Transcription
It's the morning of January 7th, 2025, and the sky over Pacific Palisades is the color of rust. The Santa Ana winds are gusting at 100 mph. The vegetation on the hillsides has not seen measurable rainfall in 263 days.
The National Weather Service has issued a particularly dangerous situation, red flag warning, the highest level of fire alert that the agency issues and the kind of warning that has historically preceded the worst wildfires in California history. The mayor of Los Angeles is in Ghana. Karen Bass left the city 3 days earlier to attend the inauguration of Ghanaian President John Mahama. She is more than 7,000 miles away when the first spark catches in the brush above Teiscol Canyon. She is still 7,000 miles away when that spark becomes a flame and that flame becomes a wall. And that wall begins to consume the wealthiest residential neighborhood in the United States of America.
Fire engines arrive at the perimeter. Hoses uncoil across the asphalt. Firefighters open their hydrants and the hydrants are dry, completely empty. And by 3:00 a.m. on January 8th, every single water storage tank serving the high elevation neighborhoods of the Pacific Palisades has completely run dry. The 117 million gallon Santa Ynez reservoir, the largest water storage facility in the area sits empty just down the road. It has been empty for almost a year, drained for repairs to a torn floating cover with the repairs delayed by competitive bidding rules required under the city charter. A reservoir holding the volume of 177 Olympic swimming pools sits bone dry while the wealthiest neighborhood in America turns into a furnace.
In the 72 hours that follows, fire consumes 6,837 structures in the Palisades and 9,418 more in nearby Aladena. Homes that sold for $5 million become piles of ash and twisted rebar. Schools where movies like Carrie and Teen Wolf were filmed are reduced to scorched concrete pads. The official death toll across the Palisades and Altadena fires combined reaches 31. A Boston University study published months later in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimates the true excess death count at 440 people, more than 14 times the official number after researchers include heart attacks, smoke inhalation deaths, and elderly residents who never recovered from the evacuation.
The mayor finally returns from Ghana on the evening of January 8th. An Irish journalist boards her plane at LAX and asks her on camera whether she owes the citizens of her city an apology for being absent while their homes burned. She says nothing, stares straight ahead and the clip goes viral within hours. 15 months later in April 2026, only 34 homes have been fully rebuilt out of more than 16,000 destroyed. Los Angeles County has dropped by another 54,000 people in a single year, the largest numeric population loss of any county in the United States. The film industry has lost almost half of its population volume. The city is staring down a $1 billion budget deficit. A self-described democratic socialist is now leading multiple polls in the race to become mayor. The most glamorous city in American history is coming apart in front of the cameras. And the people who made it glamorous are walking out of the door. And that's why I'm making this.
Over the next 60 minutes, this story will explain with cold numbers and on-the-record sources exactly why Los Angeles, the city that gave us Hollywood, the Beach Boys, the 1984 Olympics, and the modern American dream, is unlikely to recover from what is happening to it right now. This is Front Page.
To understand why Los Angeles is breaking, you have to first understand how it was built. Because almost every problem the city faces in 2026 traces back to a decision that someone made between 1880 and 1980. And almost nobody has the political courage to revisit since. In 1880, Los Angeles was a town of 11,000 people in a hot, dry basin with no harbor and no navigable river. San Francisco was the cultural and commercial capital of California. Los Angeles was a backwater sweltering in the sun, surrounded by orange groves, and almost nothing else. Then, a small group of boosters, real estate developers, railroad executives, and water engineers decided to build a city anyway. These boosters convinced the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe railroads to run a price war on tickets from the Midwest, dropping the fare from Kansas City to Los Angeles to $1 at one point in 1886. They marketed Southern California as a health destination, a cure for tuberculosis, a paradise of citrus and sunshine.
In 1913, after a campaign of political ruthlessness so brutal it later became the basis for the movie Chinatown, the city completed the Los Angeles aqueduct, draining the Owens Valley 250 miles to the north and delivering more water than the city even needed at the time. That excess water was the entire point. It was the invitation for the population growth that would follow. The motion picture industry showed up in the 1910s, drawn by consistent weather, varied scenery, and physical distance from East Coast patent enforcers. By the 1920s, Los Angeles was the fastest growing city in America, doubling in size in a single decade. By 1930, Los Angeles was the fifth largest city in the country.
Then came the boom that nobody alive today has ever seen the equal of. From 1940 to 1970, Los Angeles experienced one of the greatest population and economic expansions in American history. World War II brought enormous federal aerospace and defense spending. Boeing, Lockheed, Douglas, and North American Aviation built sprawling factories across the basin. The entertainment industry matured into global cultural dominance. Post-war prosperity meant Angelinos had disposable income, and they spent that income on the newest technology of the age, the automobile. By 1964, California became the most populous state in the union, surpassing New York. The city was adding roughly 500 new residents every single day. Dodger Stadium opened in 1962. The Forum opened in 1963. Los Angeles County alone, taken as a single national economy, has consistently ranked among the world's top 20 economies, larger than Switzerland, Sweden, Belgium, or Singapore.
Buried inside this golden age was a structural error so severe that it would be strangling the city 60 years later. A century ago, Los Angeles had one of the largest electric streetcar networks on Earth. The Pacific Electric Red Cars connected Long Beach to Pasadena to San Bernardino in a network that rivaled any global city. The city kept widening its roads, kept building its freeways, and kept letting the streetcars rot. The last red car ran in 1961. The replacement for that streetcar network was a freeway system covering 527 miles of concrete and a city built on the assumption that every adult would own a car. By the time anyone realized Los Angeles had been designed for automobiles instead of human beings, the concrete had been cured for decades. Today, 80 to 90% of all trips in Los Angeles require a car. Drivers spend 87 hours per year stuck in traffic, costing each driver about $1,600 annually in lost time. 53% of LA area roads are rated in poor condition. The city has the highest rate of automotive fatalities of any major metro in the United States.
These four conditions form the foundation of the modern city: A desert location, water taken from elsewhere, a transportation system built around cars instead of people, and an economy dependent on a single dominant industry. And for decades, none of that mattered because the dominant industry kept dominating. The population kept growing and the federal government kept the aerospace and defense money flowing. Then the bill started coming due.
