen Bass’ press relations office communicates through WhatsApp messages that auto-delete every 24 hours, potentially shielding the messages from public records requests, according to three sources familiar with the office.

The press office is under scrutiny over its use of an unpaid consultant as a spokesperson for the first half of the year. Just weeks after the consultant, Yusef Robb, ceased working as a spokesperson for the city, he took a job doing crisis communications for Lineage, whose cold food storage facility in Boyle Heights caught fire last month, spreading smoke and foul odors. Robb continued to work for Bass as an informal advisor until The Times and other outlets reported his dual roles.

Even though he was no longer a spokesperson, Robb remained in several WhatsApp group channels with mayoral press staffers, all set to auto-delete, until at least a week after he started working for Lineage, said two sources, who requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions. L.A. Material first reported Robb’s presence in the channels.

The Times has filed a public records request for all messages that Robb received or sent to the mayor or her press office between June 1 and July 10, including WhatsApp messages. The city administrative code requires records to be retained for at least two years.

The Bass administration declined to comment on the press office’s use of disappearing messages on WhatsApp.

Bass herself has also communicated through disappearing messages.

In response to a public records request from The Times for Bass’ texts in the aftermath of the January 2025 Palisades fire, her office initially declined to turn over any messages. City lawyer David Michaelson told The Times that “texts are ephemeral types of electronic communication” that aren’t subject to the city record retention requirement.

He also said Bass’ phone was “set not to save text messages.”

The city ultimately recovered more than 100 messages to and from Bass during that period and released them to The Times.

The Times still sued the city, alleging that it unlawfully withheld and deleted the mayor’s text messages and other public records from the catastrophic wildfire.

“Their contention is they don’t have to retain them, and our contention is they do,” said Kelly Aviles, outside counsel for The Times in the lawsuit, in an interview Thursday.

In a court filing, attorneys representing the city argued that keeping work-related messages for up to two years was “absurdly impractical.”

“The Times’ proposed rule requires a degree of intrusion into City employees’ personal sphere that is, at the very least, offensive if not violative of California and federal constitutional rights,” wrote Reuben Camper Cahn, an attorney for the city.

In the past, some city employees communicated with each other each other through Google Chat messages that auto-deleted after a day.

In January 2025, the city stopped that practice and required that Google Chats be saved “indefinitely.”

Retention of messages has also been an issue in the federal government, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio setting some of his Signal chats to auto-delete.

An informal advisor to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass handled communications for her office for free while simultaneously working on a three-year contract with Los Angeles World Airports worth nearly $600,000.

Yusef Robb, who runs the firm tk/Communications, was an unpaid spokesperson and advisor for Bass from February through the beginning of June.

On June 19, Robb began working for Lineage Logistics, whose cold food storage facility in Boyle Heights burned for more than a week last month. He continued to serve as an unpaid, unofficial advisor to the mayor, though no longer as a spokesperson, until The Times and other outlets reported on his work for Lineage on Saturday.

Robb said the airport contract was unrelated to his work for the mayor. But a legal expert said the arrangement raises questions about whether his free labor was a gift to the mayor and whether working for the city and private clients creates conflicts of interest.

“This was done through a transparent and public competitive bidding process,” Robb said in an email to The Times. “I provide communications support and training.”

The Bass administration said Robb’s unpaid assistance was “for the benefit of the city. It’s not a gift.”

In 2024, Robb signed the contract with Los Angeles World Airports, or LAWA — the city department that operates Los Angeles International Airport and the Van Nuys Airport — for $450,000 over three years.

He won the contract, which involved “executive media training” as well as “crisis communications,” over 10 other firms. It was updated in April to include additional work for $137,500.

A report from LAWA in support of the contract update said that “executive management at LAWA have benefited from successful, professional media training as well as support for LAWA crisis communications and response.”

Because tk/Communications has subcontracted to at least two other companies, Robb said his firm has earned no more than $315,000 over the three-year contract.

“There is no connection between the work Mr. Robb performs for LAWA and the assistance he provides for Mayor Bass’ Office,” said a spokesperson for Bass’ office. Bass is running for reelection against City Councilmember Nithya Raman.

The LAWA contract was Robb’s second with the city during the Bass administration. The city paid a total of $75,000 in 2022 and 2023 to Robb’s firm to provide “various communications services related to the start-up of the administration,” according to a contract.

Tk/Communications has worked for government agencies as well as political campaigns and private businesses, including the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, the Los Angeles Unified School District and the music and entertainment company AEG, according to the company’s website.

“We develop powerful narratives and engagement to accelerate and amplify our clients’ messages, whether they’re grounded in an investment proposal or a political campaign,” the website states. “We author and tell stories that build deep connections and lasting relationships that deliver more than you asked for.”

Robb has worked in and around City Hall for decades. He was a press aide in Mayor Jim Hahn’s administration, then worked for Eric Garcetti when Garcetti was a city council member and then mayor. He left Garcetti’s office in 2015.

Robb said he has provided “unpaid help to all sorts of people and businesses, to advance criminal justice reform, organize community movements, or just to find the right words.”

“I feel it’s important to help the city if I can,” he said.

Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School and former president of the city’s Ethics Commission, said the airport contract shows how valuable Robb’s labor is, raising the question of whether he is providing a gift to Bass by working for her for free.

Another concern for the public, Levinson said, is that Robb is working for Bass at the same time that he has other clients and could potentially use his position at City Hall to advance those clients’ interests. His work for Bass could also make him more desirable for clients who believe he has the mayor’s ear, she said.

“What we’re worried about is undue influence, preferential access and backroom deals that benefit certain people, as opposed to the public,” said Levinson. “We don’t want public officials serving two masters.”

Still, Levinson said she does not believe that Bass has violated any laws by using Robb pro bono.

“This is an unusual setup,” she said. “That does not mean it’s illegal.”

A top spokesperson for Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass left her administration Monday after a brief tenure, joining a growing list of communications aides who have departed over the past nine months.

Kolby Lee, who started as Bass’ director of communications in February, said he was resigning to spend time with family and loved ones.

“I’m very grateful to Mayor Bass for giving me the opportunity to be part of her team and serve the people of Los Angeles,” Lee said in a statement.

Bass’ communications office said in a statement to The Times, “We thank Kolby for his contribution to the office and wish him and his family well.” Bass is running for reelection against City Councilmember Nithya Raman.

The departures began in October, when Zach Seidl, Bass’ longtime deputy mayor of communications, left for the private sector.

Press secretary Clara Karger left in January after working for the mayor for nearly three years.

Bass then brought on Amanda Crumley to replace Seidl. But Crumley lasted little more than a month, leaving in March.

Lee started as communications director shortly before Crumley’s departure, serving for about five months.

During Lee’s time in the administration, Bass was also receiving pro bono communications help from Yusef Robb, an outside consultant who worked on her 2022 campaign.

Robb was not paid by the city for his work and served in an unofficial role providing comments on important issues, including Bass’ involvement in damage control surrounding the 2025 Palisades fire.

Lee provided comment to The Times in a story published Saturday about Robb’s work for the Bass administration at the same time that he is a crisis communications consultant for Lineage Logistics, the company whose Boyle Heights warehouse erupted in flames last month, inundating the area with toxic smoke and rotting food odors.

Los Angeles property owners voted against an increase in an assessment for maintaining streetlights that would have collected an additional $80 million a year, as the city faces a backlog of broken streetlights due to stagnant funding and a rise in vandalism.

The assessment has not changed since 1996. Property owners had until June 2 to submit their votes, which were weighted by the amount of their parcel’s proposed assessment. According to results released Thursday, nearly 80% of the weighted vote went against raising the assessment, which currently generates about $45 million a year.

For the average single-family home, which make up the majority of parcels, the current payment is $58 annually, or about $5 a month, according to Miguel Sangalang, executive director and general manager of the Bureau of Street Lighting. The increase would have brought the average annual bill to $117, or about $10 a month.

The proposed increase would have brought the total amount collected by the assessment to $125 million a year.

In a joint statement Thursday, Mayor Karen Bass, Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson and City Councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez and Katy Yaroslavsky said that despite the result, the “critical work will continue” to address the broken streetlights that have plunged neighborhoods into darkness across the city.

“Despite this outcome, the City remains committed to improving streetlight reliability, repairing outages faster, and building a sustainable funding path for streetlight operations and maintenance,” the group statement said. “Every Angeleno deserves to feel safe walking their dogs, returning home from work, and parking their cars at night, and the City is committed to delivering the reliable street lighting that makes that a reality.”

The Bureau of Street Lighting owns and operates nearly 225,000 streetlights across the city, which have historically been covered by the assessment. The average repair time for a streetlight was one year, bureau officials said in February.

Without more revenue from the assessment, city officials have been looking for alternative funding. The City Council has said it will finance $65 million for solar-powered streetlights.

