By admin 
The week before Los Angeles’ mayoral primary, a Spencer Pratt campaign van turned up on Hyperion Avenue, the road that separates the Los Feliz and Silver Lake neighborhoods on the city’s Eastside. Pratt’s campaign had become a social media hit over the prior month, fueled by a simple message, a barrage of A.I. slop videos, and Elon Musk’s X algorithm. But I had not seen a single piece of Pratt signage in this part of town.
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Pratt’s van was in front of a cocktail bar with a wooden facade that doesn’t let passersby see inside. I pass it often but had tried to go only once, years ago, when some friends and I were turned away after the bouncer asked if we had any women with us. (We did not.) You may have seen the bar on the first episode of the recent HBO sitcom I Love LA, in the scene when Rachel Sennott’s character tells her friend, “They used to roofie people here, but then they fixed it.” (“Oh, bummer,” Odessa A’zion’s character replies.) I pulled up the bar’s Instagram page and found—what else?—an A.I.-made event flyer that depicted a blond woman running through a gauntlet of burning homeless encampments. A campaign “ballot party” was starting right then. I took the opportunity to find out what Pratt’s deal was, out there in the physical world.
It was a worthwhile use of an evening. On Tuesday, Pratt, a Republican running with the “Community Advocate” label below his name, faced off against Democratic establishment incumbent Karen Bass, progressive Councilwoman Nithya Raman, and a host of spoilers. It’s a jungle primary, in which the top two finishers advance to a head-to-head general election this fall. On Wednesday morning, the votes were still being counted, but Pratt looked likely to finish second—good enough for a runoff with Bass and a few more months in the limelight.
[NOTE TO COPY, Patrick and Alex will fill in results late Tuesday night or early Wednesday: Pratt, a former star of MTV’s The Hills, TKTKTK ADVANCES OR DOESN’T OR WE DON’T KNOW YET BECAUSE THEY’RE STILL COUNTING. I believe I can now tell you why you’ll be hearing so much about him until November.]
The party took place on a warm L.A. evening that hadn’t yet shifted to the usual crispness. The city’s May gray had stayed away. The taco stand about 100 yards off had its normal self-sustaining line. It was a beautiful night in an imperfect but beautiful city. Or at least I thought it was. Once inside the bar, I roamed around, talking to people who think Pratt is the last thing standing between L.A. and anarchy, damnation, or both.
This crowd had a specific vantage point. The group was almost entirely white, more so than the neighborhoods the bar straddles. Most people were between 30 and 50, wore nice clothes without red hats, and did not look as if they spent a great deal of time south of Interstate 10 except to go to the airport. (Same.) Homelessness is not always visible around here, but the area is 20 minutes from the spots where it’s most common. The attendees talked about downtown apocalyptically.
Not everyone, however, wanted to speak about it on the record. On the one hand, there were Pratt supporters who thought their ideas would get them in trouble with friends or bosses. They didn’t want to be quoted. On the other were those who were confident that a quiet majority was with them and that, soon, their views on homelessness and crime would have the validation of Pratt beating Bass and Raman. These supporters believed that the city had been brainwashed into supporting Democrats but would soon see Pratt’s light.
What was the source of that light, though? What did these people see in Pratt? And what does his relative popularity say about the state of our body politic that 10 years in Donald Trump’s America hasn’t already told us? The answers became clear over a few hours, and then a few days, of talking with them.
Although Pratt lists policy positions on a handful of subjects, he’s essentially running a single-issue campaign on homelessness—an issue that, for Pratt, allows him to hammer themes about public nuisance and disorder, crime, and a government letting it all happen. It’s impossible to overstate the extent to which this topic is Pratt’s whole ballgame, the onlything I heard about chatting with his backers. Everything else he talks about ties back to it.
Two things are true of Los Angeles’ homelessness. One is that the area has an extraordinary number of homeless people: some 72,000 in L.A. County as of last summer. The other is that unsheltered homelessness (people in streets, in cars, or squatting in buildings) has fallen in the most recent measurements, which cover about the first two years of Bass’ term. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s survey pegs the decline at about 17.5 percent within city limits during that period. The situation is awful, impossible to miss, and improving.
