LA’s Mayoral Race 2022
KCRW interviewed the top contenders. This is the link to Caruso, which in turn links you to the interviews with Bass, Buscaino, Feuer, and DeLeon. https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/press-play-with-madeleine-brand/mayor-race-film-reviews-pancakes/rick-caruso These excellent interviews are informative about the candidates’ somewhat differing but overlapping views on homelessness and crime.
The two frontrunners are Bass and Caruso.
Karen Bass is leaving Congress, where she is one of the most powerful and influential Democrats, to run for LA Mayor. This is a position with lots of public visibility to be a leader in forming public opinion, but little actual power to implement since so much power resides with the City Councilmembers. She founded and led the Community Coalition, ran for state Assembly, was selected Assembly Speaker, ran for Congress and has been enormously effective everywhere she has served. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Bass
· Declare an emergency to marshal resources for addressing homelessness
· Temporary housing for 15,000 homeless
· Put developers of low cost housing at the front of the line for new building permits
· Streamline the approval process
· Develop a different model for temporary shelters with more privacy
· Build neighborhood consensus for erecting new shelters and more low income housing to counteract NIMBY-ism
· Treat mental illness and substance abuse of the homeless
· Add 200-400 new officers at LAPD, community policing and crime prevention
Rick Caruso is a very successful developer of luxury malls in wealthy neighborhoods. This is his first run for public office. He was a Republican, became an independent, is now registered as a Democrat; he supported Pete Buttigieg in 2020. He has headed up the LA Police Commission and the USC Board of Trustees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Caruso
· Build 30,000 shelter beds in his first year in office
· Cut red tape for new developments and build more low-income housing. We have a housing deficit of 500,000 beds in LA.
· Reduce costs of new housing under Prop HHH
· 500 caseworkers deployed to get people into care and shelter
· Close street encampments and move people off the streets and into shelters even if unwilling
· Work with neighborhoods to reduce NIMBY opposition to shelters
· Hire 1500 new police officers at a cost of $200 million annually
· Find savings in the city budget to finance the shelters and the increased policing – no new taxes
The two sitting LA City Councilmembers running for Mayor are Joe Buscaino and Kevin DeLeon.
Joe Buscaino is an ex-police officer and sitting councilmember for the past decade for a district running from Watts to San Pedro and including Wilmington. He has put in place plans to reduce homelessness in his district and wants to take the successes he says he has achieved with that plan citywide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Buscaino He has just dropped out of the race and endorsed Rick Caruso who mirrors many of Buscaino’s proposals on police and the homeless. Buscaino was most recently polling at 1% of likely voters.
· Build 9,000 new shelter beds in 36 months
· Homeless can no longer be sleeping on the streets, must be sleeping in Project Roomkey, Project Homekey, Bridge housing or be mandatorily enrolled in mental health treatment or substance abuse treatment or living in a tiny home or permanent supportive housing or face a criminal citation for sleeping on the streets in encampments
· Will create homeless working groups in every neighborhood to combat NIMBYism
· Dock salaries of city leaders if the homeless reduction goals are not met
· Restore $150 million to LAPD and use it to hire more officers, use community policing and keep officers regularly patrolling in the same neighborhoods to build trust
Kevin De Leon is a council member representing a district that spreads from Skid Row to Eagle Rock. He had a 12 year career in the California Assembly and Senate, rising to Senate President for the last 4 years. He then ran against Dianne Feinstein for the US Senate and lost 54-46. He ran for and won election to the LA City Council in 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_de_León
· Create 16,000 new shelter beds, a combination of congregate shelter, tiny homes, Roomkey, Homekey, etc.
· Build and buy and reuse older hotels and empty commercial properties
· Cut the costs of new housing by adaptive reuse and master leasing of vacant buildings
· Expand mental health and substance abuse treatments by creating a new city run health department
· Hire 300 new police officers
· Hire mental health specialists in lieu of police for the mentally ill
· Wants safer and better sidewalks, bike lanes and streets for walking and biking to make LA and its neighborhoods a more walkable and livable city.
Mike Feuer is the current LA City Attorney. He has been a legal services attorney, city council member and state assembly member with an extensive set of accomplishments at each level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Feuer
· Build 14,000 to 15,000 new beds
· Create $1 billion private equity revolving fund to build new permanent supportive housing – at 1/3rd the cost of Prop HHH projects
· Wants a homeless czar to be responsible for the homelessness crisis
· Upgrade county performance on mental health and substance abuse treatments for the homeless
· Expand LAPD from 9700 to 10,000 officers, reform policing to de-escalate the use of force and violence towards the mentally ill
· Crime prevention and interruption programs targeted to at risk youth
· After school programs, neighborhood clean-up and community beautification efforts
Los Angeles is a world class and highly diverse city. It is home to the global entertainment industry, to Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel, to the Rams, Lakers, Dodgers, Clippers and Kings; we will soon be hosting the Olympics again. It needs a world class mayor to help lead us. To me, Karen Bass comes the closest to my aspirations; she is highly skilled at consensus building, and she has accomplished so much in the public sector, which is why I’ll vote for her.
The public debates are to my mind missing most of the key points in our city’s future: climate change, drought and affordability. The next mayor needs to embrace the shift from fossil fuels to renewables and make this rapid shift affordable to all our residents. The next mayor needs to embrace water recycling and re-use and maybe desalination, and make it safe and affordable for all of us. The next mayor needs to embrace changes to the city’s planning and zoning ordinances so we build much more affordable housing that is close to public transit lines. The next mayor needs to work closely and collaboratively with neighborhoods, so they embrace change, not resist and litigate it at every turn. The next mayor needs to address our tale of two divergent cities: the growing economic divides/chasm, the deterioration in infrastructure, ready access to an affordable internet, failing public schools for many low-income students, essential workers with no PPE to protect them and no or barely adequate health benefits from their employers, and a badly neglected safety net for the most disadvantaged. The working class on their salaries cannot afford to live here at the prices in our housing market. The next Mayor needs to be a leader in rooting out the systemic public corruption that seems to have enveloped the development process and the public financing of local educational institutions and replacing it with a transparent, reliable and efficient process for approving new affordable housing developments. https://laist.com/news/politics/ridley-thomas-becomes-third-city-council-member-to-be-indicted-in-two-years
We need to stop demonizing the homeless as mentally ill and addicted, some are and most are not, and recognize instead they are the canaries in the coal mine of the dysfunctions in the incentives of the housing market and the ever decaying infrastructure of our social safety net. The housing market is primarily the city’s responsibility; the social safety net is the responsibility of the county; in the case of the homeless the two must learn to collaborate effectively and efficiently, fix their own institutional problems, rather than shift blame and point fingers at each other’s failings.