Bass recently announced an initiative to repair and replace 60,000 streetlights over the next two years, and several council members have turned to their district’s discretionary funding to fix broken streetlights in their districts.

Hernandez, who chairs the council’s Public Works Committee, said in a statement that the result doesn’t change the fact that the city is trying to maintain a 21st century lighting system with an outdated funding model.

“If this assessment isn’t the path forward, then it’s our responsibility to build one through better leveraging City assets like light poles, exploring new revenue opportunities, and pursuing reforms to outdated state laws like Proposition 218 that make it extraordinarily difficult for cities as large as Los Angeles to maintain basic public infrastructure,” she said.

Broken streetlights have emerged as an issue in the mayoral election, with Councilmember Nithya Raman citing broken lights as an example of how the city “can’t seem to manage the basics.” Raman is facing Bass in a Nov. 2 runoff.

In February, city council members announced a plan to replace streetlights with solar-powered versions, in an attempt to deter copper wire theft. About 1 in 10 streetlights are out of service because of disrepair or copper wire theft, according to the city.

A well-known example is the Sixth Street Bridge, where thieves stole seven miles’ worth of wire.

The top strategist for Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ reelection bid has left her campaign, just as she is gearing up for a bruising showdown against City Councilmember Nithya Raman in the Nov. 3 runoff.

Douglas Herman, who has worked with Bass since 2021, told The Times on Wednesday that he stepped down from the campaign earlier in the day. He is being replaced by Julie Chávez Rodriguez, who was campaign manager for the Biden and Harris presidential campaigns in 2024, a Bass spokesperson said.

Chávez Rodriguez has spent the past few months running Unidos Con Karen Bass 2026, an independent expenditure campaign that focused on Latino voter turnout during the primary.

Herman, asked about his departure, said he left due to “strategic differences” regarding the direction of the reelection campaign. He did not provide details.

The Bass spokesperson, Alex Stack, declined to discuss Herman’s exit.

“Going into the general election, our campaign is proud to announce that Julie Chávez Rodriguez will be leading the team,” he said in a statement.

The granddaughter of César Chávez, co-founder of the United Farm Workers union, Chávez Rodriguez worked in both the Obama and the Biden administrations. She ran Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign until he dropped out and then ran Kamala Harris’ campaign, losing to President Trump. While working for Harris, she courted Latinos and working-class voters in battleground states.

Herman was a combative messenger for Bass, issuing broadsides against her rivals as she fought for a second four-year term. He had been advising her since her first run for mayor, when she defeated real estate developer Rick Caruso by about 10 percentage points. He also helped her fend off a recall attempt while in office.

Bass was the top vote getter in the June 2 primary election, securing 34% of the vote, compared to 29% for Raman and about 26% for reality TV personality Spencer Pratt. With a majority of voters registering disapproval of her performance, she faces a tough runoff campaign.

Raman, first elected in 2020, is expected to be a formidable opponent, drawing on her support from younger voters, entertainment industry workers and activists in the YIMBY movement, which seeks to tear down regulatory barriers to housing construction.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is once again dealing with blowback for being out of town when a massive fire ignited.

The fire at a cold storage facility in Boyle Heights began burning Wednesday, hours after Bass departed for the dedication of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

Since arriving back in Los Angeles around 6 p.m. Thursday, Bass has been to the scene of the fire numerous times, declared a local emergency, hosted five press conferences, met with local leaders and families affected by the fire, and distributed masks and air purifiers.

But her quick return and public appearances have not stopped some from drawing parallels to last year’s Palisades fire. Bass was in Ghana on a diplomatic trip when the deadly inferno spread amid extraordinarily high Santa Ana winds that forecasters had warned about for days.

While the scale of the destruction in Boyle Heights doesn’t compare to the 12 lives and thousands of homes lost in the Palisades fire, Angelenos are having flashbacks as toxic smoke hovers over parts of the region.

Bass, who is running for reelection, said in an interview that she rarely travels and always worries about what could happen when she does — whether it’s a fire or a big car accident. She also said she chose Chief Jaime Moore to lead the Los Angeles Fire Department because she trusts him to handle a crisis like this fire.

“I was in Chicago three hours away, and I was there 24 hours,” Bass said, noting that she was in constant communication with the chief during her brief trip.

Bass’ handling of the Palisades fire, beginning with her absence from the city, has had a long-lasting, negative impact on voters’ opinions of her, with polls repeatedly showing high unfavorability ratings.

A May poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, which was co-sponsored by The Times, found that 57% of likely Los Angeles voters had unfavorable views of Bass, while 35% had favorable views.

Bass, who served in Congress for more than a decade, was designated by then-President Biden to be part of his official delegation to attend the inauguration of Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama. She was captured in photos at an embassy cocktail party in Accra as the Palisades fire exploded Jan. 7, 2025.

Last week, there was no warning that anything was amiss when she left the city. But any echoes of the Palisades fire could damage Bass’ image as she campaigns against City Councilmember Nithya Raman in the November runoff election.

“We’re talking about a fire, and she’s out of town, so it completely and totally reinforces that narrative of January 2025, and that’s not helpful,” said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.

Guerra said while Bass can do much of her job from another city for a day, a mayor is often faulted for not being front and center during an emergency.

“With today’s tech and instant communication, is it really that different that she’s in Chicago making calls than at City Hall?” he said. “But it has always been the case for executives that, symbolically, it is their job to be at the point of the crisis to assure those that are impacted directly, and the city as a whole, that they have the situation under control.”

Guerra said it didn’t help that Kevin Marchetti, the owner of the cold storage facility operating in the burning building, contributed the maximum, $1,800, to Bass’ reelection campaign last year.

Raman declined to comment on Bass’ handling of the Boyle Heights fire.

The blaze ignited Wednesday at the nearly 500,000-square-foot cold storage facility run by a company called Lineage, beginning on the roof, which caused a partial collapse and moved the flames into the building, where 85 million pounds of food are stored.

Firefighters have been battling the flames for seven days now, and smoke has made air dangerous to breathe in neighborhoods across the Los Angeles region.

Bass’ absence from the city soon caught the eye of right-wingers, with Spencer Pratt, who ran against her in the nonpartisan primary election, and Steve Hilton, who is running for governor, among those critiquing her.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with Karen Bass that she seems to keep leaving the city every time something happens,” Hilton said at a Monday press conference in Boyle Heights.

Pratt, who lost his house in the Palisades fire and came in third in the primary, drew the comparison directly.

“Karen was sipping cocktails in Chicago when the Boyle Heights Fire erupted, just as she was sipping cocktails in Ghana when our Palisades Fire erupted. I warned you all … what happened to us will happen to all of LA,” he posted on X on Sunday.

As she flew back to L.A. from Ghana, Bass repeatedly reminded her staff that she could make calls from the military flight, her text messages showed. But during one call or Zoom with her staffers, she had technical problems, texting, “I am listening don’t know why you can’t [hear] me.”

During the Palisades fire, then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley publicly accused city leaders of failing to give her department the resources it needed. Bass ultimately removed Crowley from her post over her handling of the fire.

Moore, the new chief, has appeared to be in lockstep with the mayor during the Boyle Heights fire, saying she has been an active partner.

About 30 minutes after the fire began, Moore was on the scene. Ten minutes after he arrived, he was on the phone with Bass, he said.

Over the next day, while Bass was in Chicago, Moore estimated that they spoke six times over the phone.

Moore said her absence was a non-issue.

“Until Mayor Bass goes through our 20-week drill tower, and she learns to fight a fire and she can stand next to me on a hose line, I don’t need her in this city,” Moore told The Times on Tuesday.

“She’s our mayor. She was doing exactly what she needed to do,” he added. “She answered the phone. She provided me exactly what I needed, and that was, ‘Whatever you need to do, you do it.’”

A new sales tax that would generate $345 million annually for the Los Angeles Fire Department will go before voters later this year, the City Council decided Tuesday, as a stubborn warehouse blaze burned for a seventh day on the city’s eastern edge.

The council voted 14-0 to put the half-cent sales tax hike on the Nov. 3 ballot, with supporters saying the additional funds would go toward more firefighters, new fire stations and new equipment, such as firetrucks and helicopters.

The vote came nearly 18 months after the outbreak of the Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes in Pacific Palisades, Malibu and other coastal areas, leaving 12 people dead. But it more immediately coincided with the city’s fight to extinguish the blaze at the Boyle Heights cold storage facility, which has spread smoke across the region over the last week.

The campaign for the sales tax hike is being spearheaded by United Firefighters of Los Angeles City Local 112, the union that represents nearly 3,400 firefighters. Appearing before the council, union leaders pointed to the Boyle Heights fire as the latest sign that the city needs more money for emergency response.

“This is our plan to undo decades of under-investment in the department,” said Ryan Quigley, a 23-year firefighter/paramedic who also serves as the union’s secretary.

Mayor Karen Bass, through a spokesperson, said she is grateful to the union for bringing the tax proposal forward.

