Walk a few blocks through much of Los Angeles today and you will perform a small ritual that no resident of a functioning city should have to think about. You will step around a body on the sidewalk, sometimes conscious, sometimes not, and you will keep moving toward your coffee or your office because there is nothing else to do.
Mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt put the absurdity plainly when he observed that about the only law still reliably enforced is the parking ticket written for the taxpayer “that are just trying to get their matcha and have to step over a naked drug addict.”
That sentence is a joke, and it is also the most accurate description of municipal priorities anyone has offered in years.
This is the ground the mayoral race ought to be fought on, and it points to a conclusion the political class would rather voters never reach. The drugs, the encampments, the crime that residents have learned to absorb as background noise, and the cost of living that quietly evicts the working families who built this city, none of these are weather. None of them fell from the sky. They are the accumulated product of a decade of choices, which means they are also, in principle, choices that can be unmade. A city that has normalized this much decay has very little left to lose by demanding something different.
The first thing a serious leader would do is stop lying about the nature of the problem. For years the crisis on the streets has been filed under the gentle, bureaucratic heading of “homelessness,” a word that suggests the solution is simply more housing and more spending. Pratt refuses the euphemism. “It’s not a homelessness problem, it’s a drug addiction problem,” he has said, and anyone who has watched fentanyl hollow out a neighborhood knows he is right.
The distinction is not semantic. If the issue were merely a shortage of shelter, the billions already poured into the problem should have bought visible progress, and they have not. Treating addiction as addiction opens a different toolbox.
Pratt proposes to use California’s SB 43, a law the state already passed, to move people suffering from severe addiction and untreated mental illness into mandatory treatment rather than leaving them to deteriorate and die in public under the banner of compassion. There is nothing humane about a policy that lets a sick man rot on a sidewalk because intervening would require a hard decision.
Enforce What Is Already On The Books
The crime problem invites the same clarity. Pratt’s central promise on public safety is not a stack of new ordinances. It is the radical proposal that the city enforce the laws it already has. Residents understand this instinctively, because they live the consequences of the alternative. As Pratt has framed it, mothers and young women who simply want to walk their dogs in their own neighborhoods no longer feel safe doing so, and a city that cannot guarantee that much has failed at the most basic task it exists to perform.
A municipality that enforces its laws unevenly, ticketing the compliant while ignoring the disorderly, is not practicing mercy. It is practicing a kind of inversion that Scripture named long ago. Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.
When the productive citizen is the one who fears the parking enforcement officer while open lawlessness goes unanswered, the moral order of the city has been turned upside down, and turning it back is not cruelty. It is the precondition of a livable place.
Affordability And The Money Trail
The cost of living deserves the same plain treatment. Los Angeles has made it punishingly slow and expensive to build, and the predictable result is that there is never enough housing and what exists costs a fortune. Pratt’s instinct is to clear the bureaucratic underbrush, to make permitting faster and more predictable and to put the burden on the city to justify its regulations rather than on the small builder to survive them. He pairs this with an argument about jobs, pointing out that Massachusetts now offers better film incentives than Hollywood does, and proposing to bring production, and the paychecks it carries, back to the city that invented the industry.
Underneath all of it sits the question of where the money has gone. Enormous sums have been spent on the very problems that keep getting worse, and Pratt wants the books opened. He has promised real audits and, just as important, spending data that an ordinary person can actually read.
“High school kids should be able to log on and know where their parents’ money is going,” he argues, rather than truth buried in dashboards built to be incomprehensible. A budget, on this view, is a contract with the people who fund it, and that contract has been quietly broken.
The Objection, And The Answer
The obvious objection arrives on schedule. Pratt is a reality-television figure with no experience in office, and surely problems this serious demand a steadier, more credentialed hand. The objection deserves a fair hearing, but it rests on an assumption that collapses under inspection. It assumes the credentialed hands have been governing competently.
They have not. The same establishment that asks voters to fear an outsider is the establishment that presided over the open drug markets, the normalized crime, and the affordability crisis now driving families out of the county. Even the Palisades Fire, whatever one concludes about its specifics, fit the pattern of a city whose leadership was somewhere other than where it needed to be. Experience that produces these results is not a qualification. It is the thing on trial.
The prophet Nehemiah looked at a ruined city and did not convene a committee to study the rubble. He surveyed the broken walls, named the disgrace honestly, and told the people to rise up and build. Los Angeles does not lack for studies or commissions or credentialed managers. What it has lacked is anyone willing to say out loud that the walls are broken and then do the unglamorous work of rebuilding them.
The primary on June 2 will narrow the field, and if no candidate clears half the vote the contest runs to November. Between now and then, residents will be urged to play it safe and choose continuity. They should answer with a sharper question. Continuity of what? The drugs, the crime, the encampments, and the cost of staying are the status quo, and the people living with them have nothing to protect by preserving it. They have, on the other hand, a great deal to gain from a mayor whose entire pitch is to look at what everyone already sees and, at long last, do something about it.
