Spencer Pratt Is the Factory-Reset Option for Los Angeles

Spencer Pratt, the former reality-TV star and aspiring mayor of Los Angeles, recently spoke with me for a podcast. We met in front of the Airstream trailer that now sits where his house did before it burned down in the Palisades Fire in January of last year. He was excited to share his ideas, if not always able to complete his thoughts, about what he’ll do when he’s in charge. For starters, he’ll clear the drug-ravaged homeless encampments of downtown, bring in developers from all over the world, and use 3-D-printing technology to build “an entire art deco, vibed-out affordable housing.” On the issue of bike lanes, a pet cause of the YIMBY voters who are backing one of his main opponents, Pratt says he’ll do them one better.“I'm going to have bike tubes through the sky!” he says. “You know, like it’s endless possibilities when you enforce a law and you get rid of the zombies.”Zombies is Pratt’s term for the tens of thousands of people who live in depraved conditions on L.A.’s streets, many of them addicted to drugs that leave them profoundly incapacitated and sometimes violent. It’s not a nice word to call someone who’s fallen into a bottomless abyss of hallucinations and thrashing self-destruction. But anyone living here knows exactly what he means.For anyone not living here, it’s nearly impossible to comprehend what has become of the place. It’s not just that, in January of 2025, wildfires destroyed more than 16,000 structures and engulfed nearly 40,000 acres across the county. Apocalyptic as the fires were, they are not the main story and never really were. The main story is one of a city seemingly annihilating itself. Potholes crater the roads. Street lights, stripped of copper wire by organized-theft crews, are out across the city.[Conor Friedersdorf: Spencer Pratt and the temptations of populism]Vector-borne diseases such as typhus are breaking out at record levels, the result, at least in part, of 45,000 people (a low estimate, and closer to 75,000 if you inc