The first major bill came in 1978 when California voters passed Proposition 13. The measure capped property taxes at 1% of a home's purchase price and limited annual tax increases to 2% until the property changed hands. Proposition 13 was a tax revolt against rising property values, and it has been politically untouchable ever since. The result is a financial incentive of staggering power. A California homeowner has wealth locked into the property. The moment that homeowner sells, the replacement home will be taxed at full market value, costing tens of thousands of dollars per year in additional property tax for the rest of the owner's life. So, the homeowner doesn't sell. And because the homeowner doesn't sell, the homeowner fights every proposed apartment building, every density increase, every zoning change in the neighborhood. Because anything that changes the character of the block threatens the value of the asset that the owner can never afford to leave. The result is on every block. Drive down Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood, and the contrast is physical. 30-story high-rise towers line the boulevard for a few miles. Then the towers stop and on either side stretches mile after mile after mile of one-story and two-story single-family homes in one of the most expensive metropolitan areas in the world. The contrast is jarring because it's unnatural. It's the product of zoning maps that froze the city in amber.
Stack rent control on top of Proposition 13 and the picture only gets worse. Los Angeles has the Rental Stabilization Ordinance, which limits annual rent increases on roughly 624,000 older apartment units. California has Assembly Bill 1482, which caps rent increases statewide. In 2022, Los Angeles voters passed Measure ULA, a transfer tax of 4 to 5.5% on real estate sales over $5 million, which sent multifamily housing development into freefall. Apartment construction in Los Angeles dropped by 1,910 units per year after Measure ULA was passed. Exactly the opposite of what the housing shortage city needed. Layered on top of that is the California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA, which has been weaponized for decades by neighborhood groups, unions, and competitor businesses to block apartment buildings, transit projects, and infrastructure improvements through endless litigation. A single CEQA lawsuit can delay a project by years and add millions of dollars in legal costs. Developers price the litigation risk into every project and many projects simply do not pencil out. A functioning Los Angeles needs roughly 50,000 new housing units per year to keep pace with demand. The city is producing 16,000. The math hasn't worked for 40 years. And the people who control the political system have a personal financial interest in making sure it never works.
Against that context, a homeless population of more than 72,000 people sleeps on the streets of Los Angeles County every night. The official 2025 Point-in-Time count from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the agency known as LAHSA, puts that figure at 72,38. It represents the number of people identified as homeless in Los Angeles County on a single night in January. The actual number of people who experience homelessness in LA County over the course of a full year is estimated at two to three times higher. 43,000 of those 72,000 people are within the city limits of Los Angeles itself. Of the 72,000, only about 30% are sheltered, sleeping in beds in indoor facilities. The rest, roughly 47,000 human beings, sleep outside, in tents, in cars, in encampments and doorways. By comparison, in New York City, 97% of the homeless population is sheltered. The contrast is so stark that climate alone cannot explain it.
The mayor declared a homelessness state of emergency on her first day in office in December 2022. Her flagship program is called Inside Safe. The program sends teams to encampments, offers occupants temporary motel rooms, clears the encampment, and theoretically transitions those people into permanent supportive housing by the end of 2025. Three years into the program, Inside Safe has spent more than $322 million and has served roughly 5,800 individuals. Of those 5,800 people, only about 1,243 have been placed in permanent housing. The return-to-street rate is 40%. 18 people died in motel rooms paid for by the program in the first 4 months of 2025 alone. The cost runs roughly $3,300 per person per month for the motel placements.
A court-ordered audit released in March 2025, conducted by the consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal at a cost of $3 million, examined $2.3 billion in city homelessness spending. The auditors stated in writing that they could not determine how the money had been spent. Documentation was missing and the records didn't match. One contractor's food inventory consisted, in the words of the auditors, "almost entirely of instant ramen noodles." And that contractor was billing the city $110 per person per day.
In 2016, Los Angeles voters passed Proposition HH, approving $1.2 billion in bonds to build 10,000 units of supportive housing for homeless residents. The actual costs per unit by the time the projects were under construction averaged $596,000. One Skid Row development came in at $837,000 per studio apartment. Multiple media reports identified projects exceeding $1 million per unit. The city of Houston builds equivalent supportive housing for $170,000 per unit. Tokyo builds it for less than $180,000 per unit. The city spends six times more per housing unit than Houston and produces a fraction of the housing. The money goes in many directions. Some of it flows to layered legal review processes. Some flows to prevailing wage requirements that drive up labor costs. Some flows to multistakeholder community input processes that delay projects by years. Some goes to consultants and program administrators. The aggregate effect is that Los Angeles cannot build affordable housing fast enough to address its own homelessness even when the city has the money because the systems that govern construction in the city have evolved to prioritize procedural correctness over delivery. Los Angeles does not lack resources. The city lacks the ability to convert resources into outcomes. And that pattern keeps repeating across every problem the city faces.
Hollywood is the second domino, and Hollywood is falling fast. In 2018, the greater Los Angeles area logged about 38,000 on-location filming days, which is the standard industry metric for how much physical production is actually happening in a region. In 2025, that number was 19,694, the lowest figure observed outside of the 2020 pandemic shutdown. The drop is more than 48% in seven years. Television production in 2025 ran 50% below its 5-year average, with TV comedy specifically running 66% below the 5-year average in the fourth quarter alone. Feature film production for the full year ran nearly 32% below its 5-year average. The Otis College report on the creative economy estimates that Los Angeles County lost approximately 17,000 entertainment industry jobs between 2022 and 2024 alone. Other estimates put the cumulative loss across the past 5 years at 41,000 jobs. Soundstage occupancy in Los Angeles, which historically ran above 90%, dropped to 63% in 2024. Three of the largest studio lots in the city have either defaulted on debt, restructured, or been listed for sale.
Hollywood is what happens when an industry built on geographic concentration meets a world that no longer requires geographic concentration. The structural cause is tax credit competition. Georgia offers a 30% refundable tax credit on production spending with no cap. A production that films in Atlanta saves 30 cents on every dollar spent on labor, equipment, and services. New York offers up to 40% on a state cap of $800 million per year. New Mexico, Louisiana, the United Kingdom, Canada, and increasingly New Jersey all offer competitive incentive packages. California, up until recently, capped its credit at $330 million per year and offered a base rate of only 20%. So, the math wasn't even close.
