Last November, after Karen Bass won a historic race to become the first Black woman elected as the mayor of the city of Los Angeles, the L.A. Times editorial page offered its congratulations. “Condolences as well,” the editors added, “for a difficult job ahead.” After six terms representing Los Angeles districts in Congress, Bass returned to her native city to confront a crisis decades in the making: a severe housing shortage that has contributed to more than forty thousand people living in the streets, overcrowded neighborhoods, and an overheated real-estate market that is pricing out the middle class from rentals and homeownership. In recent years, L.A.’s City Hall had been hit with racism and corruption scandals as well as sexual-harassment allegations. And then there is the changing climate, whose symptoms in California have included a succession of severe droughts, wildfires, and heavy storms, and, for the city, deadly heat waves and limits on water use.
I attended Bass’s inauguration in mid-December, which despite the sense of crisis was an uplifting affair. It had rained that morning, so the ceremony had been moved from the steps of City Hall to the Microsoft Theatre in downtown L.A. Birds of paradise and a giant purple light-up sculpture of the city’s initials decorated the stage; an image of the columned entrance of City Hall served as a backdrop. The auditorium was full, and had the atmosphere of a Democratic Party victory lap. Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, sat up near the front, and a contingent of congresspeople had flown out from Washington. The choir of Alexander Hamilton High School, from which Bass graduated in 1971, performed a rendition of Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come”; Stevie Wonder sang “Living for the City”; and Amanda Gorman read a poem that she wrote for the first female mayor. (“What is the way forward, when women have met many roadblocks instead of roads?” she recited. “It starts with the new dawn drawn into the open by woman, whose silence is broken.”) Bass, in a peacock-blue suit, emerged onstage waving as the audience gave her a standing ovation. She was sworn in by Vice-President Kamala Harris, who concluded the oath of office with a pointed “Madam Mayor.”
Intentionally or not, the ceremony served as a form of rebuttal. Bass had prevailed in her election over Rick Caruso, a billionaire real-estate developer best known for building indoor-outdoor malls that are simulacra of town squares, complete with novelty trolleys and dancing fountains. Caruso, a former Republican, registered as a Democrat shortly before the election, and campaigned as a pro-business political outsider who would clean up corruption and street homelessness. His campaign budget was more than a hundred million dollars, about ten times larger than Bass’s, most of it funded by his own money. Because of this dynamic, the mayoral race became a referendum on California’s liberal political establishment. Gwyneth Paltrow, Elon Musk, and Kim Kardashian lined up to endorse the mall builder. Part of Bass’s uphill battle is convincing voters that an experienced Democratic politician can fix problems that have grown malignant under Democratic leadership. Eric Garcetti, the previous mayor, had at times pointed out the limitations of his office’s power to address homelessness; Bass seems more willing to risk being the face of the problem.
Bass, who turns seventy this year, was born in Los Angeles. Her father migrated to California from Texas in the aftermath of the Second World War and worked as a letter carrier with the United States Postal Service. Her mother, who was born in L.A. and grew up in Watts, stayed at home with Bass and her three siblings. Bass’s political activism dates to her teen-age years, when she knocked on doors for the Presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy, protested the Vietnam War, and attended Angela Davis’s lectures on racial justice at U.C.L.A. When Bass was floated as a possible running mate for Joe Biden in 2020, her past resurfaced as a liability, including several trips that she made to Cuba, starting at the age of nineteen, in the nineteen-seventies.
Despite her activism, Bass stayed out of electoral politics for decades. She studied to be a physician’s assistant at the University of Southern California and worked in that capacity and as a clinical instructor at U.S.C. In 1990, as the crack epidemic, gang violence, and the attendant police crackdown hit Black Los Angeles neighborhoods, she left her job in health care to form the Community Coalition, a nonprofit that advocated for the rights and well-being of Black and Latino residents of South L.A.
It was on the strength of her reputation as a community organizer that she won election as a state-assembly member in 2004. Like many other politicians of her generation, Bass evolved toward a more centrist pragmatism. As the speaker of the state assembly during the Republican governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger and in the midst of a budget crisis, Bass agreed to painful cuts to social programs even as she sought to cultivate a reputation as an advocate for foster children and the formerly incarcerated. Bass would later refer to her time brokering deals with California’s all-male political leadership of the era as “advanced boy management.” She successfully ran for Congress in 2010, representing a swath of South and West L.A. that is among the most racially diverse areas in the country.