Pratt’s campaign is premised on the “improving” part not being real. His argument is not just that L.A. is the country’s biggest hub for homelessness, but that it’s being swallowed whole by it. He says Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom “make up stats” and that the widely reported homeless counts “are not real numbers.” He says “anybody with eyeballs” can see that the official story is false. “Actually, there’s been an increase of naked, drug-addict zombies in front of every playground, every kid’s school, every coffee shop,” he says. (Two blocks from the site of this party, a coffee shop sits across the street from an elementary school. The next naked person or encampment I spot in front of either will be my first.)
Pratt says Newsom and Bass should be in jail together. But the homeless estimates Pratt decries aren’t something those two have cooked up in a boardroom. That statistic comes from the LAHSA, a city-county joint agency that sends trained volunteers into the streets each February to count the people living there. The survey methodology comes from professionals at the University of Southern California, a private institution, and the count requires approval from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. (The feds trimmed the most recent number by about 100, out of 72,000.) Researchers from the RAND Corporation believe that local authorities undercounted the previous time around but still found declines in the areas they surveyed. Honest critics can and do debate the estimate. They just don’t claim that the whole thing is fiction unless they’re working an angle.
Which brings us back to Pratt. He says he will eliminate street encampments, which occupy downtown’s Skid Row, as well as plenty of other hot spots in various neighborhoods. (Democratic leaders at the city and state level have cleared plenty of encampments, so the idea isn’t exactly outside the Overton window.) More unusually, Pratt says he will put homeless residents into mandatory rehab facilities that he will construct on federal land. Where? On an unknown plot of “beautiful nature,” which he would ostensibly get from Donald Trump, the president he talks about as little as possible so as to avoid being weighed down in a blue city. Trump plays ball with this strategy to a degree: “I’d like to see him do well. I don’t know him. I assume he probably supports me. I heard he’s a big MAGA person.” Pratt doesn’t say so outright.
Pratt justifies his approach to the issue on the grounds that homelessness and drug abuse are one and the same. (“Los Angeles doesn’t have a homelessness problem—we have a DRUG problem,” he says.) No one would contest that a significant number of L.A.’s homeless population uses drugs, but Pratt’s framing is convenient. He doesn’t talk about those who aren’tunder the influence of something, or about the ramifications of herding sober people into his facilities. He has made an unverifiable claim that 90 percent of the city’s homeless citizens are on drugs. If that’s true, I have not heard him or a supporter address what would appear to be a treatment mismatch for the others, as well as a potential civil liberties breach for all of them. (In 2023 researchers from the University of California, San Francisco in California; 65 percent said they had used illicit drugs during at least one period in their life.)
Pratt’s theories about homelessness strain credulity on the merits. He has alleged, for one more example, that “many of the addicts you see around your neighborhood are bused in from other states in order for local NGOs to profit off their addiction.” Setting aside the conspiratorial premise, the “many” in Pratt’s assertion is doing a ton of work. That 2023 UCSF study of the state’s homeless adults found that 90 percent had been living in California when they lost their housing. And in L.A. County alone, according to the 2025 USC demographic survey, 70.4 percent of homeless adults were already living in the county when they lost housing; 90 percent had been there for at least a year. Pratt’s supporters are not diving into tables, though. They are relying on their eyes and phones, and Pratt is telling them they’re right. This indifference to academic and institutional data means that Pratt is the man with the homeless plan.
On my way into the bar, I met a 47-year-old musician and event organizer named Natasha Lands. She volunteers with a group that visits Skid Row, provides supplies to the people there, and tries to rescue animals who live chained up in abysmal conditions.
She asked me: “Want to cure homelessness? Why don’t you ask the homeless?”
I asked her: “Have you asked any homeless what they think of Spencer?”
She answered: “I don’t think they know Spencer.”