In June and July of 2025, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bills 132 and 1138, raising the California Film and Television Tax Credit cap to $750 million per year and increasing the base rate to 35% with a 40% rate available for productions outside the 30-mile zone, which covers Central LA. For the first time since the program's creation in 2009, the credit became refundable, meaning studios can collect cash even when they have no California tax liability. This reform arrived years too late. The infrastructure has already been built in the competing jurisdictions. Atlanta surpassed Los Angeles in feature film soundstage square footage in 2022. Studios have signed long-term leases at facilities in Georgia, the United Kingdom, and New Jersey. The supporting workforce of grips, electricians, gaffers, and craft service crews has either relocated or been replaced in those markets. A studio greenlighting a project in 2026 no longer asks whether to film outside California. The studio asks which non-California location offers the best economic terms for that specific production. A Film LA spokesperson named Philip Ozkalowski said publicly that Los Angeles now competes with 120 domestic and international jurisdictions for production work.
The math has changed. Below the tax credit issue lies a deeper cultural collapse that no incentive package can reverse. The traditional Hollywood model required gatekeepers. To become famous in 1995, an aspiring star had to come to Los Angeles, find an agent, audition for casting directors, get cast in something, and slowly build credits. The city's gravitational pole was industrial. Los Angeles was a factory that manufactured fame. Social media broke that model permanently. An 18-year-old in Iowa can build an audience of 20 million people on TikTok without ever visiting Los Angeles. The influencer economy is now estimated to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually inside the United States. That economy does not require the physical infrastructure of studio lots, craft union halls, post-production houses, and casting agencies. It does not need Los Angeles. It can run from anywhere with a smartphone and a reliable internet. The Fox Lot in Century City, one of the most historic studio properties in the world, is now renting its soundstages to TikTok content creators. The Radford Studio Center in Studio City, where The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Seinfeld, and Roseanne were all filmed, defaulted on a $1.1 billion loan in 2024. The cathedral is being rented out for podcasts. The result for Los Angeles is that the dominant industry that built the city is shrinking. The replacement industry does not need the city, and the tax base is hollowing out as both effects compound on each other.
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The single most damning indicator of the city's trajectory is the population data, which shows that the people are leaving. The county dropped from a peak population of about 10.04 million in 2020 to roughly 9.69 million in 2025. That is a loss of approximately 322,000 people in 5 years. From July 2024 to July 2025 alone, the county lost about 54,000 residents, the largest numeric population decline of any county in the United States. The California Department of Finance and its September 2025 long-range projection forecast that Los Angeles County will lose another 1.2 million people by 2070, a 14% decline from current levels, dropping the county to roughly 8.5 million residents.
For perspective, the entire state of California has been the nation's leading net out-migration state for six consecutive years. According to U-Haul one-way rental data, from 2010 through 2024, approximately 9.2 million people moved from California to other states, while only 6.7 million moved in. That is a net loss of 2.5 million people over 14 years. A common assumption is that only the rich are leaving. The data points the other direction. A 2026 California Policy Lab study using anonymized credit bureau data found that movers from Los Angeles came from across the income distribution. Higher-income neighborhoods saw an increased share of movers, but those movers were on average in a weaker financial position than the neighbors they left behind. They were the people who saw the lifestyle around them, calculated what it would cost to maintain that lifestyle in Los Angeles versus elsewhere, and chose elsewhere.
You can probably guess the destinations. Las Vegas added 21,000 residents from Los Angeles County in 2024 alone. The Phoenix metro, which centers on Maricopa County, was a top destination as well. Houston, which is in Harris County, Texas, gained tens of thousands of California migrants. Austin and Travis County, Texas, has been receiving a steady flow of California professionals for years. Miami-Dade in Florida, Williamson County around Nashville, and the entire Inland Empire of Riverside and San Bernardino all gained population at LA County's expense.
At the very top of the income scale, the picture is even more dramatic. California's top marginal income tax rate is 13.3%, the highest of any state in America. Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Nevada have a state income tax of zero. For a high earner with $5 million of annual income, the difference between California and Florida is roughly $665,000 per year in state taxes alone. The list of major companies that have moved their headquarters out of California in recent years is staggering. Tesla relocated to Austin in 2021. SpaceX moved its headquarters to Starbase, Texas in 2024. Oracle relocated first to Austin in 2020 and then to Nashville in 2024. Chevron, a company founded in California in 1879 as Standard Oil of California, announced on August 2nd, 2024 that it was relocating its corporate headquarters to Houston after 145 years in California with senior leadership in place in Texas by the end of 2024. The company spokesman stated explicitly that California policymakers had pursued policies that made California investment unappealing. Charles Schwab moved to Westlake, Texas. McKesson moved to Irving, Texas. Hewlett Packard Enterprise moved to Houston. Palantir relocated to Denver. CBRE, the commercial real estate firm that literally tracks corporate relocation, moved its own headquarters to Dallas. AECOM, the engineering firm hired by Karen Bass to produce the Palisades fire rebuilding roadmap, has its headquarters in Dallas. Joel Kotkin, an urbanist at Chapman University, points out that Southern California today is home to just 19 Fortune 500 companies, roughly equal to Denver and Seattle, and about half the number found in the Bay Area, Dallas, or Houston.
And the IRS migration data shows this fiscal damage. Los Angeles County recorded a net adjusted gross income loss of $4.23 billion in fiscal year 2022-2023, the second largest loss of any county in the United States, only behind Cook County, Illinois, which contains Chicago. The Economic Innovation Group's analysis of fiscal year 2020-2021 found Los Angeles County had a net adjusted gross income loss of $8.8 billion in that single year. Once a high earner moves out of state, the tax revenue doesn't come back. The wealth transfers permanently into the new state. California's revenue structure depends heavily on top earners, with roughly 45% of state tax revenue coming from the top 1% of filers. The physical mechanics are pretty simple. The state spends heavily on social programs designed to support lower-income residents. Those programs are funded primarily by progressive income taxes paid by upper-income earners. As upper-income earners leave, the revenue base shrinks, but the caseloads don't shrink because the people who cannot afford to leave are disproportionately the people who depend on services. So, the gap between revenue and spending widens, and the gap is closed temporarily through borrowing, reserve drawdowns, and one-time fixes like the billionaire tax. A fiscal death spiral now defines the city. Demand for services keeps growing while fewer taxpayers fund the system. Structural deficits widen. Service cuts erode quality of life and more high earners decide to leave, and the cycle repeats.
The budget situation in Los Angeles in 2026 is the practical reality of what that fiscal spiral looks like at the city level. The total city budget for fiscal year 2025-2026 is approximately $14 billion. The structural deficit going into the budget cycle was approximately $1 billion. In April 2025, Karen Bass and the City Administrative Officer proposed eliminating 1,647 positions to close the gap. The City Council reduced that figure to roughly 600 to 700 layoffs after union negotiations. The Los Angeles Police Protective League, which is the LAPD union, agreed to take overtime pay in the form of paid time off rather than cash to help close the gap. The Coalition of LA City Unions agreed to five unpaid holidays in 2026. By March 2026, the City Controller Kenneth Mejia reported that the deficit had been narrowed to about $25 million after these maneuvers, but the underlying structure of the budget is unchanged.