When she introduced a police-reform bill in Congress in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020, Bass recalled her activist past. “I have been fighting against this since my first days as an activist and member of the California State Assembly, when I took on then Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates,” she said, adding that chokeholds killed twelve Black men in Los Angeles between 1975 and 1982. Bass, who was surveilled by the L.A.P.D. for her activism in the seventies and was a named plaintiff in a successful 1983 lawsuit that the A.C.L.U. brought against the department for illegal spying, now works alongside the force that she has sought to reform; the L.A.P.D. receives the largest allocation of funding of any city agency, sixteen per cent of the city’s budget.
I met with the new mayor at her office in City Hall on a brilliant Thursday afternoon in early March that offered a break from a season of much needed, but totally miserable, rainy weather. Bass wore a blue suit with a pink shirt and drank hot water for her voice, which has not kept up with her speaking schedule. As she approaches her first hundred days in office, the window of time in which she has the good will of a newcomer is going to start to close. For now, Bass’s focus is on homelessness, which is both a humanitarian crisis and a political imperative. Her declaration of a state of emergency about the issue on her first day in office was perhaps more symbolic than substantive, but what I noticed as we spoke was her candor about how bad things are. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
You had a safe seat in Congress and seniority that gave you influence in Washington, including being the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. Why did you decide to come back to Los Angeles to run for mayor?
In a way, I feel I’ve come full circle. Thirty-two years ago, I started an organization because our city was in crisis at that time, and there was this profound sense of hopelessness and despair and fear. Then it was crack cocaine, the Crips, the Bloods, and a thousand homicides in one year, and I was very worried, especially about the addiction issue. I come out of health care, and I felt like the only thing policymakers were doing was passing laws to incarcerate people, so I walked away from teaching at U.S.C. Medical School and started an organization at the epicenter of the problem then. This time, I decided to leave Congress because our city is in another crisis. I was very worried that, because of the sense of hopelessness, despair, and fear and anger, citizens were going to go along with the idea of criminalizing homelessness. That’s why it feels full circle. I never thought about running for mayor, and I was not planning on leaving Congress, but, when it became very clear that the city could take a more conservative direction, that was my motivation to come home.
How would you characterize this crisis versus that one thirty years ago?
We were dealing with homelessness thirty years ago, but it was really only in two parts of town. It was South Central and Skid Row. Now it’s all over the city. I don’t know what the numbers used to be, because nobody did a count during those days, but I guess it was a few thousand, and now it’s probably closer to fifty thousand. We’ll get the new count in a few months that will verify it.
And is homelessness the center of the crisis today, or does it go beyond that?
That is the No. 1 issue in our city, there’s no question about that. In the past eighteen years, and when I was in the statehouse, I focussed on foster care and I focussed on people coming out of prison. Those are two categories of the unhoused population. What I tried to say on the campaign, and now in this position, is for the public to understand the diversity of the population. There are veterans, there are people in tents and cars who actually work full time, but they just can’t afford to rent here, or they’re excluded from housing because of bad credit or past evictions. There are people who were formerly incarcerated. There are thousands of children, some with moms who were fleeing domestic violence, some children who were in the child-welfare system. There are people with mental illness and substance abuse. And then there are people with chronic illnesses. It’s important to understand that there’s a variety of reasons that lead to homelessness. And, when you get people off the street, you have to have multiple strategies.
You set a goal of getting seventeen thousand people housed this year. Do you think you’ll make it?
I certainly hope so.
You’ve introduced a program called Inside Safe that is focussed specifically on moving people in tents and encampments into interim housing, mostly hotel rooms and other temporary shelters. The fear among some advocates for the unhoused is that some of the solutions proposed in the past have just tried to take away the visible effects of poverty instead of offering a lasting solution.