“[The mayor] has championed this measure from the very beginning,” the spokesperson, Paige Sterling, said in a statement.

The firefighters union began gathering signatures for the tax earlier this year, submitting them to the city clerk last month. Since then, backers have voiced confidence that it would pass, given the growing concern across the city about urban wildfires.

Still, the path to victory could be complicated by recent events.

Last month, Los Angeles County voters narrowly passed a different half-cent sales tax hike that’s expected to raise $1 billion annually to pay for healthcare. That measure, which received just above the 50% needed for passage, pushed the tax rate within the city of Los Angeles to 10.25 cents for every dollar of spending.

If voters approve the fire tax increase as well, the rate will jump to 10.75 cents per dollar.

The firefighters union also will be campaigning in a year when one of its recent leaders, Adam Walker, has been charged with one count each of grand theft and forgery. He has been accused of stealing more than $82,000 from a charity for injured firefighters to pay for his online gambling, his mortgage and other personal expenses.

Union President Doug Coates said Walker left his position two years ago. The union, he said, intends to make clear to voters that “the money is going to the right thing.”

So far, no one has emerged as an opponent of the tax increase. The Central City Assn., a downtown-based business group, is supporting the fire tax.

Susan Shelley, spokesperson for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., said her organization has not taken a position on the proposal. Still, she argued that sales taxes in general are “extremely regressive,” hitting the hardest for Angelenos who can afford it the least.

“Our view is that the city budget should be prioritized to fund the fire department from the first dollar, not the last dollar,” Shelley said. “And that there shouldn’t be a need for a tax increase.”

The sales tax hike, if approved by voters, would represent the most significant public investment in the fire department since 2000, when voters passed a $532-million bond measure to pay for new facilities. Backers said the tax increase would help the department speed up emergency response times, while also building new fire stations and repairing existing ones.

The firefighters union began work on the tax proposal more than two years ago, before the inferno that erupted on Jan. 7, 2025, and carved a lethal path through Pacific Palisades and other communities. Still, the push for more funding gained greater attention in the wake of the fire.

While the flames were still raging, then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley went on local and national television to accuse city leaders of failing to give her department the resources it needed. The media blitz shocked some at City Hall, who believed Crowley should have waited until the emergency was over before publicly assigning blame.

Crowley and the union said city leaders had forced the department to scale back its operations amid a budget crunch. Bass and the city’s policy analysts pointed out that fire department spending grew that year, largely because of pay increases given to firefighters.

Bass ultimately ousted Crowley, saying the chief failed to properly deploy firefighters amid warnings of dangerous Santa Ana winds. Crowley, who was demoted to another position, filed a lawsuit against the city, saying the mayor engaged in a retaliation campaign.

The fire that broke out last week at the Lineage Logistics cold storage facility has helped to rekindle calls for additional fire department funding.

Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, whose Eastside district has been enveloped in smoke in recent days, told her colleagues Tuesday that climate change and corporate negligence are making such emergencies “more frequent and more severe.”

“Whether it’s the devastating fires that hit Altadena and the Palisades last year, or the Boyle Heights warehouse fire currently affecting air quality and public health across the whole city, every one of our districts is feeling the impacts,” she said, before voting to put the tax on the ballot.

Councilmember Traci Park, who represents the Palisades, said the fires in the Palisades and Boyle Heights have “exposed Los Angeles’ urgent need to modernize LAFD for the realities and demands of a modern century.”

Fire Chief Jaime Moore, in an interview Monday, said he asked Bass to declare a state of emergency last week so that his department could obtain additional resources to fight the Boyle Heights fire, including firefighters, firetrucks, drone pilots and hazardous materials teams.

“I had firefighters work Wednesday afternoon, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. I talked to my incident commander, and he goes, ‘Chief, these guys are getting their butts kicked.’ And that’s when I said, ‘I’m gonna reach out to the mayor, and I’m gonna see what I can do to get the state of emergency declared.’”

Supporters of the sales tax increase contend the department lacks the personnel to serve a city of nearly 4 million people. According to the union, L.A. has nearly 3,400 firefighters, roughly the same number as 50 years ago.

If voters pass the sales tax hike, the city would have the funds to bring the department up to 5,000 firefighters by 2050, union officials said.

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s David Zahniser and Noah Goldberg, giving you the latest on city and county government.

Los Angeles voters have finally gotten some closure on the outstanding contests in the June 2 primary election, with City Councilmember Nithya Raman qualifying for the runoff against Mayor Karen Bass, and Measure ER, the countywide sales tax hike, prevailing after a week of ballot counting.

With nearly all the votes counted, Angelenos are now getting a more granular understanding of the strongholds built up by each of the top three mayoral candidates.

Districts that went big for Bass, Raman and Pratt

Early on in the vote-counting process, it looked like Raman might not win her Hollywood Hills-based district, which stretches from Silver Lake to Reseda. In the end, she pulled out a first-place finish, securing nearly 34% of the vote compared to Bass’ 31%, according to Paul Mitchell, vice president of the voter data firm Political Data Inc, who aggregated county precinct data into council districts. Spencer Pratt, the former reality TV personality, trailed at 27%.

Still, Raman’s strongest support came from three districts on the eastern end of the city.

Mitchell’s analysis showed Raman with 45% of the vote in Council District 13, which includes all or parts of Echo Park, Hollywood and Atwater Village. She got nearly 40% in Council District 1, which takes in parts of Highland Park, Mt. Washington and Angeleno Heights. And she scored nearly 38% of the vote in Council District 14, which includes downtown, Boyle Heights and El Sereno.

Those districts are represented by Hugo Soto–Martínez, Eunisses Hernandez and Ysabel Jurado, respectively — all members of Democratic Socialists of America, who all endorsed Bass instead of Raman, a DSA member herself. Raman placed first in all three.

Bass found her greatest strength in the three districts that cover South L.A., coming in first in all three. Her best performance was in District 8, represented by Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, where she led with nearly 62% of the vote.

The mayor received 45% of the vote in Council District 10, which stretches from Koreatown to the Crenshaw Corridor, and 42% in Council District 9, which stretches from the southern edge of downtown south to 95th Street.

Pratt performed the strongest in the west San Fernando Valley. He was the top vote-getter in District 12, which is represented by Councilmember John Lee and includes Chatsworth, Granada Hills and Porter Ranch. In that district, he received 39% of the vote, Mitchell’s assessment showed.

Pratt got nearly 37% of the vote in District 3, which is represented by Councilmember Bob Blumenfield and includes Woodland Hills, Warner Center and Canoga Park.

Pratt also led the pack in the 5th District, which takes up much of the Westside and is represented by Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky. He had 30.7% of the vote, compared to Raman’s 30.6%, according to Mitchell’s analysis.

Nithya Raman attacks the L.A. ‘political machine’

It was one of tougher attacks of the mayoral primary: Raman accused Bass of engaging in “pay to play” — making decisions that benefited certain interest groups, who then spent big on her reeelection.

At her first post-election press conference Wednesday, Raman revisited that line of attack, criticizing Bass over her push to upgrade the city’s Convention Center. That $2.6 billion project was approved in the middle of the city’s financial crisis, when the council was contemplating major job cuts, Raman said.

“Downtown business groups then spent over a million dollars supporting her in her reelection. Meanwhile, the city went back to voters asking them to pay more to fix their streetlights. That is the political machine at work,” she said.

Pay to play was a potent issue in the 2005 election, when Mayor James Hahn was defeated by Councilmember Antonio Villaraigosa. At the time, federal agencies had opened corruption investigations into decisions at the city’s harbor and airports, as well as the Department of Water and Power. That year, the phrase “pay to play” was synonymous with criminal wrongdoing.

In a video acknowledging his primary defeat, Pratt said he got into the mayor’s race to “expose this corrupt machine.”

Raman stopped short of such a framing.

“It’s not corruption,” Raman told reporters at Vista Hermosa Park. “But it is evidence that the system, and how it works, particularly the influence of money in politics, has led to some very broken priorities here in the city.”

Last year, policy analysts warned the Convention Center project would be a financial drag from the moment it opens, consuming more than $100 million per year throughout the 2030s. Business groups and labor organizations pushed back, saying the project would help revitalize downtown while creating much needed construction jobs.

The Central City Assn., a downtown-based business group that supported the Convention Center upgrade, spent about $1.6 million on efforts to reelect Bass.

“Nithya Raman doesn’t think we need more jobs or visitors to our hotels and restaurants that produce the tax revenues downtown generates for the entire city, so it’s hard to support her,” said Central City Assn. President and Chief Executive Officer Nella McOsker in a statement.

Bass spokesperson Alex Stack also pushed back on Raman’s criticism, saying the mayor has been with “every group and industry to deliver results for Angelenos.”

“Nithya Raman can’t get anything done and then attacks the same groups she sought to endorse her campaign,” he said.

