The New Yorker:

If all Bass does as mayor of Los Angeles is smooth out the absurdly parochial and bureaucratic nature of city politics, she will have achieved a major victory.

By Jay Caspian Kang

On her first day in office, Karen Bass, the newly elected mayor of Los Angeles, declared a state of emergency over the city’s homelessness crisis. The move was accompanied by a touch of political theatre—Bass, who was sworn in by Vice-President Kamala Harris, chose to begin her term at the city’s Emergency Operations Center rather than at City Hall. “My mandate is to move Los Angeles in a new direction with an urgent and strategic approach to solving one of our city’s toughest challenges and creating a brighter future for every Angeleno,” Bass said.

The focus on homelessness should not have come as a surprise. Bass’s closely contested runoff election against the billionaire real-estate developer Rick Caruso was always a referendum on how to deal with the thousands of people who now live in tent encampments, R.V.s, and the city’s overburdened shelter system. Caruso, who promised to “end street homelessness” and wanted to expand the number of police officers on patrol, ran as a maverick and political outsider who would end the do-nothing way of doing things in Los Angeles. His actual policies were hard to pin down—at some point, he suggested that giant tent cities for the homeless could be modelled after migrant holding areas in Texas—but his appeal, outside of the massive amount of money he put in a never-ending advertising blitz, was borne out of the frustration that many of his fellow-Angelenos felt with homelessness and crime. Something had to change, and Caruso’s argument was that Bass, a veteran of Los Angeles politics, would just mean business as usual.

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