LAPD, which had roughly 10,300 sworn officers at its 2009 peak, was at 8,738 officers as of April 2025, the lowest staffing level since the 1990s. The department's authorized strength for fiscal year 2024-2025 was 8,733. Karen Bass has stated a long-term goal of returning to 9,500 officers, but the path to get there is unclear given the budget environment. As of mid-2026 projections, LAPD is expected to drop to roughly 8,620 officers, which would be the lowest staffing level in three decades. LAFD had its budget cut by $17.6 million in the budget signed by Bass in mid-2024, just months before the Palisades fire. 58 vacant positions were eliminated. The department's chief, Kristen Crowley, warned in writing in December 2024 that these cuts had created what she called "unprecedented operational challenges." After the Palisades fire, Bass fired Crowley, citing her response performance. Crowley's response was that her department had been deliberately starved of resources by the same administration that was now blaming her for being unable to respond.
City liability payouts, which had historically averaged $70 to $80 million per year, jumped to $281 million in fiscal year 2024-2025. The fiscal year 2026-2027 budget allocates $210 million for liability payouts, nearly tripling the historical average. Pension obligations now consume approximately 18% of the city's general fund. The unfunded pension liability across LAFPP (which is the civilian pension system) and LAFPP (which is the fire and police pension system) exceeds $10 billion by some estimates. Statewide, CalPERS reported a net pension liability of $47.77 billion as of June 30th, 2024, with a funded ratio of about 72%. CalSTRS reports an unfunded liability of approximately $88.7 billion. The recent Foundation aggregates total California state and local pension debt at over $265 billion, or more than $6,000 per resident. These obligations are not optional. They are constitutionally protected under California law, cannot be reduced, and must be paid. So every year a larger percent of the city's budget goes to retirees and a smaller percent is available for current services.
UCLA economist Lee O'Hanlon noted in April 2026 that the Los Angeles city budget had grown roughly 62% over the previous decade. That growth has not produced 62% more service delivery. Most of the new spending has been absorbed by personnel costs, pension obligations, and liability payments. The state of California, which provides significant funding to local government, has its own fiscal problem. California's general fund deficit for fiscal year 2025-2026 ran between $11.8 and $12 billion. The state withdrew $7.1 billion from its rainy day fund, which now contains roughly $11.2 billion, about half of what was available 2 years earlier. Cuts of $2.8 billion were imposed for the current fiscal year, with deeper cuts projected to reach $11.9 billion by 2028-2029. Human services spending in the general fund hit $38 billion in fiscal year 2025-2026, up from $31 billion the year before. This pattern describes what fiscal compression looks like before it becomes fiscal collapse.
And the political response to all of this has not been austerity, fiscal discipline, or supply-side reform. The fiscal response has been a sharp turn to the far left. The 2026 Los Angeles mayoral race, which holds its primary on June 2nd, 2026, features 14 candidates on the ballot. The incumbent, Karen Bass, has spent her first term presiding over the wildfires, the budget deficit, the staffing crisis, the homelessness program audit, and the Ghana trip. Her favorability ratings are below 50% in every recent poll at the time of recording this.
Two leading challengers represent two completely different versions of what Los Angeles should become. The progressive challenger is Nithya Raman, the city council member representing District 4, which covers Silver Lake, Los Feliz, and parts of the Hollywood Hills. Raman is an Indian immigrant who came to Los Angeles to work in the entertainment industry, founded a homelessness coalition, and was elected to the city council in 2020 with the explicit endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America. She is the first openly DSA-aligned council member to win a seat in the city's history. She filed her mayoral candidacy on February 7th, 2026, just hours before the deadline after having endorsed Karen Bass weeks earlier. The Los Angeles Times described her entrance into the race as a "political earthquake." Columnist Steve Lopez wrote that Raman is "to the left of Karen Bass and to the left of the traditional left in the city" and that her candidacy raised the question of whether the city was ready to move further in the direction of New York City, which had elected the progressive Eric Adams as mayor in November 2025. Polling on Raman varies widely. The UCLA Luskin poll conducted in March 2026 showed Karen Bass leading at 25%, Spencer Pratt at 11%, and Raman at 9%, with 40% of voters undecided. The Loyola Marymount University poll conducted at roughly the same time put Raman on top at 32.5% and Bass at 17%. The discrepancy reflects how the candidates were described to voters and how the question was framed. The prediction market Polymarket priced Raman at roughly a 55% implied probability of winning the race in May 2026, with Bass at around 28%. And then, headed towards the middle of May when I'm recording this, Bass actually started beating Raman on Polymarket.
Raman's platform includes a massive expansion of rent control, opposition to market-rate development that does not include affordability set-asides, free market transit, climate resilience spending, and what she describes as "care-first public safety," which means redirecting resources away from policing and toward social services and unarmed response. She has voted for every tenant protection package that has come before the city council and has criticized the Karen Bass approach to homelessness as insufficiently aggressive.
The conservative challenger is Spencer Pratt, who is a registered Republican and is best known for the MTV reality show The Hills, which ran from 2006 to 2010. Pratt and his wife lost their Pacific Palisades home in the January 2025 fire. Pratt launched his mayoral campaign at the one-year anniversary rally for the fire victims. As of the latest fundraising reports at the time of filming this, Pratt has raised approximately $540,000 between January and April of 2026, slightly ahead of Raman's $530,000 and ahead of Karen Bass's roughly $495,000 in the same period. He polls around 11%, occasionally cracking third place. Pratt's platform centers on wildfire accountability, public safety, and what he calls "exposing every dark corner of LA politics." The reality TV background means the political establishment does not take him seriously, but his ability to drive attention online has made him a more effective candidate than expected. A Pratt campaign ad released in April 2026 racked up more than 6 million views on social media in 48 hours, which is more reach than the Bass campaign has generated in the entire first quarter of 2026.
