Galicia owns a small construction business and is also a minister at a primarily Latino Pentecostal church downtown. He tries not to fume against his misfortunes, but he has a beef with the city, which to this day can’t even identify the owner of the lot. Repeated calls to his city councilman, radical DSA member Hugo Soto Martinez, have proved fruitless.  

“There are millions for the homeless, but nothing for those who work hard,” Galicia notes. “The sidewalks are never fixed and the police are slow to come. It would be easier if the government would not make everything so miserable.” 

LA is currently hosting the World Cup, and two years from now, it will host the Olympics. The city should be ready for its closeup —  but it isn’t.  

This is a painful change for anyone who, like me, came to the City of Angels 50 years ago and embraced its eclectic mix of cultures and businesses. In the 1980s, LA was what the conservative historian Fred Siegel called “the entrepreneurial dynamo.” Unlike New York or the Bay Area, where academic pedigree and family ties were the keys to success, LA was an everyman city, a place where you could afford to start a business and live in a house like Galicia’s, all within the perimeter of a great metropolis.

Aesthetes long preferred New York or San Francisco, but the masses headed to LA. Between 1900 and 1940, the city’s population surged to 1.5 million from barely 100,000. After the war, LA expanded again, enriched by its huge oil and defense sectors, and by 2020, hit its peak population of 3.8 million, with another 6 million living in surrounding Los Angeles County. These areas once domiciled 13 Fortune 500 companies, including Disney, Northrop Grumman, Security Pacific Bank, First Interstate, Union Oil, Getty Oil, and Arco, and a long list of successful growing businesses, as well.

Since then, the Fortune 500 locals have dwindled to seven, with just one, Farmers Insurance, inside city limits, and that just barely, on the furthest fringes of the San Fernando Valley. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times, once a critical part of the city establishment, has abandoned Downtown for El Segundo, amid severe financial strains and a paid circulation that’s a fraction of its once vast readership. 

Most critically, Los Angeles County now suffers the highest poverty rates in the state, and among the worst in the country. As you drive the streets of South Los Angeles and along the historic main street of black LA, Central Avenue, now predominantly Hispanic, the ambiance is increasingly reminiscent of the colonias of Mexico: broken pavements, battered buildings, outdoor swap meets, and fly-by-night food stalls.

More from this author

Mamdani heralds the radical American city

By Joel Kotkin

The county is shrinking too. Once celebrated as “the city that grew,” by 2070 it will suffer a reduction of more than a million people — 14% of its current population. Since 2000, the area has experienced a devastating loss of 750,000 people under 25, and it has the second-lowest birthrate among the 53 US major metropolitan areas, according to the American Community Survey. 

And while it is still home to more than three million immigrants, newcomers are increasingly headed elsewhere, notably to Texas, Florida, and other Southern states. The political class may be proud of creating a “sanctuary city,” but since 2010, the area’s foreign-born population has declined.

One reason is a lack of civic leadership. LA is increasingly a headless city. For many years, an almost exclusively white, male, and Protestant business elite embraced manifest destiny and dominated the surrounding region. These leaders fostered the creation of the kind of infrastructure that makes a great city — roads, universities, observatories, aerospace plants, a massive streetcar grid, as well as car and tire factories.  

This ruling alliance was transformed during the mayoralty of Tom Bradley, who won office in 1973 and served for 20 years. Now the old business establishment shared primacy with unions and rising Jewish and African American communities, an alliance that fostered long-term planning rather than cosmetic and rarely effective “short-term fixes,” according to Nick Patsaouras, an urban planner and public official with a long history in LA development.

Today, groups like the Chamber of Commerce have little influence over the city’s direction. “There are no ‘civic’ leaders left,” Patsaouras told UnHerd. “Just parasites feeding from public trough and crooks.”   

The optimism that once defined the city has withered as well. Once it was widely believed that LA was developing into a true rival of New York, with its own subway system and a downtown filled with sparkling high-rises. By the 1980s, trade at the Long Beach-Los Angeles port surpassed that of the Port of New York. And investment, much of it from Asia, suggested a future “capital of the Pacific Rim.” As the popular slogan had it: LA’s the place.  

