Who gets to live in Los Angeles?

Here in Southern California, voting is currently open for local and state elections, and ends June 2 (if you are in Los Angeles and reading this, don’t forget to vote, here’s information). And here in Los Angeles the big question in the L.A. mayoral and council races is "who gets to live in L.A.?"

Candidates in the second largest city in the country are actively running on demonizing or outright criminalizing poor and struggling Angelenos. And at the top of the matter is the Los Angeles mayoral race, where incumbent Karen Bass is facing steep challenges over her management of the 2025 fires, the slumping Hollywood industry, rampant attacks on the city by federal agents and a major occupation by the military. To her left is City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, who has been very strong in supporting renters rights and immigrant issues. On her right is former reality TV star — I suppose, I did not really follow reality TV but apparently he is one — Spencer Pratt, whose answer to “who gets to live in L.A.?” is “not them.”

Pratt, who lost his home in the Palisades fires and has harnessed anger over the blazes to help fuel his race, has decided to center his campaign on going after poor people in the city. He has regularly labeled unhoused people — people who have fled domestic violence, people who work and go to school but don’t have a home due to bad luck, people who lost their homes in the fires — “zombies,” accused them of being on some kind of “super meth” that doesn’t exist and claimed all unhoused people have access to homes but are addicts. As he told ABC7:

_{“Well, they're not homeless. They're drug addicts. Most of these people are addicted to fentanyl and meth. This isn't Spencer making that up. There is places for all of these people to sleep in L.A. No matter what anybody tells you, we have housing and shelter for everyone that's living on the street. They are choosing to be on the streets because they want to do drugs. They don't want rules. They don't want to listen. They want to have animals to abuse."}

There are many problems here. First, the ABC7 interviewer did not push back on that claim or ask Pratt for any evidence. The truth is that the vast majority of unhoused Angelenos in the city are not addicts or mentally ill. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s 2025 point-in-time homeless count found that only 23% were struggling with addiction and 25% were dealing with some kind of mental illness. Meanwhile, unlike what Pratt claims, many homeless Angelenos any are children with their families. More than 16,000 have experience with domestic violence, with nearly 4,000 being homeless as a result of fleeing a domestic violence situation.

As others and myself have written repeatedly, the main driver of homelessness in Los Angeles and nationwide is the cost of living. There’s not enough housing and there definitely is not enough affordable housing. Many people live paycheck-to-paycheck and thousands more than the 43,695 unhoused people in the city counted in the point-in-time count experience homelessness each year, often in short stints as housing briefly falls through. For many, housing is precarious, even before the fires and the rising cost of living, which is only going to get worse due to the global impact of the war with Iran.

Pratt and his campaign have also heavily utilized AI for ads, with computer generated images depicting Los Angeles as overrun with tents and fires, a fearmongering vision of the city. And this past week pro-Pratt social media accounts all shared a video of a block in Silverlake overrun by unhoused people. Except it appears to be staged (and poorly, look at the brand new grill still covered in plastic) and there isn’t a large encampment there. I went by there the other day.

Bass, a longtime member of Congress who was on the shortlist for Joe Biden’s vice president, won in 2022, saving Los Angeles from having mall developer and conservative Rick Caruso as mayor. Since taking office she’s been better than La La Land aficionado Eric Garcetti, but hasn’t been particularly standout or progressive. Her homelessness initiative has been flawed, with valid complaints. The massive destruction of the two fires in early 2025 . And then there is the last year of assaults on Los Angeles by the federal government, where Department of Homeland Security agents have terrorized communities, abducted people and with the help of local cops, brutalized peaceful protesters dozens of times, on camera, in Downtown Los Angeles within eyeshot of Los Angeles City Hall. Conservatives and progressives are mad at Bass, for whatever reason, but it’s clear that change is on the ballot.

Being mayor of Los Angeles is not a powerful job. The 15 city council members have enormous power, and so much of actually enacting big policy relies on coordinating with the county government. This is not a Chicago or New York City situation. But the mayor still sets an agenda, still oversees a budget and still commands public opinion on issues.

The city faces several issues. There’s the slump in the filmmaking industry, the rising cost of living due to global economic issues, fights over transit and more. But homelessness is at the top of the list, once again. It is a problem, but the either ignorant or intentional lies about the issue won’t solve it. According to one recent study from the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, even as some of the population has declined, housing demand hasn't. Renters are heavily burdened and many have been priced out, with the overwhelming majority of unhoused Angelenos in the county having lived here before becoming homeless, despite the claims reactionaries like to make.

This isn’t limited to the mayoral race. In 2024, after progressive wins two years earlier, a reactionary wave fueled by the retail theft crime ring fears — fears proven to be in part a hoax by companies looking to cover up business losses — and anger over homelessness led to more conservative figures winning city and county races. One of those, District 11 Councilwoman Traci Park whose area covers parts of the Westside, has leaned hard into anti-unhoused messaging. Not fighting homelessness, fighting those who are unhoused, with ads full of fearful sights of encampments (including one made up almost exclusively of veterans by the West LA Veterans Affairs campus) or trying to get rid of people in RVs, despite city efforts to make it safer for people living in their cars.

Pushing people out, playing Whack-a-Mole with people who are a part of the community, doesn’t actually solve the issue. Nor does it do anything to prevent people on the edge from falling into homelessness. Putting people into forced treatment or detention facilities on federal land, as Pratt has suggested (echoing Trump), also relies on ongoing federal support and those facilities even existing, which they currently don’t, and that’s not even getting into the likely illegal process of putting people in them in the first place.

The reactionary bent and exclusionary ideology is on the rise in Los Angeles, but doesn’t match much of the last decade of voter preferences. Since 2016, Angelenos in the city and county have backed plans for expanding transit around the region, taxes on the sale of luxury properties to fund affordable housing and more. People here want to live here, they want a welcoming community.

In a few days the primaries will close and the top two candidates will head to the November general election, unless someone wins a majority outright. It’s an election that will decide if some of the people that are voting in it are even welcome in Los Angeles.