Every major American city run by Democrats for decades seems to follow the same downward spiral. The tents multiply. The drug paraphernalia accumulates. Billions in taxpayer money get shoveled into a rotating cast of agencies, nonprofits, and “initiatives” that produce glossy dashboards and precious little else. And when the situation inevitably gets worse, the mayor finds a microphone and blames somebody in Washington. It never gets old. (Actually, it does.)
Los Angeles has elevated this routine to an art form. A city that once embodied the American Dream now holds the grim distinction of being the most unaffordable major housing market in the entire country — just five percent of listed homes qualify as affordable. Residents navigate tent encampments on their way to work, pass boarded-up storefronts tagged with graffiti, and witness open drug use at noon on a Tuesday. But if you ask City Hall, the real villain sits in the Oval Office.
From the Daily Wire:
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is blaming President Donald Trump for a recent surge in homelessness that has left thousands more people living on the streets of the so-called City of Angels.
FOX11 reported that homelessness in America’s second-largest city is expected to rise by about 3.5% when the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority releases new data Friday.
Shocking, I know. Mayor Bass delivered her diagnosis with a straight face: “The Trump administration has driven up the cost of gas, groceries, and rent — pushing more families to the edge — and slashed critical safety net funding.” You could almost buy it — if L.A.’s homelessness catastrophe hadn’t been spiraling out of control for the better part of a decade under exclusively Democratic leadership at every level of government.
A crisis years in the making
Let’s talk about what Bass would rather you ignore: her own record. Her marquee initiative, Inside Safe, has torched more than $300 million to shuffle roughly 5,800 people into interim housing — mostly hotels and motels. That might sound like progress. It isn’t. Forty percent of those people wound up right back on the streets. Only one in four ever reached permanent housing. The per-person price tag for those who did? North of $200,000. That’s not governance. That’s malpractice.
Billionaire developer Rick Caruso, who ran against Bass in the 2022 mayoral race, offered a characteristically blunt take: “I doubt anyone living in LA is surprised.”
Hard to argue. The roughly 45,000 people now living on L.A.’s streets — representing an eight percent jump in unsheltered homelessness from last year — didn’t appear because of anything Donald Trump did in the last eighteen months. Bass herself let the mask slip when she conceded that “audits and the courts have now made plain what too many Angelenos already saw: the money wasn’t tracked, providers went unpaid, and public trust eroded.”
Read that again. The money wasn’t tracked. Under her administration. But sure — it’s Trump’s fault.
Follow the money
The audit revelations are damning on their own. The corruption lurking beneath them is something else entirely. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority has been gutted by investigations exposing massive gaps in oversight and accountability. And then there’s the L.A. Grand Hotel arrangement that went viral on X — a deal where the city paid $154 per night per room to a company called Shenzhen New World, regardless of whether anyone actually occupied them. The company’s owner, Chinese billionaire Wei Huang, was convicted by the DOJ for bribery. He’s now a fugitive believed to be living in China.
Your tax dollars at work, Los Angeles.
Spencer Pratt, the Palisades wildfire victim and former mayoral candidate, put it in terms even City Hall can understand: “The more homeless people, the more money Nithya Raman and Karen Bass can launder through their corrupt NGOs. You will NEVER fix this problem by electing people who profit off it.”
The real culprit
Zoom out and the picture gets worse. California claims six of the eight least affordable housing markets in the nation. Six. That’s not a federal policy failure. That’s the predictable result of decades of progressive overregulation, anti-development zoning, and a political class that treats poverty like a revenue stream.
Bass even threw fellow Democrat Gavin Newsom under the bus, blaming $70 million in state cuts for her troubles. When you’re simultaneously blaming the Republican president and your own Democratic governor, maybe — just maybe — the common denominator is the person standing behind the podium.
One L.A. resident summed it up better than any analyst could: “I don’t listen to the numbers. My eyes are better than numbers.”
The people of Los Angeles don’t need another $300 million program that parks people in motel rooms and calls it compassion. They don’t need another press conference full of finger-pointing and rehearsed deflections. Karen Bass has lied about her record, wasted staggering sums of public money, and presided over a system she herself admits is broken. That’s not a leader who deserves reelection. That’s a leader who deserves a recall. The streets of Los Angeles already cast their vote.
Key Takeaways
- L.A.’s unsheltered homelessness surged 8% despite $300 million in city spending under Mayor Bass.
- Bass deflects blame to Trump for a crisis that predates his administration by years.
- Audits reveal untracked funds and taxpayer dollars funneled to a DOJ-convicted company.
- Los Angeles needs a recall election — not another round of mayoral excuses.
Sources: Daily Wire, Yahoo News