Today, the Entertainment Capital of the World can’t even fend off challenges from places like Dallas-Fort Worth, Nashville, and Miami. Michael Kelly, director of the Drucker Institute at the Claremont Colleges, suggests that virtually every basic industry — including manufacturing, finance and business services —  has lost jobs, or at best has stagnated, since 2019. Only government-funded education and health jobs showed significant growth. If LA had grown as quickly as the national average, he calculates, it would have created 300,000 more jobs. 

Instead of focusing on development, the city’s establishment increasingly resembles the rulers of the late Roman Empire, offering the people the distraction of bread and circuses. Even as the signature industry, entertainment —  down 42,000 jobs in the past three years — shrinks, a passion for showiness and glamor remains. Diversions include the Dodgers, the Lakers, the World Cup, a sparkling new George Lucas $1 billion Museum of Narrative Art, due to open this fall — and most particularly, the Olympics. 

The city’s business “leaders,” Drucker’s Kelly suggests, aren’t fixing the weak economy, the dysfunctional schools or the increasingly dilapidated and dangerous LA parks. “All they care about is the Olympics,” he says.  

But the City of Angels today hardly resembles the brash upstart that held a successful Olympics in 1932 or the emerging world capital that, in 1984, under the brilliant leadership of businessman Peter Ueberroth, ran the Olympics with little incident and a profit. The LA 28 organization, the official host committee, claims it has enough sponsorships and TV deals to pay for what is needed, although there are growing doubts whether the city can absorb Olympics-related security costs, given its near-disastrous fiscal shape. Officials should hope that visitors, particularly journalists, will not see eyesores like Juan Galicia’s burnt-out home, and will skip the visit to Skid Row, close to the city’s downtown business district, which has a murder rate 17 times the city average. 

This was once a city that, like Marlon Brando’s broken boxer in the movie On the Waterfront, “could have been a contender” to challenge New York and other more established metropolises. But since the end of Republican Richard Riordan’s mayoralty in 2001, power has shifted to a motley coalition of political operatives, those using the city’s infrastructure to enrich themselves, and increasingly powerful public-sector unions. A focus on “social justice” and green virtues has thoroughly replaced the old growth-oriented vision. 

Homelessness is the most obvious failure. Even as San Francisco, under reform Mayor Dan  Lurie, aided by the local tech community, has turned back the homeless tide, Los Angeles retains roughly 70,000 “unhoused” people. It has spent billions but has refused to take such steps as shutting down the camps. Half of the homeless are known to be from somewhere else, attracted by the salubrious climate, free needles, and lack of police enforcement. 

The problem is no longer confined to the infamous Skid Row, but has spread to once stable neighborhoods, even as those charged with improving conditions have been charged with corruption. In a neighborhood close to where I used to live, homeless people hang out in the supermarket and eat in the aisles. Others harass business owners and illegally draw power from the city grid.

In part due to homelessness and the largely unchecked gangs, many of LA’s once great public places, like MacArthur Park, have become crime-ridden dystopias, filled with the mentally ill, firebugs and gang members. Even the libraries are increasingly unsafe. As long-term LA journalist Sam Quinones suggests: “in Los Angeles, private spaces have become public threats.”

But the homeless are just one element of the growing disorder. Add to this attacks by gangs of kids, vandalism, and theft throughout the city, particularly downtown. Thieves removed the copper pipes from Galicia’s burnt-out home. Criminals are now so bold that they have started stripping copper wire from street lights, leaving some of the city in the dark. 

Not surprisingly, the middle class is heading for the exits. Since 1980, the percentage of city residents who own their own home has fallen from 40% to roughly 33%, compared to rates of roughly 65% home-ownership nationally and 56% in the state. 

The loss of the middle class has transformed the political landscape, largely to the benefit of the Left. When Republican Riordan ran in 2001, Republicans could account for as much as a third of the electorate, notes longtime GOP strategist Arnold Steinberg. Today, amid the expansion of mail-in ballots and lax control over who votes, they barely constitute half that amount. Add to this ultra-permissive voting rules and legal “ballot harvesting,” including from the homeless, and changing the political direction seems almost impossible. 