The other 11 candidates on the ballot range from a Democratic socialist housing organizer who has been compared by political analysts to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to a Brentwood tech entrepreneur named Adam Miller running as a moderate manager. But none of them are pulling above the margin of error. The structural reality of the race is that the two DSA-aligned candidates, Raman and Huang, are collectively pulling somewhere between 25 and 50% of voter support against an incumbent who is unpopular and a Republican who cannot reach a majority in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by approximately 6 to 1. In a low-turnout June primary where roughly 25% of registered voters typically participate, the most organized and motivated activists determine the outcome. The DSA in Los Angeles has roughly 5,000 dues-paying members, a battle-tested organizing model, and a clear vision for what they want. The mayoral race remains too volatile to call as of the recording of this episode. But the trajectory is pretty unambiguous. Even if Karen Bass survives, the political center of gravity in Los Angeles has shifted permanently to the left of where it sat 5 years ago. And the policy agenda that follows that shift will continue to expand rent control, expand social spending, and continue the regulatory environment that has produced the housing shortage and corporate flight in the first place.
The City Council that governs Los Angeles alongside whichever mayor wins in 2026 has its own track record. And that track record is a part of the reason Angelinos are losing faith in their government. In October 2022, the Los Angeles Times published the contents of a leaked recording from a closed-door meeting that had taken place in October 2001 at the headquarters of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. The participants were City Council President Nury Martinez, Councilmember Kevin de León, Councilmember Gil Cedillo, and head of the County Federation of Labor Ron Herrera. They were discussing redistricting strategy. On the recording, Nury Martinez referred to the adopted Black two-year-old son of fellow Councilmember Mike Bonin as "parece un changuito," which translates from Spanish as "looks like a little monkey." She said of District Attorney George Gascón, and these are her words, "That guy, he's with the Blacks." She mocked Haitian immigrants and discussed how to gerrymander the district lines to politically harm Nithya Raman, the same Nithya Raman who is now running for mayor. Within 72 hours, Martinez and Herrera had both resigned and Cedillo had been stripped of his committee assignments. Kevin De León refused to resign and was eventually defeated for reelection in 2024. The recording broke between Black and Latino voters in the Democratic coalition that had governed Los Angeles for decades.
In January 2024, former Councilmember José Huizar, who represented the downtown 14th district, was sentenced to 13 years in federal prison after being convicted in a massive corruption case involving bribes from Chinese real estate developers in exchange for favorable zoning votes on downtown high-rises. The case included testimony about cash, casino chips, prostitutes, and structured payments routed through shell companies. It was the largest pay-to-play conviction in modern LA political history. In March 2023, former Councilmember and County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas was convicted of federal bribery charges related to a kickback scheme involving the dean of a USC graduate school. He was sentenced to 3 years and 6 months in federal prison.
In November 2024, Los Angeles County voters threw out their progressive District Attorney, George Gascón, who had been elected in 2020 on a platform of declining to prosecute most low-level crimes, abolishing cash bail filings, banning enhancement charges, and refusing to try juveniles as adults. Gascón lost to Nathan Hochman, who ran as a hard-middle independent and was previously a Republican, by a margin of 61.5% to 28.5%. That was the largest margin in a contested Los Angeles County District Attorney race in modern history. In the same November 2024 election, California voters statewide passed Proposition 47, which rolled back portions of the 2014 Proposition 47 by a margin of 68.4% to 31.6%. Proposition 47 made repeat petty theft chargeable as a felony when the defendant had three or more prior theft convictions and restored the option to charge repeat drug offenses as treatment-mandated felonies. The campaign was funded by Walmart, Home Depot, Target, In-N-Out Burger, and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. Governor Newsom opposed the measure but did not fund opposition advertising. By March 2026, nearly 40,000 charges had been filed under Proposition 47, and the California county jail population had risen by 2,600 in the law's first year.
The voters of California, including the voters of Los Angeles County, made these choices. They voted to keep Karen Bass in office in 2022, then voted out Gascón in 2024, then voted for tougher criminal penalties under Proposition 47, then defeated rent control expansion under Proposition 10. The electorate is not ideologically monolithic. It is reacting to lived experience, and the lived experience is that conditions are getting worse on the ground. The street-level data supports the reaction. The Beverly Hills jewelry store smash-and-grab that took place in March 2022 saw three men from Long Beach use sledgehammers and crowbars to steal $2.67 million in jewelry from a Cartier store in broad daylight. The ringleader, Liddell Tharp, was sentenced in March 2025 to seven years in federal prison. The Nordstrom at Topanga Mall was hit by a flash mob of 30 to 50 people in August 2023 who stole more than $300,000 in goods. Fellow home-robbery crews identified by LAPD's Robbery-Homicide Special Operations Division conducted more than 200 incidents between 2021 and 2022 in Beverly Hills and the Westside, frequently targeting Asian shoppers and high-end watch wearers leaving restaurants. LAPD Priority 1 response times rose from 5.9 minutes in 2019 to 6.7 minutes in 2024. In October 2025, the LAPD stopped publicly releasing raw crime data, breaking a two-decade precedent. The department cited concerns about data accuracy. Verdicts, including the LA Times, suggested the department was responding to political pressure to suppress unflattering numbers in the run-up to the mayoral race. Homicides in Los Angeles in 2025 fell to the lowest level in nearly 60 years, which is a real achievement that Karen Bass has cited heavily in her re-election campaign. Property crime patterns are mixed, with some categories down and others up depending on the year and the data source. The picture is not uniformly negative. The picture in the wealthy enclaves of Beverly Hills, Brentwood, and Bel Air, which is where the people writing the largest checks live, is one of declining personal security, rising private security spending, and a sense that the public safety contract has broken down.
And then the water crisis is layered on top of all of it. And that crisis has the potential to cancel out every other improvement the city might otherwise make. The metro exists because of water that it took from somewhere else. William Mulholland directed the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, completed in 1913, which drained the Owens Valley to feed the growing city. The story was dramatized in the movie Chinatown, but the real story was even more brutal than the fiction. The city secretly bought up land and water rights in the Owens Valley while the Reclamation Service was preparing a federal irrigation project for the same area. The federal project was killed, the aqueduct was built, and the Owens Valley dried up. Owens Lake, which had been a navigable body of water, became one of the largest single sources of dust pollution in the United States.