When the New York Times asked Pratt if he had personally engaged a homeless person on the street, he wasn’t clear. “You can’t not interface with homeless people living here—that’s the point,” he told the paper of record. Pratt wasn’t at the party, and his campaign has not yet granted an interview request.
One word I did not hear at the party, and a topic that Pratt has downplayed on the trail, is rent. Yes, it’s too high, he says, but he suggests that his housing plan will deploy a trickle-down approach that starts with lessening landlords’ risks and costs and thus encourages them to build more. He argues that because of its population decline in recent years, the city has vacancies. It’s true, but it doesn’t follow that L.A. then has no housing supply problem, as Pratt states. That’s because households are getting smaller, and multiple families don’t tend to share single-family homes. Running for mayor on an anti-homeless platform without highlighting the cost of rent or advocating zealously for building new housing feels like running for mayor of Mars without talking about water. His tack here reflects his supporters’ priorities, though. A Los Angeles Times survey a few days before the primary found that 34 percent of Pratt voters saw affordable housing as a “very important” issue, but 96 percent of them gave that billing to crime and public safety.
At the bar, one of Pratt’s staffers introduced herself and suggested I talk to a 22-year-old woman named Sophia who had come to the party. (After Sophia shared dozens of documents, photos, and videos to explain her story, Slate agreed to withhold her last name. We judged her fear of being tracked to be credible.) A University of California, Los Angeles student who lives near campus, Sophia made repeated calls to the Los Angeles Police Department, on two different nights this winter, about a man she said was following her and carrying a knife.
“I called the police. They did nothing. They didn’t take the situation seriously,” she said.
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That was in February. In early March, someone lit a tree on her block on fire, requiring a firefighter response and causing enormous damage to her car, which was next to the tree and had a smashed sunroof. The same man had sometimes squatted in a vacant apartment in the neighborhood with a can of acetone, some of which was spilled on the floor. (A neighbor photographed the man and the flammable liquid.) After the fire, the man walked toward Sophia, who recorded him saying, “I set fire to that,” before the audio became unclear. Later, she said, she saw the man again, this time with a gun. She called the police repeatedly, and after more than an hour, officers showed up. They did not arrest the man.
“That’s what happens when you defund the police,” she said.
There is a complication with that cause-and-effect chain. L.A. rolled back police spending after the summer of 2020 but began to restore it the very next year, still well before Bass took office. The department’s funding is now flat with pre-pandemic levels when adjusted for inflation, and well above it in nominal dollars. None of the major candidates pushed for defunding in this race. I asked Sophia about this tension, and she told me that the city, which has fewer than 9,000 officers, should have an officer count closer to New York’s 30,000-plus. “The police, they don’t have enough people,” she told me. LAPD officer levels are lower than in the past, though the decline has coincided with falling overall crime rates.
Pratt has told his supporters not to believe official stats, but that’s almost beside the point here. Falling rates are cold comfort for victims. The man Sophia identified and repeatedly documented has since been arrested for at least the 12th time in the area, booking records show. He pleaded not guilty to a felony grand theft auto charge on May 5, according to his L.A. Superior Court case file. Sophia said she needed to get a new car and that her insurance costs have increased, making the ordeal a financial one too.
I asked her if she believed that Pratt could deliver homeless residents to some facility he would create on federal land.
“100 percent,” she answered.
I asked if she worried that Pratt’s agenda would amount to punishing 70,000 people for the actions of a much smaller number, like the man who had terrorized her.
“They would rather be on the streets doing drugs, living around each other, than actually getting clean and becoming productive members of society,” she said. “Because it takes a lot of work to get clean.”
She shared Pratt’s stated view that the homeless count was higher than the official total.
Pratt’s solutions may be moon shots untethered to statistical reality. But his advantage in the race is that something isn’t working, and whatever it is, it’s not working on Bass’ watch.
At the party, I met 27-year-old Connor Mcleod, who was trying to get a crisis response contracting business called Harm off the ground. (He said he wasn’t weighing in on the race but wanted to connect with all of the campaigns.) His group’s focus fits with the thing that had let down Sophia. “Based on what is happening currently with emergency services like 911 in L.A., there needs to be something that can supplement that system, because we’re seeing that it’s not working,” he said.
