Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass allowed homes in the city to burn to the ground, and has failed to lead a competent rebuilding process. The Los Angeles Times is now claiming that Bass’s failures are proof that her opponents are unfit for office, in a despicable hit job designed to protect Bass’s reelection campaign.
The Los Angeles Times wrote a hit piece on Spencer Pratt, a Republican former reality television show star who has emerged as Bass’s top polling opponent thus far. The hit piece dives into Pratt’s residence details: He lists a vacant lot in Los Angeles as his legal residence, but he lists a home in Santa Barbara County as his mailing address, and he is currently living in that Santa Barbara home. Surely, this must be a scandal, and the Los Angeles Times “report” suggests that Pratt can and should be declared ineligible to run for mayor.
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In reality, Pratt’s Los Angeles home burned down, along with thousands of others, when wildfires raged throughout the city. The “lot” he lists as his address is only a lot because Bass’s incompetence allowed Los Angeles to burn, and Pratt was as much a victim of it as the thousands of others who lost their homes. The mailing address is not a scandal, either. Obviously, Pratt isn’t going to receive his mail at an empty lot that is currently uninhabitable.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a story here. The real story is that Bass allowed Los Angeles to burn down, and has failed to rebuild it. According to the Los Angeles County Permitting Progress Dashboard, the city has rebuilt just 32 homes in the more than 14 months since the fires were contained, a pace of just barely over two homes per month. There have, thus far, been 3,352 rebuilding applications received, and there were 7,417 housing units damaged.
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That means Los Angeles has rebuilt 0.9% of the homes for which it has received rebuilding applications, and it has rebuilt 0.43% of the homes destroyed 14 months ago.
Rather than make that the story, though, the Los Angeles Times has instead decided to use it to try to discredit Bass’s top challenger. The outlet endorsed Bass when she ran in 2022, and is now doing her dirty work by publishing a useless report about Pratt’s addresses while ignoring the bigger story directly in front of it. Bass’s incompetence, both before and after the fires, should be the real story. Instead, we get victim-blaming of a man whose house burned down on Bass’s watch to protect the Democratic mayor’s reelection.