The aqueduct was followed by Colorado River allocations under the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which divided the river's water among seven western states. California received 4.4 million acre-feet per year out of the lower basin allocation. The State Water Project, completed in stages between 1968 and 1973, brought water from Northern California through the Central Valley. All three sources are now under stress. Simultaneously, the Colorado River has been overallocated since the original compact was negotiated, and the gap between paper allocations and actual water has been closed by drawing down Lake Mead and Lake Powell. Lake Mead reached a level of about 1,054 feet in January 2026 against a dead pool elevation of 895 feet, at which the water cannot pass through Hoover Dam at all. Lake Powell sat at about 3,553 feet. Both reservoirs have rebounded somewhat from their 2022 lows but remain structurally stressed. In 2026, the lower basin states, including California, are negotiating new allocation rules that are expected to reduce California's Colorado River share by approximately 13%. That cut will affect agriculture in the Imperial Valley most directly, but will also reduce the water available to Southern California cities.
The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which feeds the State Water Project, varies enormously year-to-year. The 2023 water year saw 237% of average snowpack. The 2024 water year saw 110%. The 2025 water year saw about 96%. Long-term, the snowpack-to-precipitation ratio is declining as more precipitation falls as rain rather than snow. Then there's local groundwater in the Central Valley, which California also depends on, but has been overdrafted to the point that land subsidence has reached 28 feet in some places. The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014 requires sustainable balance by 2040, which means severe pumping cuts are coming.
But there is the Huntington Beach Desalination Plant, a $1.4 billion project proposed by Poseidon Water, but it was rejected by the California Coastal Commission on May 12th, 2022, by a vote of 11 to zero after 22 years of permitting. The Carlsbad Desalination Plant, which is the only major desalination facility currently operating in Southern California, produces about 50 million gallons per day at a cost exceeding $2,000 per acre-foot, making it the most expensive water in San Diego County's portfolio. The city's response is to invest in water recycling. Mayor Bass announced a goal of becoming 70% locally water-reliant by 2035. A $1 billion expansion of the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in the San Fernando Valley will produce 45 million gallons per day of purified recycled water by 2028. The total cost of meeting water quality standards in Los Angeles County over the next 20 years is estimated at $20 billion, and the city does not have a clear funding pathway to meet that cost. The Palisades fire revealed the operational fragility of the city water system. That failure was not a one-off problem. It was a glimpse of a system running near maximum capacity under normal conditions with no margin for the kind of multi-front catastrophic event that many say will be more frequent.
So to fund these desalination projects, California needs more money. But more money is leaving the city. But honestly, the best thing that LA could do right now is sign up for a Chime checking account using my link below. Because if they did, and if you did, you would get literally $200 for free right now. Why would they do that? Because they want you to use their platform. And with a nation-leading high-yield savings rate, there's really no reason not to. I get free money, you get free money, they get you on their platform, which is a pretty damn good platform. chime.com/caleb or link in the description below. Get $200 for free right now. Don't be stupid like LA, cuz you know Mayor Bass would say no to a free $200.
The Pacific Palisades fire is now the central political and economic event of Los Angeles in this decade, and the rebuilding effort is the test that the city is currently failing. By April 2026, 15 months after the fire, the official scoreboard reads as follows: Total structures destroyed across the Palisades and Altadena fires plus the smaller Hillside fire was approximately 16,000 to 18,000. Total acres burned was about 50,000 to 57,000. Total insured losses are estimated at $40 to $50 billion. Total economic losses are estimated as $76 to $131 billion by Lazard and Bratonica calculation. Permits issued for residential rebuilding across the Palisades and Altadena combined: approximately 2,600. Permits under review: approximately 3,340. So roughly 6,000 of the 13,000 lost homes have at least entered the permitting pipeline. The first certificate of occupancy was issued in December 2025. NBC News in a January 2026 reporting analysis found that fewer than a dozen homes had been completed across both fire zones. Most of the completed homes are in Altadena rather than the Palisades.
Compare that to other recent major wildfires. The 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, California, saw about 3% of homes rebuilt within one year and roughly 30 to 40% rebuilt by 2024, 6 years later. The 2023 Kaanapali fire on Maui saw roughly 2% rebuilt within one year. The 2021 Marshall Fire in Boulder County, Colorado, saw approximately 30% rebuilt within one year, far ahead of the California pace. Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom both declared in early 2025 that the Palisades rebuild would be the fastest in California history. They have cited permit issuance data showing that the city was issuing permits roughly three times faster than the historical California baseline for major fire recovery. The permit pace claim is technically accurate, but permits issued is not the same as homes rebuilt. The Urban Institute and other independent reviewers have noted that issuing a permit is the easy step. The hard step is converting that permit into a finished home. And that step depends on factors that the mayor and the governor cannot directly control.
The biggest factor is insurance. The California insurance market was in crisis before the Palisades fire. State Farm, the largest home insurer in California, had stopped writing new homeowners policies in May 2023. Allstate had stopped writing new policies in 2022. Tokio Marine pulled out in 2024. Chubb scaled back in 2021. State Farm specifically dropped about 1,600 Pacific Palisades policies in July 2024, 6 months before the fire. More than 100,000 Californians have lost their homeowners insurance since 2019 as the major carriers have retrenched. The California FAIR Plan, which is the state's insurer of last resort, saw its total exposure rise from approximately $153 billion in 2020 to $458 billion in 2024. In Pacific Palisades specifically, FAIR Plan policies rose from about 330 in 2020 to roughly 1,400 in 2024, meaning one in seven of the area's 9,000 homes was covered by the insurer of last resort when the fire hit. After the fire, FAIR Plan exposure in the affected zip codes alone reached $23 billion. The FAIR Plan levied its first-ever $1 billion assessment on private insurers, with $500 million of that cost passed through to private policyholders across California in the form of higher premiums.
In May 2026, California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara announced that an investigation had identified 400 violations of insurance law in a sample of 220 State Farm fire claims, exposing the company to a maximum penalty of $4.3 million and a possible one-year suspension from writing new policies in California. State Farm's response was that the violations were primarily administrative and procedural errors and that the action was a "reckless and politically motivated attack." State Farm had paid out $5.7 billion on more than 13,700 fire claims by that point.
Construction costs in the Palisades are running $800 or more per square foot. In Altadena, costs are running about $570 per square foot. Most homeowners policies do not cover the full cost of code-compliant rebuilding, which can require fire-resistant materials, additional setbacks, and sprinkler systems that did not exist on the original homes. Many residents are uninsured by hundreds of thousands of dollars per house, and the insurance settlements that should be paying for the rebuild are arriving slowly, in pieces, sometimes after litigation. 53% of Palisades fire victims, according to a survey published in early 2026, had taken no action to rebuild as of one year after the fire. The most common reason given was
financial. The capital required to actually start construction simply was not there. So, the Palisades in 2026 is not seeing a rebuild. The neighborhood is seeing a slow motion sale of fire zone lots to investors, builders, and wealthy buyers who can self- finance construction without insurance proceeds. Fire Zone lots that were valued at $3 to $5 million before the fire are selling for $700,000 to $1.2 million after the fire. The original homeowners are taking the cash and leaving. The neighborhood that emerges over the next decade will be smaller, less middle class, and entirely different in character from what burned down.