Pratt trailed Trump among L.A. voters

As a mayoral candidate, Pratt was dogged by questions about whether he was MAGA — shorthand for the movement that first powered President Trump into office in 2016. The Republican had received fulsome praise from Trump-aligned figures, including podcast host Joe Rogan and Greg Gutfield of Fox News.

Pratt downplayed his GOP ties. Still, there’s one area where he definitely had some similarity with Trump: His performance with L.A. voters.

Trump and Pratt both picked up roughly one out of every four votes in L.A. during their respective campaigns.

Pratt, former star of MTV’s “The Hills,” had 25.5% of the vote in L.A., according to results posted Friday. In November 2024, Trump did a little better, receiving 26.5%, county election results show.

Trump had 369,319 votes in L.A. two years ago, compared to 976,781 for then-Vice President Kamala Harris. By Friday, Pratt had 217,638 votes, compared to 247,242 for Raman and 292,115 for Bass.

It might not be fair to compare Pratt and Trump, given that there were key differences between the elections. Pratt was competing in a primary campaign, while Trump was in a general election. The candidate pool was different as well.

Trump was running in a six-way contest where Harris was his main rival. Pratt, on the other hand, was in a race featuring 13 other candidates.

Although two-thirds of those candidates were complete unknowns, four of Pratt’s rivals ran serious campaigns, amassing endorsements and spending significant amounts of money.

State of play

— TRUMP VS. LAHSA: The Trump Administration moved Thursday to block the embattled Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority from receiving federal funds, saying the agency was badly managed and engaged in fraud. Elected officials across the city denounced the move, while nonprofit groups also voiced alarm. “This is intended to create chaos,” said Jerry Jones, the head of the Greater LA Coalition on Homelessness, which represents groups that serve the region’s unhoused.

— PAYOUT PROBE: Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman said Wednesday that he believes four out of every five claims in the largest sex abuse settlement in U.S. history — one that resulted in a $4 billion payout by Los Angeles County— may be fake. Hochman has asked a judge to pause the sex abuse payments while he continues his criminal investigation into the plaintiffs, lawyers and therapists involved in filing the claims.

— GET READY TO RUMBLE: The showdown between Bass and Raman is going to get ugly, political experts said this week, in part because they agree on a number of big-picture political issues. Both will need to court at least some of the disaffected voters who picked Pratt in the primary.

— A SCATHING SENDOFF: As we mentioned higher up, Pratt released a video Friday that was both an acknowledgment of his primary election defeat and a vitriolic screed against Bass and Raman, his former rivals. Pratt called them “morons,” “commie animals” and “corrupt communists,” and made clear he intends to ramp up his attacks in the coming months. “I don’t have campaign laws hamstringing me now. It’s war,” he said.

— WOOING LATINOS: Bass carried far more Latino-majority neighborhoods than her rivals in last week’s primary, a Times analysis found. She carried 35 Latino-majority neighborhoods, including Boyle Heights, Pacoima and Historic South-Central. That was a 46% increase from 2022, when she won 24 Latino-majority neighborhoods in her primary against Rick Caruso and Kevin de León, the analysis found.

— EKING OUT A WIN: The countywide sales tax hike known as Measure ER prevailed this week, with late-arriving ballots pushing the number of ‘yes’ votes just above 50%. “It’s a lifesaver to carry us through the storm we’re all in,” said County Supervisor Holly Mitchell, who led the push among her colleagues to get the measure on the ballot.

— AN EXPENSIVE FEE-FA: Bass was set to attend the U.S. opening game of the World Cup Friday at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood after being invited by FIFA, her office said. Still, Bass wasn’t exempt from the high ticket prices she criticized earlier this year. She paid $2,735 out of pocket for her ticket, a spokesperson said. On a related note, the mayor announced more than 100 “Kick it in the Park” events where Angelenos can watch World Cup games for free.

— MORE OF THE SAME: In a break with recent history, every council member who ran for reelection this year won their race. “People see what we’re doing, and they want us to keep fighting for them,” said Councilmember Tim McOsker, who won nearly three out of every four votes in his San Pedro-to-Watts district.

QUICK HITS

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to address homelessness went to the area around 54th Street and Western Avenue, in the South L.A. district represented by Harris-Dawson.
• On the docket next week: The City Council meets Wednesday to take up a sprawling package of charter reform proposals, including a move to ranked-choice voting and a larger number of council members. Will the council send those ideas to voters or punt them for another two years? Stay tuned!

Stay in touch

That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to LAontheRecord@latimes.com. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.

OK, I’ll admit it. I’m going to miss Spencer Pratt.

I had never heard of the former reality TV star before he said God wanted him to be mayor of Los Angeles. And now that he’s out of the race, he’s still serving up lazy fastballs down the middle of the plate, calling the top two vote-getters — Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman — dummies and morons.

Quick question for Pratt: If you’re on record claiming that 9/11 was an inside job and the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, and you run for office in a deep blue city with President Trump’s backing but not much of a plan or even a clue as to what a mayor can or can’t do, should you be calling other people morons?

And yet the pouting Pratt pulled more than 200,000 votes. So sore loser or not, he tapped into a lack of faith in elected officials and simmering frustration with City Hall, which happen to be the essence of today’s column.

I have five questions for Bass and Raman. They’re somewhat inter-related and have to do with matters I hear about regularly from readers:

Infrastructure (sidewalks, streets, etc).

Homelessness (billions of dollars spent, and a long way to go).

Parks (L.A.’s national ranking for quality and accessibility just dropped again).

Trash and blight (no explanation needed, right?).

And focus. (Do the candidates have a clear set of goals and a plan for achieving them?)

We’ve got five months to visit and revisit these topics, and today I’m going to focus on the first, so here we go.

Infrastructure:

A few days ago, I met with Earl Ofari Hutchinson of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable. Hutchinson is a longtime community activist and commentator, and he had just launched a torpedo in the direction of City Hall.

“There are hundreds of busted, dangerous sidewalks in South L A that have gone unrepaired for years,” he wrote to his network of followers. “They cause hundreds of injuries, and have resulted in massive numbers of claims and payouts in settlements. LA City Officials must act now to jumpstart a crash program to fix these sidewalks.”

On my way to meet Hutchinson, I traveled west along Florence Avenue and saw dozens of typical rough patches on the street and sidewalks. But if there were a contest to identify the all-time worst sidewalks in Los Angeles, Hutchinson’s discovery of the one at 71st Street and 11th Avenue would be a Hall of Fame contender.

For starters, it’s got the classic uplift, and the villain is the usual suspect — ficus tree roots. A 20-foot slab of sidewalk is pitched sharply, as if designed by trip-and-fall lawsuit lawyers. Way back in 2014, in my early days on sidewalk patrol, I was able to crawl under a similarly ruptured sidewalk in West L.A., and I could’ve done the same at 71st and 11th.

But I thought better of it after Hutchinson peered into the opening and said it looked like a comfy home for rats and other vermin.

The homeowner, Sharon Kelly, can’t use her front gate because of the lopsided sidewalk. She let me borrow her tape measure, which revealed a 16-inch rise in the pavement.

“It keeps rising,” Kelly said. “But it was already lifted when we came here.”

That was in 1997. I asked if she’s called the city for help.

“Several times,” she said, and the only response was a slapdash temporary asphalt patch.

Hutchinson said residents have responded in force to his call for emergency sidewalks repairs, just as they did when he crusaded for a crackdown on widespread illegal dumping.

“Dozens of residents have come out of the woodwork, and here’s what they all say: ‘We have called our city council person and various city departments repeatedly, over and over again.’”

And the response?

“Nothing,” Hutchinson said.

While we were talking, two people with walkers steered clear of the worst spot near Kelly’s property. Charles McQuarn, 77, said traversing the neighborhood means zigzagging around all the hazards.

“I gotta come out into the streets, too,” he said.

When he was a teenager, McQuarn said, he worked for a community group that fixed sidewalks. I mentioned that Councilmember Monica Rodriguez has been using Conservation Corps youths to do the same, but it’s time to scale up that program and come up with other remedies to speed the process.

The city is fixing about 600 sidewalks each year, the backlog of requested repairs stands at about 30,000 and if you get onto the waiting list, you’re looking at about 10 years before help arrives.

When we were done on 71st Street, Hutchinson led me over to a nearby stretch of Florence where, for blocks and blocks, it appears as if there have been volcanic eruptions around the trees. Large chunks of cracked sidewalk form mounds, one after another. The Hutchinson Himalayas are a site to behold — a mile-long museum of municipal neglect.

And it’s been like this, Hutchinson said, “for years.”

The question for Bass and Raman: What will you do to speed the repairs?

Homelessness:

Voters have been generous when it comes to repeatedly taxing themselves more, and more, to address homelessness. There’s been Measure H, Measure A, Measure ULA and Proposition HHH.

Yet although billions of dollars have been spent and tens of thousands of people have been helped and housed, more than 40,000 people are homeless in the city and roughly 70,000 in the county. In her primary victory speech, Bass said families shouldn’t have to step around encampments, and Raman has said greater urgency is needed.