So, first, I think the advocates are correct in being suspicious because they’ve seen this so many times before. I do believe what I’m doing is different, though, but only time will tell—I have to prove that. I’m not offended by people who question what’s going to come of this, but I do know the depth of my sincerity and the depth of my commitment, and I have to demonstrate that to people.
The most important thing to do is to get people out of tents, because that is how Angelenos experience homelessness. Whether you are in a tent or you’re impacted by the tent, the tent is the focal point. If I dedicated all of my time to building half a million units of housing but there were still tents, people would have no faith that we were getting anything done. That’s the measure, and that’s why I focussed on that, because increasing people’s faith in government is critical to people being willing to say, “Build in my neighborhood.” My fear was that people were reaching a point of giving up and just saying, “Look, just get rid of these people. After all, they’re on the street because they’re drug addicts, and they choose to be there.” A lot of people feel that way. I’m sure you’ve heard that.
And drug addiction is a real problem—I think fifteen hundred people died of fentanyl overdoses in L.A. County in 2021. You have a background in working on drug treatment and addiction issues. Is that something that’s on your mind?
I’m obsessed by it, because what I’m worried about is that I don’t think enough policymakers are connecting the dots with substance abuse. Everybody connects the dots with mental health, but I don’t think everybody connects the dots with substance abuse. Everybody says, “Well, they’re all meth addicts.” We have what remains of a drug-treatment infrastructure that has been shredded over the years. And I’m trying to raise this issue on a federal level, to say that we need to make some changes in policy so that we can rebuild our drug-treatment infrastructure.
One of the things that I wanted to do that I’m very happy to say happened almost immediately was getting everybody in alignment: federal, state, county, and city. By coincidence, President Biden comes out with a plan around homelessness where he says he wants to reduce homelessness by twenty-five per cent in the next two years. I called up and said just come to L.A. and you can meet your goal. Ambassador Susan Rice, the head of the Domestic Policy Council, came here, we explained what was going on, and now L.A. is in contention to be selected as one of the cities that the White House will focus on.
Governor Newsom also offered to include us in the first cohort of the CARE Court. The CARE Court would allow people who are profoundly mentally ill to be put into conservatorship and taken care of. We will not solve the problem if we do not address mental health and substance abuse.
You also recently passed an order for the city to look at where it might be able to build housing on city-owned land.
That was an executive directive, because the city owns hundreds of acres of land, so let’s build there because, you know, of course, one obstacle is neighborhood opposition.
What’s your vision for the future of housing in L.A.?
It’s that L.A. is more like a lot of other cities where you have mixed-use, residential, and commercial. One of the things that I think Inside Safe is going to lead to, and this was the New York connection—in New York, every individual has a right to shelter by law, which means the city’s obligated to provide shelters. What New York has done over the years is invested in either long-term leases or purchased hotels, motels, and maybe some apartment buildings so they have a shelter system. [A representative from New York City’s Department of Social Services said that the city primarily contracts not-for-profit providers to run designated shelters rather than lease hotels or motels.] Our shelter system here was mats in a big room, and a lot of people won’t go into those anymore. The fact is a lot of people feel it is safer to be in a tent on a street than in a shelter. So what I see for the future is L.A. City—and maybe L.A. County, too—getting involved in purchasing apartment buildings, motels, hotels around the city. It could possibly be another iteration of public housing, but instead of the old model of giant units in one area it would be much smaller units all around the city, so public housing is not stigmatized in that way, but it’s actually everywhere, and it’s also very temporary.
Why temporary?
Let’s just say we’re finished with street homelessness. We wouldn’t be—I predict we will be dealing with street homelessness for a long time—but it means you get people off the streets right away, which is where you get a motel. At the motel, individuals will receive services, which means assessing why they were unhoused, and responding to whatever the issue is. The idea is that they won’t be in the motel for more than a couple of months, and then they will go to permanent supportive housing, where then they could stay for two years with a voucher. My goal would be for the individuals to then be mainstreamed back into the regular housing market because they will have jobs and they will have received what they need to get over what led them to be unhoused in the first place. One of my critiques is that, when people talk about the unhoused, it stops at permanent supportive housing, which doesn’t make sense. You need to help somebody mainstream. And I think we have incredible opportunities to do that because L.A. City has thousands of vacancies, job vacancies that people could be prepared for, on all different levels, and then we have to look at other employment opportunities as well.