Steve Soberof, a Los Angeles real estate developer, was named Chief Recovery Officer by Karen Bass on January 17th, 2025. His original salary, which was $500,000, paid by philanthropy rather than the city, became a political controversy and was reduced after public backlash. Southern California Edison, the utility whose downed power lines are alleged to have started the eaten fire, is facing more than 50 lawsuits. A Florida man named Jonathan was charged on October 8th, 2025 with three counts of arson with prosecutors alleging he set the small Lockman fire on January 1st that flared into the much larger Palisades fire on January 7th.
In February 2026, the Los Angeles Times published the result of a monthslong investigation into the official Palisades fire afteraction report. The Times reviewed seven separate drafts of the report and reported that Mayor Karen Bass had personally directed interimm fire chief Ronnie Velinova to soften or remove sections that documented fire department failures. The original draft blamed LAFD for not pre-eploying engines before the extreme winds and for failing to fully extinguish the Lochman fire on January 1st, the same fire that reignited on January 7th as the Palisades fire. Sources told the Times that Bass was concerned the original findings would expose the city to litigation. Bass denied the report and called it irresponsible. But the story prompted Rick Caruso, the developer who lost to Bass in the 2022 mayoral race, to publicly reconsider his decision not to run for mayor again in 2026 before ultimately staying out. Pulling on Bass declined further in the weeks after the story broke.
Whatever the criminal and civil resolution of these cases look like, the underlying point is the same. The most destructive urban wildfire in California history happened to a city that had cut its fire department budget, had an empty reservoir, and had a mayor who flew to Africa, had broken hydrants, that the fire department had not communicated about, and had an insurance market that was already exiting the state. None of these conditions have been fixed. Next major fire will arrive in roughly the same operational reality.
The 2028 Olympic Games are arriving in Los Angeles in two years, and the Olympics will either be the city's last best chance to force a comeback or the moment that confirms the decline. The LA28 organizing committee has projected a budget of $7.149 billionally privately funded with no new permanent venues required. The committee has secured $5.1 billion in total commitments from sponsors, including $2 billion in domestic sponsorships announced by the end of 2025. The model is based on the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, which generated more than $200 million in profit under the leadership of Peter Olroth by reusing existing venues, securing record sponsorship deals, and limiting public spending. The 1984 Olympics had 21 sports and 6,829 athletes. The 2028 Olympics will have 36 sports and 15,000 athletes. The scale is twice as large and the cost control assumptions that worked in 1984 may not survive contact with reality.
The Southern California Association of Governments has projected that the 2028 games will produce 13.6 to 17.6 billion in regional economic impact with Los Angeles County alone seeing $ 8.68 billion in 2028. After the games, the same study projects a half billion dollar economic drop in 2029 from the post Olympic letdown effect that has been documented in every recent host city. The fiscal backs stop arrangement is where the risk lives, though. If the LA28 budget runs over its $7.149 billion target, the next $270 million in losses are absorbed by the city of Los Angeles. The next $270 million after that is absorbed by the state of California. The next $270 million after that goes back to the city. After those three layers, the International Olympic Committee covers additional costs, but the structure means that Los Angeles taxpayers are on the hook for the first major overrun. Recent Olympic history suggests overruns happen. Sydney 2000 finished 90% over budget. Athens 2004 contributed materially to Greek financial collapse. Tokyo 2020 doubled to over $20 billion and Paris 2024 cost approximately $9 billion. The LA28 model is built on the bet that 1984 was the rule and the others were exceptions. Independent risk analysis from groups like Strategic Actions for a Just Economy projects true total costs closer to 12 billion when ancillary security, transit acceleration, sanitation, and city staff overtime are included.
The federal government has pledged 1 to4 billion depending on the source and the actual federal contribution will not be known until after the fact. The transit infrastructure investment is huge. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority is spending about $20 billion on 28 transit projects scheduled for completion before 2028. The Westside subway Purple Line Extension, originally budgeted at $2.8 billion in 2014, is now projected at $3.4 billion or more with significant overruns. And the original 2023 opening date has slipped to 2026. The $525 million Los Angeles River bicycle path and the $200 million convention center expansion are also scheduled for Olympic completion.
Metro ridership has recovered partially from the pandemic collapse. The system carried 311 million riders in 2024, up from the bottom, but still 16% below 2019 and 37% below the 1985 peak of 497 million annual riders. Fair evasion is estimated at 30 to 50% on some rail lines. Crime on the system has been a persistent problem with 21 deaths on metro buses and trains in early 2023 alone, mostly from fentanyl overdoses and 168 reported assaults on operators in 2023. The Olympics could force visible improvements. Public spaces will be cleaned, encampments will be moved, transit security will be reinforced, and touristfacing infrastructure will be polished to a global standard. But the structural problems will remain after the Olympic flame is extinguished. The budget deficit, the pension liabilities, the rent control regime, the sequel litigation environment, the high state income tax, the departed corporations, the collapsed film industry, the fire zone reconstruction, the water infrastructure gap, and the DSA aligned political coalition controlling the city council all continue exactly as they did before. None of these problems disappear because the Olympics happened. The Olympic experience may actually accelerate decline by demonstrating to the world on the global broadcast stage the contrast between what Los Angeles can produce when global cameras are watching and what Los Angeles is in normal operating conditions when the cameras are off.
The future projections are sobering. The California Department of Finance and its September 2025 long range projection expects Los Angeles County to lose 1.2 2 million people by 2070, dropping to 8.5 million residents. The Los Angeles Unified School District enrolled 392,654 students for the 20252026 school year, down from 49,18 the year before, a 4% drop in a single year. The district peaked at 746,831 students in 2002, which means LA USD has lost roughly 354,000 students from its peak, almost half its student body. Almost half the district's elementary schools have lost more than 50% of their peak enrollment. 56 elementary schools have lost more than 70%. While the student population has been collapsing, the district added 17,000 non-eing staff and granted teachers a 21% raise in 2023 just as federal pandemic relief funding was expiring. The district issued 3,200 layoff notices in February 2025 and is heading into structural deficit.