Questions for Bass and Raman: Why haven’t taxpayers gotten more for their money with the two of you at the helm, what are you going to do to speed progress and create more accountability, and what distinguishes you from each other?

Parks:

In the annual rankings by the National Trust for Public Lands, Los Angeles has dropped from 90th to a tie for 93rd in park investment and accessibility among the nation’s 100 most populous cities.

The City Council is about to consider a motion to increase park funding through charter reform (with dozens of community groups in support), and progress is ridiculously slow on an agreement to use schools as after-hours playgrounds.

Question for Bass and Raman: Do you support the charter reform, and what else are you going to do to address the sad state of the city’s parks?

Trash and blight:

In downtown L.A., vandalism, shuttered storefronts and post-COVID abandonment have crippled what was a vibrant, revenue-generating economy that benefited the whole city.

In Hollywood, a resident hired her housekeeper to help report illegal dumping of goods that are often used to construct more homeless encampments, leading to all sorts of problems.

On the south lawn of City Hall, a graffiti-tagged monument and fountain have been out of commission for most of the last six decades.

Question for Bass and Raman: At the very least, can you fix the fountain?

Focus:

Like any big city with great assets and unlimited challenges, many residents have a love-hate relationship with L.A. But years ago, someone told me he loves Los Angeles because it’s a messy, multi-cultural work in progress, set on a dramatic landscape between mountain and sea, trying to figure out what it wants to be.

Question for Bass and Raman: Whether in the realm of basic services or grand visions, what three or four primary objectives do you have over the next four years?

In other words, what do you want L.A. to be?

steve.lopez@latimes.com

When Republican Spencer Pratt burst into Los Angeles politics, venting a torrent of online fury against Mayor Karen Bass’ handling of the Palisades fire, he pitched his mayoral campaign as a full-bore challenge to L.A.’s political status quo.

The former reality TV star, who lost his home in the blaze, started as a long shot but emerged as a national story, with the ability to harvest social media attention, rally a base and dominate the news cycle.

But in a city overwhelmingly Democratic, where Republicans make up just 15% of registered voters, even some of his supporters wondered how far he could rise. In the end, voters selected Bass, a Democratic centrist, and democratic socialist City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who ran to Bass’ left, to face off in the runoff.

Still, for many of the 200,000 Angelenos who voted for Pratt, his brash, social media-fueled campaign was not just a long exercise in trolling. Pratt gave voice to their discontent with the system of one-party rule and said things they too often felt uncomfortable saying.

And now, they face a difficult choice of who to support in November.

“I know a lot of people who are disappointed,” said Meghan Daum, an L.A. writer and podcaster and former Los Angeles Times columnist who endorsed Pratt. “They are saying, ‘OK, now what? What can we do?”’

While Pratt did not make the runoff, political experts said his candidacy tapped into Angelenos’ dissatisfaction with the Democratic establishment and resonated with a sizable number of Angelenos who are rarely represented in L.A. politics.

“He identified a previously invisible level of anger and frustration,” said Dan Schnur, a longtime politics professor at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine University, of Pratt. “The question going forward is whether he, or someone else, can shape that raw emotion into a movement.”

Pratt has yet to put out a statement conceding the race or contesting the results. As a stream of Republicans, including President Trump, made unfounded allegations of election fraud in California, the campaign’s most online candidate was conspicuously absent on X and Instagram.

Some Democrats in L.A. urged Pratt to make good on his promise to leave the city if Bass or Raman were elected. Late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel, a prominent Democrat, told Pratt he had rented him a U-Haul.

Despite the snark from Democrats, political observers say Pratt changed the terms of L.A.’s mayoral debate.

“He forced the more conventional candidates to talk about the issues in a way that would not have been the case if he weren’t in the race,” Schnur said.

“For the first time in years, there is a critical mass of citizens who are done pretending that what they see before their eyes isn’t really there,” Daum wrote on her Substack. “The people in charge will have to answer to those citizens.”

In the final weeks of the campaign, Pratt became ubiquitous in the national media. There were profiles in high-end publications, podcast interviews and regular reports from Fox News. But the results show he fell short of persuading enough Angelenos to make the runoff.

“It doesn’t appear that he’s impacted the political underpinnings of a deep blue city like Los Angeles,” Schnur said. “His impact was less ideological than attitudinal. He wasn’t convincing the voters to become more conservative, he was convincing them that it was OK for them to vent their anger in an unconventional way.”

Dissatisfaction is building in L.A. as the city’s cost of living mounts and a new generation of young Angelenos are unable to buy homes. Many are concerned about the lack of visible progress on street homelessness. Some are angry at what they see as city leaders’ poor preparation and response to the Palisades fire.

Ultimately, the momentum for change in Los Angeles was divided. As Pratt challenged Bass from the right, Raman tacked to the left of Bass on homelessness and policing and made affordability a key plank of her campaign.

Whatever their concerns about the status quo in L.A., many Angelenos were unwilling to vote for a Republican.

During the course of the campaign, Daum said she had numerous conversations with Angelenos who said: “I can’t associate with anybody who voted for Trump. I can’t have them in my house. I can’t have a conversation with them. I want nothing to do with them.”

A 42-year-old millennial who became famous on “The Hills” and owns a business selling “healing” crystals, Pratt had no political experience when he entered the mayoral race. He didn’t even appear to have a campaign manager.

“The system in Los Angeles isn’t struggling, it’s fundamentally broken,” Pratt said as he launched his campaign on Jan. 7, the anniversary of the fire. “It is a machine designed to protect the people at the top and the friends they exchange favors with while the rest of us drown in toxic smoke and ash.”

Bombastic and full of braggadocio, Pratt critiqued what he saw as Bass’ failure to prepare for and respond to the wildfires. He berated city leaders for not doing enough to get unhoused people off the streets. He railed against the city’s challenges with public safety, potholes, and the abuse of dogs on Skid Row. He even seized on a comment Bass made on the campaign trail about using taxpayer money to fund dental care for meth users.

As Pratt talked about homelessness, his message resonated with Marissa Comstock, 36, a stay-at-home mom and former software engineer in Eagle Rock.

“It’s totally obvious to me,” she said. “We need to get these people off the street.”

Last year, Comstock said she and her husband had a negative encounter at Griffith Park as they pushed their daughters around in strollers. Just a few minutes into their hike, she said, they were accosted by an unhoused person who screamed at them and threatened to cut off their daughters’ legs.

Since that incident, Comstock said, she takes her daughters only to places like the Huntington or Descanso Gardens that require membership to be admitted.

“I don’t feel comfortable even being on regular streets,” she said. “If there’s some crazy homeless person, what am I supposed to do?”

Pratt did extraordinarily well in capturing attention and developing a message, said Paul Mitchell, vice president of the Sacramento-based bipartisan firm Political Data Inc. Many Angelenos, he noted, had a better sense of Pratt’s viewpoint than they did of much more deeply funded California gubernatorial candidates, like Matt Mahan or Xavier Becerra.

During his campaign, Pratt did not express support for Trump or the Make America Great Again movement. He insisted he was a nonpartisan candidate running on local issues.

“I’m going to show everybody that I’m their mayor,” Pratt said on election night.

But even if Pratt was not explicitly MAGA, his reality TV theatrics mixed with antiestablishment populism were so MAGA-coded that he struggled to persuade disaffected liberal Angelenos. He referred to the homeless as “fentanyl zombies.” He railed against California’s “socialism.” He called Bass “Basura,” Spanish for trash.

When Trump spoke of Pratt, telling reporters “I heard he’s a big MAGA person,” Raman was quick to share Trump’s remarks on social media, warning Angelenos that Pratt was wildly out of step with their views.

While Pratt impressed some political observers with his performance in a May 6 televised debate with Bass and Raman, others said he alienated a significant portion of Angelenos with some of his social media antics.

“He could have talked about the drug use and the risks and the filth and the fire risks and all that,” said Rob Stutzman, a GOP political strategist, of Pratt’s zombie rhetoric, “but then paired that with, ‘My God, these liberals are leaving these people out here to die,’ and expressed some humanity towards the population that’s on the streets.”

Ultimately, Daum said Pratt was a “terrible candidate.”

“He did a million things wrong,” she said. “The whole time, I was yelling on Twitter about how he’s got to stop it: the AI videos are gonna hurt him, the Basura stuff, the zombie stuff. Like, stop it! Stop it!”

As Pratt’s campaign came to an end, Stutzman said, it is not clear that he represents any kind of lasting political movement.

“The question remains: Did he create a political movement or did he exploit the opportunity to run for mayor to restoke his diminishing fame?” Stutzman said. “He’s in the mold of a Kardashian: He’s just found ways to be famous without ever really doing anything important. I suspect that this was more about him acting out as to what he is as a reality celebrity versus becoming a leader of a political movement in L.A. We’ll see.”