I don’t see a motel being permanent housing. There are no kitchens. And tiny homes, for example, that’s very temporary. There are no bathrooms. I think everybody needs to have a bathroom and a kitchen. So some of it is designed to be temporary.
But what if there’s not enough permanent housing?
When you talk about my goal of seventeen thousand, part of that goal is Inside Safe, another part is expediting housing that’s under way, and the other part of it is getting people in beds in houses that are already built. You may or may not know that in spite of everything we’ve been talking about there are hundreds of vacant units where people can’t get in them because of the county’s process for getting housing. L.A. County, with the collusion of the city, came up with a system that is not workable. That’s why the city at many different times has hundreds of vacant units. There should never be a vacancy. How do you have vacancies and a waiting list? So I’m trying to resolve that.
Then I also mentioned passing a directive to fast-track building. If you come to the city and you want to build affordable housing, we have a special lane for you to go through where your building will get built faster than if you came in and said you wanted to build luxury housing.
So I’ve described to you Inside Safe, expediting housing that is currently being built, identifying publicly owned property so that we can build, and then also changing what’s called adaptive reuse, which means it’s an unutilized shopping center or school or commercial property; to convert that into housing is another strategy, and then adding units of what were formerly called granny flats, which are accessory dwelling units, smaller units added to existing homes. All of those are part of how to get to seventeen thousand.
Can the city build a lot of housing?
Yeah, but the city can’t do it alone. This is an all-hands-on-deck situation. It’s a mistake when you have a problem of this magnitude to think that elected officials are going to solve it themselves. The city can’t build our way out of this. The city needs the private sector, for-profit and not-for-profit, and the city needs regular Angelenos. So, this morning, I started my morning off with a prayer breakfast in the San Fernando Valley—oh, you see that?
[On the opposite wall was a television tuned to CNN, and Bass had been distracted by a report that Dianne Feinstein, the eighty-nine-year-old senator from California, had been hospitalized for shingles.]
Uh-oh.
That’s . . . a little scary. I was telling you about the prayer breakfast; I lost my train of thought there for a minute. The prayer breakfast was interfaith—every religion you can think of was there. The point of it is that a component of this needs to live in the faith community for a variety of reasons. One, it’s a moral issue. We need faith leaders to lift that piece of it up. Two, churches have property—there’s a number of them that want to build housing. And, three, as part of the moral campaign I gave them very specific things that they could do. One is they could appeal to their congregations because in their congregations inevitably there are people that own property, that own apartment buildings or duplexes, and we need a campaign that says just take two, meaning vouchers. Thousands of people in the city have housing vouchers but can’t find landlords who take them. If we could raise this as a moral issue that we all need to be involved in, the solution is, if you’re a landlord and you own an apartment building, can you just take two vouchers? The other way that they could get involved is, when you move a person from a tent into a motel, the motels don’t have room service and maid service. So these people need soap, sheets, blankets, and I don’t think the community-based organizations that we partner with should shoulder those costs. If we move an encampment, I think the neighborhood around that encampment, we should get them involved. So what I proposed to the faith leaders are those things.
When the unhoused enter the mainstream housing market, that’s a brutal market even for pretty stable middle-class people. In your inaugural speech, you spoke about how your dad was able to raise your family on a single income and own a home. You spoke of that L.A., which is really hard to find now—it’s hard for people to achieve that dream.
So, it is a problem for everyone. This is not the problem of the unhoused, right? This is the problem of all Angelenos. And the only solution to that problem is for there to be building of all types of housing.
How do you change the minds of residents who don’t want multifamily housing built in neighborhoods that are currently single-family homes?
I think where you get into major neighborhood opposition is when you impose things on neighborhoods. I used to be one of those folks that organized in neighborhoods around land-use issues. We would object to the building of, you know, a recycling center, which in the inner city became kind of drug-trafficking hubs. But what I have found is that if you go to a neighborhood and say, “Look, we need to build housing somewhere, help us determine where,” and I always use the example of Sherman Oaks, where they’re adamantly opposed to changing the character of their single-family homes, but they welcomed housing on the commercial corridors. You cannot say all the unhoused need to be in Black and brown communities. You can’t do that. Because these communities are already severely overcrowded. That’s why you have to build housing everywhere.