The University of Southern California Lusk Center for Real Estate projects the city of Los Angeles to be flat or modestly declining in population through 2040. The middle class, defined as households earning between $75,000 and $200,000 per year, is projected to shrink as a share of the city's population, with both ends of the income distribution growing relative to the middle. Teachers, nurses, firefighters, trades people, and entry-level professionals will increasingly commute from the Inland Empire or leave the region entirely. The most useful comparison isn't Detroit, which experienced a 66% population collapse from its 1950s peak. Detroit was a single industry city when its single industry collapsed. Los Angeles is more diversified than Detroit ever was with the world's largest port complex by volume with USC and UCLA and Caltech with biotech anchors at Amgen in Thousand Oaks and at Kite Pharma in Santa Monica with aerospace anchors at SpaceX in Hawthorne and at Boeing and Long Beach. So, the most accurate comparison is San Francisco, which lost roughly 7% of its population during the pandemic and has seen its tax base decline by approximately 20%. San Francisco still works as a city. People still live there, and the bay still glitters, but the trajectory is unmistakably negative. The political response is dominated by the same advocacy coalitions that produced the original problems, and the wealthy are increasingly retreating into private services that allow them to opt out of the public infrastructure they once relied on. Stratification rather than collapse defines the most likely future for Los Angeles.
A two-tiered city forms in the future. The very wealthy live in enclaved neighborhoods like Bair and Brentwood and Manhattan Beach with private security, private fire response, private schools, and private medical care. The working poor live in rent stabilized apartments in neighborhoods served by public infrastructure that is slowly degrading. The middle class has largely left for Phoenix and Las Vegas and Austin and Boise. The Olympic flame burns brightly in 2028 and then the cameras leave and the city goes back to managing its slow motion structural problems.
So recovery would require according to the consensus of economists who have studied the city several specific reforms. Recovery would require zoning reform that allows real density in transitrich corridors. It would require SQA reform that prevents weaponized environmental litigation against housing. It would require modification of Proposition 13 for commercial and multif family property to reduce the lock in effect on land turnover. It would require pension reform that does not violate the constitutional protections on acrudeed benefits, but that closes the spigot on future obligations. It would require investment of $20 billion or more in water infrastructure over the next two decades. It would require restoration of the Los Angeles Police Department to 9,500 officers and the Los Angeles Fire Department to staffing levels that match the actual fire risk. It would require rethinking the homelessness response from the ground up so that the peer unit cost of supportive housing comes down from $596,000 to something closer to $170,000 that Houston manages.
None of these reforms are politically likely under the current leadership structure, current voter coalition, or the current advocacy environment. The politicians who would propose them would lose their primary elections. The voters who would support them are leaving the city. The advocacy groups that have the most concentrated political power in low turnout municipal elections benefit from the status quo because the status quo is what keeps their fundraising pipelines flowing and their organizational influence intact. The trap that Los Angeles is in has a particular shape. The reforms that would help are politically impossible. The politics that are possible are the ones that produce the problem in the first place. The path of least political resistance is more declarations, more programs, more spending, more deficits, more departures, and more decline.
A final piece of context makes the current moment more dangerous than the past LA crisis. After the 1965 Watts riots, Los Angeles recovered because the federal government was pouring aerospace and defense money into the region. After the 1992 riots, Los Angeles recovered because the dotcom boom and the manufacturing of a more diversified economy. After the 1994 Northridge earthquake, Los Angeles recovered because of 11 billion in federal aid and the national construction boom. After the 2008 recession, Los Angeles recovered because of national monetary policy. the entertainment industry's continued dominance and demographic momentum. After the Palisades fire, the budget crisis, the population exodus, the corporate flight, and the political collapse, no comparable recovery driver is visible now. The technology sector is now centered in the Bay Area and Austin. Aerospace has moved to Florida and Texas. Entertainment is moving to Atlanta and London. The federal government is currently controlled by an administration that views California as a political opponent. There is no obvious source of the kind of external economic boost that has historically pulled Los Angeles out of its valleys.
Los Angeles has always come back before. It is the place of reinvention, the place where dreamers go when their hometown disappoints them. The city of golden hours and palm trees and second chances. The brand is so powerful that the city's actual condition can decline for years before the brand catches up to the reality. The brand is not the city. The brand is a story Los Angeles tells about itself. The actual city is a place where the population is shrinking. The budget is broken. The housing is impossible. The streets are patrolled by a department at 30-year staffing lows. The wildfire recovery is stalled. The dominant industry is leaving. The political coalition is moving further left. At the moment, it most needs reform. And the people who can afford to leave are leaving. The brand might carry the city for another decade. The Olympics might buy 3 years of cosmetic recovery. The future mayor might find the political courage to actually take on the structural problem. The federal government might change hands once again and reopen the funding spigot. Or the most beautiful, most ambitious, most globally famous American city of the 20th century may have already passed the point where the math can be reversed. The city may not just be having a bad decade. It may be becoming what every city eventually becomes when its political system loses the ability to make hard choices. a monument to what was a warning to what could have been. A place that the rest of the country looks at as an example of what happens when honesty about the trade-offs disappears from the political conversation.
The weather is still warm. The sun still sets behind the Pacific. The palm trees still line the boulevards and the studios are still there even if they are quieter. The Olympics are still coming, but the people, money, and the industry are leaving. And the politics, the politics that voters elected, the politics that the activist coalitions demanded, the politics that were supposed to fix everything are the politics that are accelerating the very decline they were supposed to reverse. Los Angeles will probably never recover. The city doesn't lack what recovery would require. It lacks the political will to do what recovery would actually demand.
A story like this does not end in Los Angeles alone. Every American city with high taxes, expensive housing, captured politics, and aging infrastructure is watching what happens in Los Angeles because the same trap is closing in on a lot of places. Los Angeles is just further down the road. So, the lights are still on and the freeways are still moving. The Pacific is still beautiful from the bluffs at Pacific Palisades where almost nothing has been rebuilt. Party's not over, but the bill is coming due. And the people who would have paid it already moved to Texas. I'll see you in the next one. I'll be candid. Front page loses money. The cost of research, audio editing, video editing, and everything else that goes into this project is substantial. I believe the neutral and factual perspective we bring to these topics are important in today's culture of endless misinformation for political or financial gain. If you support the journalism we do here, please consider clicking the join button or the channel membership link in the description or pinned comment below and join in with everyone else supporting this project. Every single supporter makes a difference and helps us continue front page. Click join or the link in the description or pinned comment below. Thank you.