When Angelenos go to the polls in November, there are several paths for Pratt voters.

Some, Mitchell said, will probably sit the election out entirely.

“You’ll get some Republicans who vote for Raman because they’re like, ‘Well, she’s a socialist and I can’t stand her, but I’m just voting no on Bass.’ And then you’ll have a lot of Republicans who are like, ‘OK, Raman’s a socialist.’”

After Raman made it to the runoff, Bass’ campaign slammed the city council member for voting against hiring more police and blocking efforts to keep homeless encampments away from schools. Meanwhile, Raman positioned herself as the anti-status quo candidate.

In a statement celebrating her advance to the general election, Raman did not mention Pratt or his supporters, but railed against “powerful interests” in City Hall.

“Working people pay the price in higher rents, depleted services, and a city that has stopped working for them,” she said. “If you’re as frustrated by the broken status quo as I am, I hope you’ll join our movement to build a city that works for everyone.”

Even as Daum felt depressed that Pratt’s campaign was not continuing, she said she felt more engaged in L.A. politics than she had ever been. She planned to vote in November and would be watching both Bass and Raman to see how they responded to Angelenos’ concerns about street homelessness.

“If Karen Bass said, ‘OK, I get it, “housing first” is not the panacea that I’ve been thinking it is. Seriously, I’m gonna put together a task force of people who are going to actually think this through.’ … I would be following that. I would be very curious,” Daum said. “Same if Nithya said that, too. I’m open to either of them, I guess.”

Comstock said she would probably vote for Bass in the runoff.

“Nithya Raman is just way too far on the socialist scale for me and will likely do more damage, rather than Karen Bass’ ineffectualness,” she said. “I don’t want to go any farther left.”

Spencer Pratt had a few things going for him when he launched an insurgent campaign to become Los Angeles’ next mayor.

He had a heart-tugging origin story that saw him transform from a has-been television star into one of the thousands of residents who lost their home in last year’s Palisades fire. He faced an unpopular incumbent in Mayor Karen Bass. He was powered by a vigorous social media presence and an angry electorate thirsty for change.

He was able to capitalize on those conditions to outraise his main rivals, Bass and city council member Nithya Raman, and transform his candidacy from an afterthought into a national story. Running as a Republican in a super-blue city like L.A. put him at an automatic disadvantage — one that might have been extremely difficult to overcome in the end. But the Pratt posse started to feel like a bona fide movement the more it thundered on, the type of revolt against the old guard that in previous eras led to the passage of Proposition 13 and the recall of Gov. Gray Davis — the type of movements that forever alter California politics.

Pratt, however, faced an apparently insurmountable obstacle.

Pratt.

With almost all votes counted, he’s going to finish in third place with about 26% of the electorate — the same slice Donald Trump received in 2024 — while Bass and Raman proceed to face each other in November. Political strategists will teach his failed attempt to their clients as a cautionary tale of how a candidate blew every advantage they had when they couldn’t afford to lose one.

Pratt’s first mistake was thinking that Angelenos wanted a campaign of wanton rage. Yes, many residents are furious at the state of the city. Yes, they want change. Yes, the angry Angeleno archetype is a real phenomenon that flares up in local elections to smack back at the powers that be.

But L.A. is not MAGAlandia — running from the right on apocalyptic, whiny messaging will only get you the few Republicans that remain in the city and some disaffected liberals. Pratt didn’t run as a MAGA candidate, but it’s hard to say he didn’t run like one — even as he swore he was running for everyone.

He took every opportunity to ridicule progressives in a city where four democratic socialists sit on the city council, one of them — Raman — has a good chance of becoming the next mayor, and five of the six candidates endorsed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America either won outright or are moving on to the general election.

Instead of making overtures to that side of the populist coin, Pratt recorded videos obsessing over Bass’ trip to communist Cuba in the 1970s, a well-known fact he treated as revelatory and which made Pratt sound like he was stuck in a John Birch Society meeting circa 1965. His dismissal of Raman as “stupid” and the mayor as “Basura” — trash — came off as facile juvenilia at a time when we already have the Big Juvenile Delinquent running things in the White House. Ridiculing homeless people as “zombies,” “vagrants” and “bums” only riled up the worst elements of the city and turned off anyone with a heart.

Keith Casey of Casey’s Family BBQ serves up food as L.A. mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt hosts a campaign “block party” event on 10th Avenue in Los Angeles on May 20.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Pratt undoubtedly attracted votes from a good amount of non-MAGA people fed up with various problems afflicting L.A. But many of the supporters who brayed the loudest on his behalf were the same people already doing daily propaganda on social media for a failed, hate-filled president and his baleful cronies.

Pratt acted like he believed the AI-generated videos created by fans that cast him as a comic-book hero was real life instead of forgetting that he was a novice trying to take on two experienced politicians. While Bass and Raman trekked across the city during the primary, Pratt limited his public appearances mostly to the Westside and random encounters with supporters he posted on social media. The few times he appeared outside those safe spaces came off as safari expeditions in a mysterious city the 42-year-old lifelong Angeleno obviously didn’t know.

Take the South L.A. block party he hosted last month. Instead of having something thoughtful to say about the state of Black L.A. or how its political leaders continue to neglect the region, all Pratt seemed to take away from that afternoon was that it was in the territory of the Rollin’ 60s Neighborhood Crips, a detail he shared ad nauseum on social media and to the press — as if kicking it with gang members would fix L.A. or gain him any votes or grant some kind of street cred.

That self-centered cluelessness ended up torpedoing Pratt’s best campaign moment. In the one debate he participated in, Pratt put Bass on the defensive, turned Raman into a tongue-tied mess, kept his answers sharp and relatable, and even earned the praise of the moderators. He should’ve demanded more gatherings like that to flex his mastery of television cameras, make his case to as many Angelenos as possible and showcase the self-proclaimed Pratt Daddy as someone willing to take on hard questions anytime, anyplace, from anyone.

Instead, Pratt declined an invite to their only other scheduled debate and never bothered with the forums civic groups across the city held in order for their members to hear from candidates. Instead, Pratt flew out to New York the week before election day to appear on Fox News.

Sticking to largely sycophantic media who lobbed softball questions hardened his ceiling. Pratt needed to proselytize — not preach to the choir.

The thing is, Pratt made some strong points about the inefficiencies of L.A.’s political status quo and the outrage that is having tens of thousands of people live on our streets. And there’s something appealing about an outsider crashing City Hall, which is way too beholden to sclerotic lifers who can be as clueless about what the city needs as Pratt turned out to be.

Instead, he platformed people who saw L.A. as a hellhole — or “shithole,” as Trump likes to call certain places. It was hard to see what some of Pratt’s loudest and most strident supporters actually thought was worth preserving in the city — but not why they felt he was their man.

In the wake of his loss, Pratt sure hasn’t push back against unfounded claims by too many of his followers and Trump, Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson that Democrats somehow rigged the election against him. Quite the contrary, Pratt has insinuated on social media that they’re onto something.

That last point reinforces the ultimate reason Pratt could never become L.A.’s next mayor: He really doesn’t believe in L.A.

Angelenos don’t mind haters — it’s the type of city that frustrates residents even on its best days. But one insult residents won’t brook is someone who doesn’t have confidence in better days ahead for the city no matter how dire things may be.

Angelenos can spot a phony from far away — and Spencer, you’re turning out to be phonier than the fake drama on any of the television shows you ever appeared in.

You vowed to leave L.A. if you didn’t win the race for mayor. Maybe you should stay and try to righteously pressure Bass and Raman to make much needed changes. If you do, urge your followers to do the same instead of them pouting and sitting out the mayor’s race.

But if you don’t, well, maybe you never really loved L.A. as much as the City of Angels, warts and all, deserves. And you kind of need to really love L.A. to really fix what ails it.

Step up, or step outta town.

When Nithya Raman stepped up to a podium on the night of L.A.’s mayoral primary election, she thanked her supporters for standing up to the “powerful interests” who spent millions of dollars trying to “preserve this city’s broken and unjust status quo.”

“At a time when so many people have written Los Angeles off or have lost hope in the future of this incredible city,” the democratic socialist L.A. mayoral hopeful said, “you are proof that Angelenos are hungry for change.”

But as election results rolled in, the movement for change was underwhelming, or at least divided. Incumbent Mayor Karen Bass was in the lead, advancing to the November runoff. That left Raman locked in a battle for a second spot with Republican former reality TV star Spencer Pratt.

Bass is one of several high-profile establishment Democrats to emerge on top. In California’s gubernatorial race, centrist Xavier Becerra, a veteran of the Biden Cabinet, advanced to the runoff after being challenged from the left by billionaire green activist Tom Steyer and Democratic former U.S. Rep. Katie Porter. Steyer is now behind Steve Hilton, a Republican, and battling to make the runoff.

Still reeling from the rise of Donald Trump, Democrats in California and beyond are struggling to figure out the future direction of the party.