Spencer Pratt’s mayoral campaign may have thrilled conservatives around the country, but few of his greatest admirers vote in LA. He came in third behind current Mayor Karen Bass, a long-time Leftist who organized help for Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the 1970s, as part of the Venceremos Brigade, and Nithya Raman, a 44-year-old Mamdani clone, who lives in a $1.9 million house in fashionable Silver Lake and has a planning degree from MIT. 

Bass’s disastrous mishandling of the Palisades fires has made her vulnerable to an even further Left challenger. Raman’s handlers hope to sell her as a “change agent” and a competent manager, something Bass is clearly not. Raman is currently, by some polls, in the lead. But whoever wins, nothing much will change, at least not for the better. Political power will continue to remain in the hands of militant public unions, notably the SEIU, which represents generally low-income service workers, and the teachers, who demand ever more taxes to pay their salaries and generous pensions. 

Suggested reading

Gavin Newsom versus the Nimbys

By Richard Hanania

Homelessness will remain a massive problem whoever wins. Raman has opposed restrictions on public camping and sleeping. “Raman’s record on homelessness is worse than Bass — if that is possible,” notes westside activist Tim Campbell, a longtime Angelino and former government auditor. “She’s incompetent and arrogant, which is a fatal combination.”  

Raman’s managers will paint her as pragmatic, but her political allegiance belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America, whose platform includes seizing private housing, a 100% renewable energy system, making all public transportation free, the decriminalization of drug use, and the decommissioning of the central jail. Her purported moderation only makes sense when compared to her fellow DSA council member Ysabel Jurado, who favors not just defunding the police but abolishing them.  

Whoever wins in November, Los Angeles seems likely to continue its masterclass in urban dysfunction. As in New York, Seattle, Washington, DC, and other cities, the DSA is cementing a coalition of public-employee unions and the welfare-dependent with a crop of young college graduates who predominate in neighborhoods such as Echo Park, Silver Lake and Hollywood,  LA’s version of New York’s “Commie Corridor.”  

If the City of Angels is to come back, don’t look to the business elites but to working and middle-class immigrants from places like Mexico, Central America, China, Taiwan, India, and increasingly, Africa. Many of them now settle in smaller cities in Los Angeles County — Paramount, Bellflower, Downey, and South Gate, among others — that are showing that you can build a successful city amid the big city’s dysfunction. 

These cities pride themselves on the basics like law enforcement, street maintenance, and schools, and demonstrate that such initiatives can work in today’s Southern California. Indeed, in a study I conducted with researcher Bheki Mahlobo, we found that these south Los Angeles County cities, once seen as backwaters, have managed to outperform the city itself, particularly its South Side, in terms of employment, public safety, and school scores.

Los Angeles retains a magnificent collection of neighborhoods, and is home to remarkable institutions like the Getty Center, a striking museum in the Santa Monica Mountains. And there are some tentative signs that the LA electorate is capable of pushing back to defend it. In 2024, voters ousted Soros-financed District Attorney George Gascon; they have also displayed a growing resistance to tax increases. You can still feel the area’s potential in places like El Segundo, where space and aerospace firms are flourishing, and at a charter school in Granada Hills, where largely minority students — Chinese, Korean, Middle Eastern, Latino — routinely win the national academic decathlon. Hollywood still possesses a reservoir of entertainment-industry talent. And, of course, the weather and topography remain daily reminders of why people came here in the first place. 

The key to renewal lies with people like Juan Galicia who, despite everything, is pursuing permits to rebuild in his neighborhood. Sustained by his faith and his commitment to making Los Angeles a better place, Galicia, like many Angelinos, is staking out a claim for a better future. Some, like me, may have fled — in my case, south to Orange County — but I will cheer Galicia and people like him as they try to restore a city to which I owe much, and would be delighted to see ascendant once again.      

“I want my trees back and my home back,” Galicia tells me. “I have to work every day and rebuilding this house is my dream. It will happen, you’ll see. I still feel blessed to be here.” 