Pratt’s crisis-response attack on Bass lands because of the most memorable failure of her tenure. Few have forgotten that when two enormous wildfires broke out here in January 2025, the mayor was on a business trip to Ghana despite forecasts of extremely high winds in the middle of a drought. She hurried back as the fires broke containment, but her absence, which her social media posts seemed to obscure, became the symbol of a disorganized response to the disaster. Pratt’s house was among thousands to burn.
This is the kind of opening through which Pratt has driven a truck, albeit an artificially generated one. L.A.’s declining share of a contracting film and television industry is hollowing out its middle class, a group Pratt rarely talks about when homelessness is not at issue. Shareholder pressure on studios, tax credits in other states, and California’s policies on expense deductions all play clear roles. But there is no more intuitive avatar for this assault on the city’s creative engine than A.I., which has provided the dominant aesthetic for conservative internet posters backing Pratt. The videos look terrible, and Lord knows the city has enough graphic designers, video editors, and actors that Pratt’s supporters could call.
The A.I. use is the one topic for which Pratt sounded humbled in the stretch drive of the campaign. He has reposted some of it, which he says he regrets. The campaign still showed up to this A.I.-advertised function, though. The graphic of the fleeing blond woman no longer appears on the bar’s Instagram.
Weeks of hammering this vision of Los Angeles have had an effect. There’s a reason Musk bought Twitter, a reason Pratt talks the way he does about statistics, and a reason amateur creators blow so much money on their A.I. bills.
In a way, I could feel it all working on me. I walked 15,000 steps around two neighborhoods on Monday, saw a scattered handful of homeless people, said “How’s it goin’?” to one who said “hey” back, and picked up a chicken burrito that was mediocre by L.A. standards but would have been an 85th-percentile Mexican food item in most cities. The Dodgers and the weather are still the nation’s best. This city, which rules, will soon host the World Cup, which will go well. I almost forgot what an irredeemable hellscape it had become before I opened X and was reminded that all people with common sense could see the disaster.
That doesn’t make the city’s problems fake, though, even when those experiencing them have a good lot in life. (I love it here and feel safe, but I don’t love giving ADT $55 a month after someone broke into our neighbors’ apartment.)
L.A. has a substantial group of people who are unhappy with their surroundings, the economic turmoil in the area, and their government’s response to all of it. Some of these residents believe they have a champion in someone who is shouting the things they’ve whispered. He is a former reality star who makes big promises and disputes data that does not map neatly onto the foundation of his campaign. This has never happened before, probably.
Give this to Pratt: In a world in which shame still humbled high-profile politicians, Bass might have resigned out of honor after the fires. (I could say the same about Newsom’s group dinner at the French Laundry while he was urging the rest of the state to socially distance in 2020.) But we don’t live in that world. The man who killed shame as a political tool is, of course, Trump, who is pulling for his fellow showbiz Republican with a view of himself as the ultimate source of truth on the issue most critical to his supporters. The president is Pratt’s ally despite the campaign’s efforts to keep some distance in a city that mostly dislikes the president. Pratt, who played a heel on TV, isn’t easily shamed in his own right.
That shamelessness can be an asset. Much like his White House contemporary, Pratt has woven a new reality for his supporters by continually insisting that he and he alone is telling the truth. And what Trump did with immigration, Pratt has done with homelessness. He has told supporters that the ranks of homeless L.A. residents are exploding, that the powers that be are lying about it, that he’ll fix it with an unusual plan that raises a litany of unanswered logistical and legal questions. (Think “Build the wall and make Mexico pay for it,” but somehow even more outlandish.)
To create a movement, though, Pratt does not need to know what causes seas of tarps and tents. He just needs enough Angelenos to ask themselves a different question: Is this scale of homelessness a problem that requires a solution geared first for the people on the streets or for the rest of us?
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The people inside this bar had their answer.