Some progressives, inspired by Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral victory, saw 2026 as an opportunity to move the city further left. But the results have been mixed in key races, with veteran Democrats like Bass and Becerra eking out leads even as polls show dissatisfaction with status quo politics in California.

“This was supposed to be a change revolution, but voters clearly said no to the revolution,” said Sara Sadhwani, a politics professor at Pomona College. “Voters want change,” she noted, “but it doesn’t appear right now that there has been an appetite for a major shift in the ideology of the city or the state.”

Xavier Becerra speaks during an election night event in downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday.

(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)

Becerra emerged as the Democratic favorite late in the election and won support from many establishment party leaders. Pundits said after a wild primary that included the implosion of Democratic U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell’s campaign amid sex assault allegations, Becerra emerged as a “safe” choice.

Some opponents attacked his moderate views and his willingness to accept campaign donations from big oil companies like Chevron. But that did not stop his rise.

Bass was also beset with challenges, being an incumbent in a city beset with problems.

For her, election night marked a “victory with an asterisk,” Sadhwani said, noting that Bass is first incumbent L.A. mayor in more than two decades to face a runoff. “It would be wrong for Karen Bass to think that this victory … is a ringing endorsement of the work she is currently doing.”

The results underscore Bass’ unpopularity as an incumbent, garnering just 35% of the vote so far. If Raman can catch up and eventually surpass Pratt in the vote count, she could pose a considerable challenge to Bass as more young voters come to the polls in November.

Mike Bonin, a former L.A. City Council member who leads the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State L.A., said if Bass exceeded expectations it was because they were very low.

“Coming in first in a runoff isn’t a huge victory for an incumbent mayor,” he said. “Two-thirds of the city did not vote for her. That’s not a position of strength.”

James Adams, a political science professor at UC Davis, said that Becerra and Bass coming through indicates the centrist Democratic candidates were in a stronger short-term position than their rivals. But problems loom ahead, he said, as the longtime Democratic establishment that’s been governing California for the last 15 years failed to make notable progress in solving problems with affordable housing, homelessness, public transportation and education.

“I think the Democrats’ prospects are very bright in 2026 given the California Republicans’ dysfunctionality and a complete backlash against Donald Trump,” Adams said. “But I have much bigger concerns about the California Democrats long term, because it seems to me they’re setting a record for most consecutive years of failing to fix the state’s problems while getting reelected anyway.”

Democrats in California, he said, were suffering from being in power too long.

“Whenever one party gets into a long-term, dominant position, usually because the other party is just in the midst of self-destructing … the whole thing ends in tears, because the party that is in a dominant position, they don’t have to be that good.”

As the vote count continues in the mayor’s race, democratic socialists in Los Angeles already have some wins down-ballot.

“We are gaining momentum,” said Leslie Chang, a co-chair of the 5,000-member L.A. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, a decentralized anti-capitalist group that advocates for rental protections and defunding the police. Over the last six years, Angelenos have elected four DSA-backed City Council members and a DSA-recommended city controller.

The DSA did not officially endorse Raman, because she entered the race after the group had issued endorsements and another DSA candidate was also running for mayor. However, three of the six DSA-backed candidates for citywide office were projected to win outright.

DSA Councilmembers Hugo Soto-Martinez and Eunisses Hernandez were reelected by such large margins they avoided runoffs. In the city attorney’s race, DSA-endorsed Marissa Roy was in the lead and the mainstream Democratic incumbent became the first city attorney ousted in a primary in nearly a century. City Controller Kenneth Mejia, a progressive anti-establishment candidate who is not a DSA member but an ally of the group, led by nearly 20 percentage points.

When Chang knocked on doors, she said, some voters asked: “Well, what’s the difference between Nithya and Karen Bass?”

A few voters told her that after reviewing Bass’ and Raman’s websites, they found their platforms similar. Chang was surprised. She thought Raman articulated a clear and novel strategy for how to get L.A. out of the housing crisis, but she said some on the left took issue with her working with housing developers to reduce red tape.

Neel Sannappa, chair of the California Democratic Party’s progressive caucus, said Raman was stymied by getting into the race late and having only a few months to campaign. It also didn’t help that a more left-wing challenger, Rae Huang, already had some momentum — not enough to win, but enough to split the left.

“Nithya does represent something real and growing in Los Angeles,” Sannappa said. “There is a hunger for more progressive, left-leaning candidates that want to make sure that we’re investing in people and not so much investing in just police … and being able to build things that are new and innovative.”

Supporters watch election results come in on their phones during Nithya Raman’s election night party at Boomtown Brewery on Tuesday.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

Some have criticized Raman’s coalition-building, noting she was not endorsed by her fellow DSA-backed City Council members. Others said the MIT and Harvard graduate, who has been a councilmember for six years, performed tepidly in a May televised debate and suffered from Pratt’s attempts to tie her to the establishment.

“If you’re a part of the institution, which she is,” Sadhwani said, “then you can’t exactly claim that you’re going to bring massive change.”

Sadhwani said that California’s left, in contrast to New York’s, appears to have a charisma deficit. While Pratt and Hilton had an advantage with their television backgrounds, they also spoke “in plain terms about the real problems that the state faces.”

Part of Bass’ success can also be attributed to assembling a coalition that included the L.A. County Federation of Labor, the L.A. police officers union, the L.A. County Democratic Party and immigrant rights groups.

In the mayoral race, Sadhwani said, “the dominant political coalition still has power, money, the organization.”

“If you can garner the support of the unions, then having a broader message, maybe it’s less important,” she said. “You don’t have to work quite so hard, because the unions have the base machine.”

People attend Mayor Bass’ election party for the California 2026 primaries at the LINE Hotel on Tuesday.

(Carlin Stiehl/For The Times)

Yusef Robb, a longtime Democratic strategist who is an advisor to Bass, attributed the mayor’s lead to her campaign’s success in building a broad coalition and communicating across the political spectrum. Most voters, he said, tend to think less about ideology — and whether a Democrat was mainstream or DSA-supported — than candidates’ positions on bread and butter issues.

“Mayor’s races are first and foremost about what people see outside of their front doors, when they walk their kids to school, when they drive to work,” he said. “At the end of the day, the voters look at the field and say, ‘OK, who do I trust to keep my kids from having to skip around a tent on the way to school?’ ‘Who can I trust to hire more officers?’ … and ‘Who can I trust to fight back against ICE in court through executive action and even in the streets?’ And that’s Karen Bass.”

For Democrats in this robustly blue state, part of the challenge in figuring a path forward is that every candidate — even those already in power — pitches themselves as a bona fide progressive against the status quo.

“We have led a grassroots campaign because we want to bring change to our city,” Bass said on election night. “And that’s what we’ve been doing, and that’s what we’re going to continue to do.”

Raman also tried to tout herself as a change candidate. Articulating her platform in broad strokes rather than bread-and-butter detail, Raman said she wanted L.A. to be a place “where government actually functions and delivers every day on this city’s beautiful bighearted values, where we stand up against ICE, where we show up for our gay and trans siblings.”

But as she talked of neighborhoods “full of trees and shade … and people and good food,” she seemed low-key and equivocal. Her message was a far cry from the pressing one U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) put forward in his presidential campaigns, highlighting the millions of Americans working for “starvation wages” and a young single mother in Nevada struggling on $10.45 an hour.

Ultimately, the fight between Bass and Raman, as a struggle between mainstream and progressive Democrats, is complicated by the fact that Bass came up through the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, founding the grassroots Community Coalition in South L.A. in the 1990s.

Campaign worker Khai Dombroe prepares balloons before Nithya Raman’s election night party.

(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

And even though Raman is a DSA member, she has tacked to the center during the campaign, distancing herself from past calls to defund the police by saying she did not want the LAPD to lose more officers.

While Raman and Bass have much in common, the most significant difference between them is on homelessness, Sannappa said. Even though Bass comes from a political tradition of not wanting to criminalize the unhoused, he said, she understood her voters include people wanting to move homeless people off the streets.

“Brass tacks is that we need people that are going to be willing to fight for mental health services,” Sannappa said.

“I think Nithya more so represents the direction where the Democratic Party is going to have to go.”

As L.A. becomes less affordable and homeownership becomes out of reach for many Angelenos, young renters have become a rising political constituency — a shift that many say will likely propel the city leftward.

Bonin said he expected the next new rising Democratic coalition in L.A. to be a labor-renter coalition. He cited Councilmember Soto-Martinez, a renter and union organizer, as probably the best avatar of that.

But as the middle-class splinters along generational lines, other political experts warn that many ordinary Angelenos feel increasingly shut out of L.A. politics.

“Once upon a time the Democratic Party was the party of the working class, and today it has become the party of the educated elites,” Sadhwani said. “Perhaps one of the gifts that Donald Trump has given to Democrats is to force them to contend with the everyday issues of voters, which they seem to have distanced themselves from.”