Let’s talk about police for a minute. That’s a big part of the L.A. City budget. And you’ve suggested a few reforms, but you also supported the reappointment of Michel Moore as the police chief, and some people objected to that.
That’s correct.
And, while you were in Congress, you also pushed for some reform of policing.
The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.
Exactly. So where are you at with police right now? Three people were killed in police encounters at the very beginning of the year—
In one week.
So how do we improve what everybody knows is a kind of complicated relationship between the residents of L.A. and their police force?
I know in some neighborhoods they want to see an increased police presence. In some neighborhoods, they don’t want to see that. I would like to have an objective analysis done. I was horrified at the officer-involved deaths because at least two of the three—did you happen to see the tapes?
I haven’t watched them.
The first tape and the third tape, in my opinion, the two individuals were clearly in a mental-health crisis. And, in the first tape, the officer did not call for the mental-health team. Officers get angry when the person doesn’t coöperate, and then it just increases the threat level. What I said to the chief, and what I plan to do, is I told him that every officer needs to be trained in some of the basics around mental health. On the first officer-involved death, a social worker could have led the effort with the police standing nearby. You can’t de-escalate an exchange while you’re pointing a gun at somebody and then tell them to calm down. So I believe in co-response, very similar to how child-welfare cases are dealt with, where a social worker goes if there’s a suspicion of abuse or neglect of a child.
There are a lot of other things that I think should happen in the L.A.P.D. The other thing that is key that the police chief wants as well is the ability to terminate officers. Our charter does not allow for it. In fact, there are sixty-nine officers, sixty-nine, that the chief wants to terminate now. And he can’t—he has to keep them on the force. I don’t think they’re with people, but he has to keep them on the force.
The police union has said that they’re hoping to respond to fewer non-emergency calls. Does the city have the resources to respond to those kinds of calls in another way?
There is a mental-health team, but there’s not enough of them. They don’t even work on weekends or at night. If we just declare an alternative response and we don’t have the systems in place, then I’m not sure what we’re accomplishing. To do it properly would take a tremendous amount of resources. The union laid out, I think, twenty-eight different instances of what they would not respond to anymore.
You took office right after a big scandal at City Hall where some City Council members were caught on tape saying racist things. You’re the first Black-woman mayor of Los Angeles, but I also assume that you’ve known some of those politicians for a long time and that you’ve worked with them.
Yep.
Did those comments reflect real strife within city government? Is there a sense on your part that you have to come in and do some repair of trust?
Let’s look at it a little broader than just those tapes. There have been several scandals connected to City Hall. Some of the scandals have led to criminal indictments, convictions, incarceration, and then you have the tapes. So the issue that you’re raising, it’s much bigger than what was heard on those tapes. It’s a loss of faith in government. And you very well know, this is not a Los Angeles issue. This is a national issue. People believing that government doesn’t work, doesn’t help them, is not functional. All of those are burdens that, frankly, anybody in office right now—I don’t care what office you’re in or what level of government—we all have to step up to assure people that government actually can function. So, yes, I feel that responsibility. In terms of the tapes, yes, there were people in that room—Gil Cedillo I’ve known for forty years; Kevin de León for twenty; I was just getting to know Ron Herrera and Nury Martinez. I was obviously disappointed and hurt with people that I know. But one thing that I feel very strongly about is that what was on those tapes, I do not believe, did not and will not impact race relations in this city. Because people like me and other people who have been doing multiracial work for decades—and there were people that did it for generations before me—you can’t erase decades of work in a one-hour tape.
Another big issue, we’ve had some crazy weather, and we will continue to have some crazy weather, but even just this week: pouring rain, power outages, floods. How are you thinking about climate change?
I think the previous mayor put the city on a great road map to becoming carbon neutral. My job is to evaluate the progress, make whatever adjustments are needed, and continue the path forward.
Is the city’s infrastructure able to cope with it?