A few years later, Pratt found himself in front of the cameras again, this time for MTV’s docu-soap, The Hills. He eloped to Cabo San Lucas with his inamorata, the rat-tail and scorpion ingesting Heidi Montag, she of the 10 cosmetic surgeries, who was soon to grace the cover of Playboy magazine. In 2009, Pratt shifted gears to music, cutting an album and proclaiming he was the “White Jay-Z”. The following year he was arrested in Costa Rica for boarding an airplane with weapons. In Los Angeles, this is the resume — sordid sex-tape scandals and all — that qualifies Spencer Pratt to run for mayor.

The comedians aren’t amused. Late-night Trumpo-phobe Jimmy Kimmel derided him as a crystal-hawking huckster. Drew Carey, the man-of-the-people game-show host, condemned him as a “serial scammer”. Chelsea Handler took a moment off from smutty anecdotes to ask on Instagram: “Have we learned anything yet?” They were among the Hollywood liberals who have ridiculed and demonized Pratt as a showboat, a loudmouth, a clown, and a troll. And yet — to reduce the overriding frustrations of our piteous political moment to three words — no one cares.

The latest UC Berkeley-Los Angeles Times poll has Pratt at 22%, only four percentage points behind incumbent Karen Bass and three behind activist city council member Nithya Raman. The latest from the California Post placed Pratt at 30.1% and the incumbent at 29.5% — a statistical tie. Of course, it doesn’t really matter who wins today’s non-partisan primary (Pratt is a registered Republican), as it has become clear that Bass will not swing enough votes to gather a majority, thus guaranteeing a run-off in November.

The point here is not to decry the degraded state of American politics. Railing against reality television politics is so twenty-teen. These days, not a single eyebrow raises when plaid-flanneled Luke Gulbranson — known for his clueless romantic pursuits on Bravo’s Summer House — runs for a Congressional seat in Minnesota, or when “Teen Mom” Farrah Abraham seeks a spot on Austin’s City Council. Just look at the guy with the nuclear codes. 

It’s hardly a revelation that politics has gone Hollywood. The interesting point here is that the liberal Hollywood elite, the longstanding behemoth of left-coast, Left-wing electioneering, has been powerless to stop it. The rattling last gasp of LA’s political establishment came in 2024, when Oprah and Julia Louis-Dreyfus led the cavalry for Kamala Harris, whooping and waving proverbial swords over their heads so that George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Jamie Lee Curtis would know which way to charge — to no avail.

More from this author

The orthodox Jews tripping on toad toxins

By Frederick Kaufman

Pratt delivers a new brand of politics — call it alt-Hollywood, as his coalition includes none of the previous power brokers of Tinseltown’s establishment. Of course he has his billionaire, the hedge-fund tycoon Daniel Loeb, who once purchased a massive stake in Sony Pictures. And he can boast a bona-fide Academy-Award winner in Brian Grazer, a longstanding backer of California Democrats (including Kamala). Then come the West Coast MAGAs one might expect: Dennis Quaid and James Woods. But from there on out, his industry backers look different from anything we have seen in the past. He has energized hordes of Hollywood himbos and bimbos, awakening the political consciousness of actresses/models like Amber Rose and Paris Hilton, fellow reality stars Brody Jenner and Kristin Cavallari, Real Housewife of Miami‘s Joanna Krupa, and Dancing with the Stars’ Audrina Patridge. Pratt’s long tail reaches far into the D-List, from Billy Bush to Bachelorette runner-up Nick Viall to the perpetually online blabberati of comedians, DJs and former UFC fighters.

In a viral video of the fundraiser held at the Brentwood home of Pratt’s erstwhile foil on Princes of Malibu, David Foster’s wife Katharine McPhee belted out a version of “Simply the Best” — with new (and cringe) lyrics featuring Pratt. “La la land is ready for a plot twist,” concluded Access Hollywood. 

In Hollywood, as in Aristotle’s Poetics, a plot twist is generally accompanied by what is technically known as a “recognition” — a perception that what was once is no more, a new awareness that changes everything. The recognition that may well define Pratt’s political future is the Hollywood liberal’s reversal of fortune. This became evident on Fox News‘s hard-Right comedy hour Gutfeld!. “He’s on a mission to defeat the coastal elite,” declared the arch-conservative stalwart and eponymous host, Greg Gutfeld. “You’re on a roll. You’re surging in the polls.”