As many Angelenos feel worse off now than four years ago, Chang said Bass was not directly responsible for every problem. Still, she said, she could have done more to move the city in the right direction.

Delaying the wage boost tied to the 2028 Olympics, she said, was a move that failed working people at a time when many are struggling to make ends meet.

“My fear, of course, is people pivot away from corporate Democrats and they choose the MAGA Republican, because that is the most visible fight,” Chang said. “Or because they think, ‘Oh, well, a democratic socialist running on the Democratic Party line, this is just more of the same status quo.’ ”

Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman cut deeper into the lead of reality television personality Spencer Pratt on Saturday, as his lead slimmed to just a single percentage point.

Pratt fell to just over 27% of the vote while Raman jumped up to slightly over 26%, according to the results from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder. Pratt now leads Raman by just 7,494 votes.

“We’ve seen Nithya Raman catching up on every update and the last two in particular she’s accelerated,” said Paul Mitchell, vice president of the bipartisan voter data firm Political Data Inc. “She’s continued to gain at a rate that means she will eventually catch up unless Pratt starts getting some ballots coming in that are either geographically or demographically better for him.”

Democratic consultant Michael Trujillo, who doesn’t represent anyone in the mayoral race, said the results suggest Raman will surpass Pratt as more votes are counted.

“I think it’s over,” Trujillo said. “It appears Nithya will be in the runoff. Pratt doesn’t appear to be growing much more.”

The second-place finisher in the mayoral primary will face Mayor Karen Bass in a Nov. 3 runoff. On election night Tuesday, the Associated Press determined that Bass had secured enough votes to qualify for the runoff.

Pratt has been in second place since then, but Raman has gradually eroded his lead as mail-in ballots have been counted. The updated vote tally released Thursday showed Pratt with 29% of the vote and Raman with 23%.

With Friday’s update, Raman’s share had risen to 25% and Pratt’s shrank to 28%, for a 3 percentage point gap.

In the most recent batch of mail-in ballots counted, Raman received 23,514 votes, while Pratt gained 10,336.

Election analysts expected Raman to gain ground as the mail-in ballots were tallied, reasoning that many left-of-center voters — Raman’s base — held onto their mail-in ballots until the last minute as they waited to choose between Democratic gubernatorial candidates. They also say younger, more progressive voters tend to hold onto their ballots longer generally.

Although the mayor’s race is nonpartisan, Pratt is a Republican in a city that is overwhelmingly dominated by Democratic voters and elected officials.

A poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, which was co-sponsored by The Times, had Pratt running in third place behind Bass and Raman.

The poll of 1,351 likely voters conducted May 19-24 had Bass with 26% support, Raman with 25% support and Pratt with 22% support, with a 3% margin of error.

Los Angeles voters have become accustomed to seeing election results change as late-arriving ballots are tabulated. In the 2022 mayoral primary, real estate developer Rick Caruso led the pack for about a week before Bass pulled ahead.

Pratt was favored in many of the same neighborhoods that voted for Caruso, according to a Times analysis of precinct-level returns provided by the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder on Wednesday, when an estimated 62% of the projected vote had been counted. Raman, by comparison, made inroads in progressive areas dominated by Bass four years ago.

Pratt, whose Pacific Palisades fire home burned in the January 2025 fire, was strong there and on the Westside, as well as in the San Fernando Valley communities of Encino, Woodland Hills, Chatsworth and Sunland-Tujunga.

Raman dominated precincts known for their progressive politics, particularly those with younger people in renter-heavy neighborhoods stretching from Hollywood to Highland Park, including her home base of Silver Lake.

Mail-in ballots with an election day postmark will continue to be accepted by county election officials through Tuesday.

Mayor Karen Bass ran the table in South Los Angeles, Spencer Pratt found strong support from his Westside base, and Nithya Raman racked up votes in Echo Park and other neighborhoods with a concentration of renters, according to a Times analysis of partial precinct-level results from this week’s primary election.

The Times analysis, based on an estimated 62% of the ballots counted so far, found that Pratt was favored in many of the same neighborhoods that voted for mayoral candidate Rick Caruso in 2022, while Raman made inroads in progressive areas dominated by Bass four years ago.

Bass found support in neighborhoods along much of the Harbor and Santa Monica freeway corridors, along with central San Fernando Valley communities from Van Nuys to Arleta.

With much of the vote left to be counted, a map prepared by The Times showing how neighborhoods voted represents a snapshot of an election still very much underway. Bass garnered enough votes on election night to qualify for a Nov. 3 runoff, the Associated Press determined, but votes are still being tallied and it’s not yet clear if she will face Pratt or Raman.

Early returns show Pratt with a significant lead over Raman, but some analysts expect the remaining ballots to lean Democratic, as many left-of-center voters held onto their mail-in ballots until the last minute as they waited to choose between Democratic gubernatorial candidates.

Not surprisingly, Pratt did well in the Pacific Palisades, where his home burned down in the 2025 fire, garnering 60% in one precinct. The next closest candidate there was Adam Miller at 14%.

A registered Republican, Pratt also led in many of the more conservative neighborhoods that were dominated in the 2022 mayoral primary by Caruso, a former Republican who switched to being a Democrat before running for mayor. Pratt was ahead in much of the Westside and the West Valley, the analysis found, including much of Woodland Hills, Encino, West Hills and Chatsworth — just like Caruso four years ago.

“The Pratt vote mirrors a tremendous amount of the Rick Caruso vote: geographically, demographically and ideologically,” said Dave Jacobson, a Democratic consultant and co-founder of J&Z Strategies.

Certain Valley neighborhoods that supported Caruso didn’t go to Pratt, though, as Bass made inroads in areas including Northridge and North Hills, extending her support farther west into the Valley than she did in her last primary.

At the same time, Pratt appeared poised to win some neighborhoods that Bass carried in 2022. He was leading in Studio City and Hancock Park, according to the preliminary returns in areas where Bass led Caruso after the primary.

Bass’ stronghold in South L.A.

Bass’ support eroded to some extent since 2022, when she secured 43% of the vote in the primary against Caruso, then-Councilmember Kevin de Leon and leftist Gina Viola, the analysis based on partial returns shows. Even so, Bass outperformed her 2022 primary results in many areas south of the Santa Monica Freeway, though the precincts are slightly different than they were four years ago, making direct comparisons difficult.

In one precinct in Gramercy Park, Bass picked up 82% of the vote so far — up from a similar precinct where she won about 75% of the vote in 2022. Part of Bass’ dominance in the area could have to do with the fact that Pratt and Raman didn’t perform as well as Caruso did in many of these South L.A. neighborhoods.

Still, in some parts of the neighborhood, Bass underperformed 2022, though she still won more than half the vote.

In a Baldwin Hills neighborhood precinct where she won 77% of the vote last time, Bass was down to about 64% this year so far, as Raman took 20% of the precinct and Pratt had 9%. In 2022, Caruso won less than 13% of the area.

Bill Carrick, a longtime Democratic consultant, said it was unsurprising to see Bass’ support continue to be strong in South L.A.

“She’s been in the community there, lived there a long time and represented them in various capacities,” he said. “She’s a pretty well-known figure. She’s tied into all the networks.”

The Raman factor

The partial election returns show Raman leading the pack in precincts known for their progressive politics, particularly those with younger people in renter-heavy neighborhoods stretching from Hollywood to Highland Park.

Every neighborhood that Raman won was taken by Bass during the primary in 2022, though Viola, a leftist candidate that year, also did well in these precincts compared with other parts of the city.

On the Westside, Raman found few spots to lead, taking Sawtelle and Palms by fairly narrow margins, although those margins could possibly increase as more votes are counted.

She also dominated the Westwood precinct that includes UCLA, winning 56% of the vote in one precinct, compared with Bass’ 19% and Pratt’s 10%. And in a Los Feliz precinct in her council district, Raman so far has 58% of the vote, far ahead of Bass and Pratt.

Still, as of Wednesday, Raman was trailing in 54 of the 66 precincts in her own council district.

Zachary Donnini, a data expert with the nonpartisan group VoteHub, said he expects to see Raman’s numbers rise as the county continues to count late-arriving mail-in ballots, which he says tend to skew younger and more Democratic — which is Raman’s base.

“All the areas that are good for Pratt are going to become less good for him, and all areas that look less good for Raman are going to look better for her,” Donnini said.

Too close to call

Across the city, certain battleground precincts were so tight that no single candidate had a lead as of Wednesday’s count, on which The Times’ analysis was based.

In two adjacent Koreatown precincts, Bass and Raman were tied, with 117 votes in one and 187 votes in another, with Pratt trailing not far behind in both.

Bass and Raman also split a downtown Los Angeles precinct with 199 votes each, though Raman carried much of the rest of downtown, which Bass won in 2022.

In the Valley, it was Bass and Pratt who split precincts. In one Sun Valley precinct, the two each took 151 votes compared with Raman’s 80. They also tied in an Encino precinct.