Your guide to the race for LA mayor: Four major challengers look to unseat Karen Bass

LOS ANGELES - Karen Bass made history four years ago, beating real estate developer Rick Caruso by about 10 percentage points and becoming the first woman elected as Los Angeles mayor.

This time around, the 72-year-old incumbent is in an even tougher fight, facing a field of 13 challengers, four of whom have emerged as serious rivals in polling and fundraising.

Council member Nithya Raman, who endorsed Bass only to later run against her, has the backing of many in the entertainment industry, the pro-housing YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) movement and the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America.

Reality TV personality Spencer Pratt has drawn support from politicians and media figures who align themselves with President Donald Trump, including Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who's running for governor, and podcaster Joe Rogan.

Adam Miler, who made a fortune on education software, has been courting moderate voters. And community organizer Rae Huang is running at the left end of the political spectrum, turning to figures like podcaster Hasan Piker to spread her message.

Although the race is nonpartisan, all of the leading candidates are Democrats except for Pratt, a Republican.

The contest is playing out more than a year after the devastating Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and left 12 people dead. Bass faced stinging criticism over her absence from the city when the fire broke out and her handling of the recovery. She continues to register high disapproval numbers.

But Bass, a political veteran with more than two decades in public office, is vigorously defending her record, portraying herself as a champion of change within City Hall and pointing to key policy wins: back-to-back reductions in street homelessness; homicides falling to their lowest level since 1966; and the fast-tracking of scores of affordable housing projects.

Who are the candidates?

Karen Bass got her start in civic life in South Los Angeles as a founder and top executive of the nonprofit Community Coalition, which focused heavily on recovery from the 1992 riots. She won a seat in the state Assembly in 2004, going on to serve two years as speaker, then spent almost a dozen years in Congress.

Now, seeking a second four-year term, Bass wants to finish her work on homelessness, public safety, housing reform and the rebuilding of the Palisades.

A resident of the Sawtelle neighborhood, Rae Huang,43, is a Presbyterian minister and community organizer who has vowed to cut police funding, remove surveillance cameras from city street poles and develop Vienna-style social housing developments, such as those owned and operated by the government. According to her campaign website, as a deputy director at Housing NOW! California, she worked on efforts to expand the supply of affordable housing and halt the displacement of renters.

Huang says she's looking to build a new system that serves every Angeleno, rather than tinkering with the one that exists.

A resident of the Brentwood neighborhood, Adam Miller is the former chief executive of Cornerstone OnDemand, a global educational technology company. The publicly traded company was sold to a private equity firm for $5.2 billion in 2021. Miller served for a decade as chairman of Team Rubicon, a nonprofit that helps communities around the globe recover from disasters. He also created the nonprofit Better Angels, which has focused locally on the homelessness crisis.

Miller, 53, says he is running because the city needs a strong manager to tackle problems like lagging housing production, homeless encampments and illegal dumping.

Spencer Pratt has appeared in reality television shows, most notably "The Hills," the spinoff of MTV's high school reality-soap "Laguna Beach." He wrote a book titled "The Guy You Loved to Hate: Confessions from a Reality TV Villain." And now, after losing his home in the Palisades fire, Pratt has a political campaign that's been using its resources to savage Bass, Gov. Gavin Newsom and other politicians.

Pratt, 42, has not been shy about his views, referring to Bass as trash, using the Spanish word "basura" as a play on her last name. He contends that too many children in L.A. have to walk past "the filth and degeneracy of the homeless drug zombies."

Nithya Raman, 44, made L.A. history in 2020, becoming the first elected official in the city to win with support from the Democratic Socialists of America. Before that, she co-founded the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition, which serves Silver Lake, where she resides, and surrounding neighborhoods. She had a stint with Time's Up, the Hollywood-based group formed to help women combat sexual harassment.

Raman, who represents an affluent Hollywood Hills district, led the effort to reduce evictions, capping rent increases at 4% for apartments built before October 1978. She says she's running to ramp up housing production, revive the entertainment industry and strengthen city services.

Where they stand on homelessness

Bass made homelessness a top priority the moment she took office, declaring a local state of emergency and launching Inside Safe, which has moved thousands of unhoused people off the street and into hotels, motels and other temporary housing.

The mayor has credited Inside Safe with a 17.5% drop in "unsheltered" homelessness - those living on the street or in their vehicles - over a two-year span. However, a steadily growing share of the program's participants is returning to the street. For now, about one out of four is in permanent housing.

Bass wants to address the problem by beefing up social services within the program. Still, she has described Inside Safe as a lifeline for L.A.'s unhoused residents, offering toilet facilities, hot showers and rooms with doors that lock.

"I will absolutely not go back to the broken systems of the past," she told reporters last month.

Raman, who has been in charge of the council's housing and homelessness committee since 2023, voted for the mayor's emergency declaration and signed off on three years of funding for Inside Safe.

In recent months, however, Raman has been saying that the program is too costly, in part because the average stay in an Inside Safe facility is now nearly a year.

Raman wants the city to rely more on apartment vouchers, which she described as more effective and less expensive. She also is seeking to shift oversight for L.A. homeless programs from multiple offices to the city's housing department.

Miller described Inside Safe as an outright failure. He promised to dramatically increase the number of "tiny home" villages, building 50 of them for $50 million, while also expanding the overall number of shelter beds.

