Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was confronted with an uncomfortable question and appeared to laugh when asked why her campaign promise to end street homelessness by 2026 failed. When Bass ran for mayor in 2022, she campaigned to end street homelessness, telling CNN anchor Jake Tapper the following year that it was one of the most important goals for her administration.
Now that Bass has hit the campaign trail once again, she has been forced to reckon with falling short of that goal, a failure that her opponents have capitalized on. CNN's Elex Michaelson asked Bass about that failure during a sit-down interview that aired on Tuesday.
'So when you talked to Jake Tapper in 2023, you said that your goal was to end street homelessness in LA by 2026. It's now 2026,' Michaelson said. 'And we haven't ended it,' Bass interrupted while she appeared to laugh uncomfortably.
Michaelson acknowledged that street homelessness was still a harsh reality for Angelenos and confronted the mayor with a tough question: 'How are you so off?' Bass explained that she had made that promise at the beginning of her term and remained committed to the goal.
'I didn't anticipate some of the bureaucratic barriers that I would experience, but I am prepared to take those on now,' Bass said. The mayor cited her decision to fast-track 42,000 affordable housing units as evidence of her commitment to ending street homelessness.
Bass added that street homelessness has decreased for the first time during her term, impacting the quality of life for everyone in the city. However, Michaelson pointed out that even though street homelessness has declined under Mayor Bass, the decrease has been only 17 percent, rather than the 100 percent she initially vowed.
When asked why Angelenos should trust her after initially failing to achieve her goal, Bass responded: 'Because let me just tell you for the first time - we've had a decrease at all. There was not a decrease before at all because there was no commitment to get rid of street encampments, and we had encampments all over the city. So I would ask for people's trust in the sense that we have absolutely made progress. We know what we need to do now to end street homelessness.'
The exchange was part of a wide-ranging interview at the St Vincent Behavioral Health Campus, a location Bass chose for the sit-down. The campus is intended to assist those struggling with mental health challenges, substance abuse, and chronic housing insecurity. The facility opens this year and provides 800 beds to people in need. Bass has touted the project as a success of her administration and another step toward achieving her goal of ending street homelessness.
However, her critics and opponents have accused her of failing to solve the crisis. During a mayoral debate earlier this month, Bass's opponents, Spencer Pratt and Councilmember Nithya Raman, criticized the massive funding for her Inside Safe program. Raman argued that Inside Safe was neither 'fiscally sustainable' nor a permanent fix, while Pratt took a hardline approach to getting people off the streets by increasing law enforcement.
Homelessness is at the crux of the Los Angeles mayoral election. It is one of the defining issues for Angelenos, with over 67,000 people in the city displaced at the end of last year, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Authority. The Daily Mail has reached out to the mayor's campaign team for comment.