Pratt ignored the statement and repeated his campaign promise to be the “look around” candidate — apparently the only mayoral candidate in Los Angeles who will “look around” and see the “naked drug addict zombies with machetes” who plague his native city, leaving a trail of steaming excrement on sidewalks from Sherman Oaks to Silver Lake.

“You have celebrities that are now coming out in support of you,” Gutfeld pressed on. He named two of them: Leonardo DiCaprio and Jamie Foxx.

“I actually don’t want celebrities to come out and endorse me,” countered Pratt. (This, from the man who won “Snapchatter of the Year” at the 2018 Shorty Awards.) “I love when the celebrities attack me.” All of which makes it clear that Pratt fully comprehends the moment he is so thoroughly exploiting: the twilight of Hollywood’s liberal elite.

Pratt himself provides a perfect example of the Hollywood liberal’s reversal of fortune. He grew up in the tony enclave of the Pacific Palisades, part of California’s 32nd congressional district where Hillary Clinton notched 70% of the vote in the 2016 presidential election. He attended the Crossroads School in Santa Monica, where he imbibed a socially mindful “Human Development” curriculum in which math and science were subordinated to social justice, environmental issues, and “Modern Gender Studies”. At Crossroads, Pratt’s classmates included numerous progeny of the entertainment aristocracy, among them Dave Chernin (scion of old-school Hollywood liberal Peter Chernin) and Max Winkler (scion of old-school Hollywood liberal Henry Winkler). Pratt thus had the privilege of witnessing first-hand the great tradition of Left-wing Hollywood groupthink, and learned its lessons well. Perhaps too well, as he has co-opted its ethos and language for himself, incessantly emphasizing personal victimhood, namely, his post-Palisades homelessness and subsequent neglect at the hands of the political establishment. Of course, Pratt isn’t suffering too terribly, holed up for the duration in the Bel Air Hotel. That said, he has tapped into vast veins of resentment among LA’s Democratic base — the poor, the non-celebrity, and the Porsche Cayenne moms.

Pratt can get away with a campaign ironically fueled by discourse long-ago perfected by Hollywood liberals: because he knows that the species is going extinct, and thus cannot wield much in the way of meaningful response. He knows that the power and glory that once defined the Hollywood liberal establishment is a thing of the past.

There may be room for some pathos here. I recognize the loss, as my own father was an OG champion of the rights of the poor, suffering, ink-stained proletariat toiling in the writers’ rooms of Paramount and MGM. He plotted one Writers Guild of America West strike after another as he tooled from his Neutra house in the hills to studio commissaries in his white Lincoln convertible — followed, in chronological order, by a silver gull-winged Mercedes, a black Porsche, a bronze Bentley, a biscuit Jaguar, and in a fitting finale for an octogenarian Marxist, a black Cadillac.

Throughout his half-century career as a director and screenwriter, the project closest to my father’s heart was a film Spencer Pratt would surely hold up as an example of the most absurd of all bleeding-heart fantasies. This was the 1962 release of Convicts 4, a biopic loosely based on the story of John Resko, an impoverished and unemployed unfortunate who robbed a convenience store on Christmas Eve and inadvertently shot and killed the shopkeeper. The rest of the show concerns Resko’s life in prison, where among a madcap crew of ne’er-do-wells he learns how to paint, and as a result is at long last reprieved — redeemed by the power of art. At that point in Hollywood’s ancient history, such a scenario could attract a rat pack’s worth of stars, among them Ben Gazzara, Sammy Davis Jr., Vincent Price, and Rod Steiger. Yet today, almost everyone in the industry would rather get the bums off the street than waste taxpayer dollars on paint and canvas to rehabilitate them. 

Almost everyone, that is, except the “Communist and Socialist” — who are, in the world according to Pratt, “the only people that don’t love me”.

From his earliest days in reality TV, Pratt has understood that the fast track to success was to wage war against a fake foe like David Foster. In politics, he has created a similar kind of illusory enemy out of Hollywood’s liberal establishment. No matter that it’s dead and gone. Its ghost will do. As every executive producer knows, there’s nothing quite as terrifying as a ghost.