Beyond that, Miller said he would introduce a new homeless outreach app for workers at the city, county and other agencies to track "real time services" for L.A.'s unhoused population.

Miller supports Municipal Code Section 41.18, which bars encampments from coming within 500 feet of schools, daycare centers and "sensitive" locations, such as designated libraries or freeway overpasses.

Pratt and Bass also support 41.18. Nevertheless, Pratt has denounced Bass' handling of the homelessness crisis, saying too many sidewalks are populated by homeless drug addicts. On social media, he portrayed himself as the only candidate with "the will to clear encampments in this city."

"Nithya Raman and Karen Basura have turned LA into Zombieland," he said in one recent post.

Pratt would adopt a "treatment first" policy, one that views mental illness and addiction as "the primary drivers of chronic homelessness." Long-term housing would be reserved for those who show "stability and sobriety," his campaign website says.

Huang would work to repeal 41.18, which she described as inhumane, and end what she called "sweeps" - cleanups carried out at encampments by city sanitation crews. Those crews frequently seize and destroy tents and other belongings, including medicine and identification cards, she said.

"Sweeps also add to the anxiety and trauma of being unhoused, creating mental health pressures that make it harder to engage with services," Huang said.

Huang would ask the city controller to audit Inside Safe, while also ramping up production of "permanent supportive housing," apartments with on-site social services.

Raman opposed the council's decision in 2022 to expand 41.18 to bar encampments around schools and daycare centers. She also voted against creating dozens of new 41.18 zones in other council districts, saying it simply pushes unhoused people elsewhere.

Where they stand on police

Bass prioritized police hiring after taking office, saying she wanted to restore the force to 9,500 officers. She has struggled on that front, with the number of sworn officers recently falling below 8,700.

To slow the rate of departures, Bass negotiated a package of pay increases at the Los Angeles Police Department in 2023 that included higher starting salaries and new retention bonuses. She also retooled the hiring process to speed up recruitment.

Even with those efforts, Bass has had to modify her short-term hiring goal, saying that, for the current year, she wants to keep the LAPD from getting smaller.

Bass also brought on Jim McDonnell, a onetime veteran of the LAPD, to serve as the city's newest police chief. Huang and Raman have voiced strong dissatisfaction with him, saying they would move to replace him.

Both criticized McDonnell for saying he wouldn't enforce a state law, which recently was struck down by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, barring federal immigration officers from wearing masks.

Huang has taken by far the hardest line against the LAPD, saying she would shift a significant amount of money out of the department and into social services.

"Our neighborhoods are starved for resources while paying for a protection racket for one of the biggest legal gangs in the world," Huang said on X.

Raman opposed the LAPD pay increases, saying they have "bankrupted" the city, depriving other services of much-needed funding. Over the past six years, her views on police staffing have shifted.

In 2020, during her first run for city office, Raman called for defunding the police, saying the LAPD should be a "much smaller, specialized armed force." After taking office, however, she voted for some budgets that increased the department's budget.

In January, Raman opposed the hiring of 170 additional officers sought by Bass. A few weeks later, after launching her mayoral bid, she told NBC-4 the LAPD should not shrink any further, saying there aren't enough officers to respond to 911 calls "in a timely fashion."

Pratt,on his campaign website, said he would "reject extreme defund style politics."

"(It's) critical that we support prosecuting retail theft and organized criminal activity and enforce existing laws that protect neighborhood safety and quality of life," he said.

Miller voiced support for the police pay increases, saying they were needed to keep officers from taking jobs elsewhere. He also said he would go beyond Bass' long-range hiring goal by working to restore the LAPD to 10,000 officers.

"People feel unsafe in their neighborhoods," he said. "They don't want to walk around at night, and they certainly don't feel safe in their own homes, which is unacceptable."

Where they stand on housing production

Early in her administration, Bass issued Executive Directive 1, which required city approval within 60 days of any residential project considered to be 100% affordable.

Under ED1, the city has approved about 42,000 units since Bass took office. However, only a fraction of those projects - about 6,000, or roughly 14% - are under construction, according to the mayor.

Bass eventually exempted single-family neighborhoods from ED1, following an outcry from homeowner groups. She is also pushing a package of reforms to speed the approval of other types of housing.

Raman has become a favorite of the city's YIMBY movement, which has spent years pushing for the city to legalize taller, denser residential projects in single-family neighborhoods.

Since launching her campaign, Raman said she would require that the city approve a housing development within 60 days of receiving an application, as long as it complies with zoning rules. Those that do not comply would need to be approved within four months, she said.

"We say we're in a housing crisis here in Los Angeles, and then the city makes it impossible to build in L.A.," she said during a March forum on housing. "My plan would change that."

Pratt would expand on the mayor's ED1 program by mandating a 60-day approval process for accessory dwelling units - smaller back houses on single-family lots. That same timetable also should apply to certain urban infill projects, he said.

"I happen to have a bit of experience ... in my own rebuilding purgatory in the Palisades," Pratt said. "So I know a thing or two about what trips up housing construction."

Huang has called for more social housing - either co-ops or publicly owned apartments that are not part of the free market.

"I believe that housing is a human right, and that homes are for people and not for profit," she told one audience in March. "The market will not save us."

Miller,like Raman, promised to dramatically ramp up housing production, saying the city needs more of every kind of housing.

"It's simple supply and demand," he said.

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