If we had had a better infrastructure for rainwater capture, can you imagine? And, I mean, we certainly do have an infrastructure for that, but not what it should be. I’m hoping that we had so much rain that maybe it took us out of the drought for a minute. We had more rain in January than we did in all of 2022.
What is L.A. going to look like in twenty years? I think it’s in a kind of inflection point where its car-based identity, the single-home thing, it’s really changing.
I think you’ve already seen a huge change. I’m always amazed when I drive around town at all of the apartment buildings going up. And it makes me wonder who lives in all these places. It seems like so much housing is being built, and it really makes me wonder what the vacancy rate is because it’s so expensive now to live. So you ask me, What does L.A. look like in the future? It’s up.
What about transit?
There will be much more public transit, but the biggest issue with public transit right now is homelessness. You know that, right? After the interfaith breakfast, I went on the Red Line, which is the line that’s most severely impacted. Twenty-[one] people died on the Metro last year. This year, twenty-two people died [since] January. That’s shocking.
Is it known how they died?
I asked that. I’m on the Metro board. I’ve only been to two meetings. The majority of both meetings were about homelessness. When they gave the report of how many people died, I know one was a murder, but I asked them because I don’t want to make the assumption that twenty-one were overdoses. And I say that because the health status of the unhoused population is so poor that there could be a lot of natural causes that could have been prevented. So I don’t know. We will have to wait to see what the coroner says, but I asked for the coroner’s report.
So everything comes back to homelessness.
In this city, it does. Ridership is up now, but there’s a gender difference. There is still a decline of female riders, and, when people are asked, it’s because they don’t feel safe. And, when I say they don’t feel safe, I don’t mean they’re worried about somebody robbing them. They are, but that’s not the only reason. They don’t want to sit on the bus because it’s dirty, and they don’t know who sat there before. You know, just riding it today there were people all stretched out sleeping. There were people sleeping in the station. You see the impact of homelessness. Right now, the plan is to build up the social-service piece in the Metro, so people ride the trains all day until the trains stop and wait for the buses to start up. When they all get off the train, that’s a good place for contact with service providers.
Do people want that help?
Well, just like I said with the people in the tents, I think we’ve proved very easily that, yes, people want that. But my only exception is drug treatment, and I say that because we don’t have any drug treatment to offer them.
We’ve talked a lot about homelessness, but is L.A. still a middle-class city?
It’s a tale of two cities. It’s a tale of unbelievable wealth and unbelievable poverty.
And what has your experience of that wealth been as mayor? Does it have an outsized influence?
Of course wealth has influence. It does, but I think the campaign proved it wields a lot of power but it’s not decisive.
How do you support the middle class?
Well, I certainly don’t want more people to leave, but I think that’s contingent on people feeling safe and people being able to afford to live here. My focus is on homelessness, but we have to get all kinds of housing built.
How do you do that?
Some of that is happening, but it definitely needs to be much, much more. But everything I’ve talked about is how that happens: me expediting the process, having the process not be so onerous. When you talk to developers, they don’t want to deal with L.A. because of all of the bureaucracy, so my first days in office were about addressing that bureaucracy. What makes it easier to permit also makes it faster. The speed is what’s most important, because, if a person is trying to build something and they don’t know how long it’s going to take to get a permit and it’s months and months and months, the time raises the cost. So, if L.A. is going to be affordable, L.A. has to be able to build housing much quicker.
O.K., and then just as a last question, to get back to the idea of what the future of the city is, for some people it’s very dystopian. Maybe people on the right paint this dystopian picture of L.A., but even on the left, with climate change, there’s this idea of an unsustainable city that can’t adapt to the future, that doesn’t have the water, that doesn’t have the housing, it doesn’t have the transportation to be a place to bring it into the next phase. What do you say to that vision?
My responsibility and the responsibility of other elected officials is to restore people’s hope, address their despair and their fear, then I think people can see a light at the end of the tunnel. So I consider that my responsibility, but I paint L.A. in the exact opposite way. I think this is a city with tremendous resources, unbelievable knowledge and skills. And my job is to marshal all of that together. We can conquer all of these problems. We have the capacity to deal, but the capacity needs to be marshalled, organized, and directed. And I view that as my responsibility. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
