After the fires, the mandate for Karen Bass remains the same: House the people of Los Angeles

Any student of California history knows the story of the 1906 earthquake. San Francisco was torn apart by the quake itself, then ravaged by the fire that followed. California’s great city, a hub of the Gold Rush, was reduced to smoking rubble.

What happened next is lesser-known. In the wreckage, displaced residents were forced into makeshift shelters. Resilient rats scampered through the city’s detritus. Earthquake and fire preceded the plague, which swept the city beginning in May 1907, reviving an epidemic that had struck San Francisco before the tremors, but had seemed under control.

The plague was one of history’s most notorious killers, and its presence in San Francisco was not only lethal to those who contracted it but also threatened those responsible for the city’s recovery and well-being. City leaders tried to downplay the dangers, suggesting that it was confined to Chinatown and hinting that white people didn’t need to fear it. Dozens of people died while civic leaders tussled over the size and scope of the problem and the merits of drawing attention to it.

Los Angeles today faces a challenge comparable to that of San Francisco 119 years ago. The fires have done their damage. Now comes the test of leadership. It will separate those seeking to make hay from the tragedy from those dedicated to the region’s welfare. And it will be judged by whether Los Angeles can rise to the most formidable housing struggle in its history.

Even before the fires, Los Angeles was hundreds of thousands of units short of what was needed to house its population. The Palisades fire, which struck within city boundaries, destroyed another 6,800 buildings — most of them homes.

The early evaluations of the civic response have been mixed at best. Mayor Karen Bass took heat for being out of the country when the fires erupted, and then took more heat for her unsteady public comments after she returned. She aggravated local officials last week when she first prepared to open Pacific Palisades and then announced that she had worked out a deal with Gov. Gavin Newsom to keep the National Guard in place.

Malibu Mayor Doug Stewart was among those annoyed by the back-and-forth. 

“These last-minute, uncoordinated decisions create unnecessary confusion and disruption,” he said in a statement.

The issue was resolved quickly, but it foreshadows the difficulties that lie ahead in what will be a long recovery. Clear messaging is important in crises, and the signals from Bass have not always met the moment.

And yet, Bass also has summoned city resources, led scores of meetings and streamlined the work of city departments. At a community meeting last week just outside the fire zone, she was warmly welcomed by leaders and residents. Many worked their way to the front of the room to receive a hug, and several thanked her for her compassionate management of the recovery so far. 

With the fires now contained, she may have the liberty to speak more forcefully on the recovery and its surrounding politics.

Beyond Bass, the city’s always-frail civic leadership has been predictably shaky. Rick Caruso, the developer who lost the mayoral race in 2022, continued to act as if this tragedy were a route back to politics, this week announcing the creation of a nonprofit to help with recovery and releasing a list of board members that draws heavily from his political base.

That’s commendable at one level — clear thinking is helpful, and more minds are better than fewer — but it’s hard to imagine Bass and city leadership being especially receptive to Caruso’s input. His effort seems at least as much an attention-seeking vehicle as an effort to help.

Meanwhile, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, publicly called for the creation of a “leadership council,” which he announced in his Sunday newspaper, with its rapidly declining readership. But Soon-Shiong, who demanded Bass’ resignation while the fires were still being fought, seems even less likely than Caruso to win much attention or support from City Hall, where he is regarded as a civic wannabe rather than as a serious contributor to civic life.

Housing remains the mission

What lies ahead is a multifaceted challenge that will push the city to new extremes even as the Bass administration grapples with the crisis it was elected to confront: homelessness. Now, the housing challenge is not just to find shelter and housing for the city’s 45,000 or so homeless people but for the tens of thousands of people who lost homes in the firestorm — and the untold many others who were already at the brink and now face the prospect of soaring rental costs. 

Bass has made it clear that she intends to tackle both. At last week’s meeting, she expressed her continued commitment to housing the city’s homeless, a pledge she reinforced when we spoke on Tuesday. 

“While we work to recover and rebuild the Palisades, we also have a number of serious issues in the city,” she said. Chief among those: Public safety and “getting people housed.” Since mid-January, even as the fires have consumed the attention of city and the world, the mayor’s Inside Safe program has conducted four operations, bringing shelter to 55 people who had been sleeping outside.

In one sense, Bass’ mission is merely an expansion of her original mandate. But the task of rebuilding housing in the Palisades is obviously different than that of bringing in people who have been living without shelter. Most Palisades residents will not be homeless in the traditional sense — losing belongings and memories is a brutal experience under any circumstances, but qualitatively different from sleeping under a tarp. 

Still, the mission in the Palisades is housing, too. 

As Bass becomes the region’s chief advocate for housing construction, she can rely on support from Sacramento but perhaps not of President Donald Trump, for whom this crisis has been another opportunity to mug and preen while spouting nonsense about fighting fires by diverting rainwater from Northern California to Central Valley farmland. Trump is at best a distraction, but more often he is a willful obstacle to recovery by a state that consistently rejects his politics. Bass’ mission there will be to appeal to the federal government for help without directly antagonizing a lying narcissist.

Read More: Trump doesn’t understand California’s complex water network. But that’s not the point

In one sense, the urgency around the fires may prove useful. Using some of the emergency authority she has exercised to rebuild the Palisades, Bass also could use city property to erect modular housing units to supply unhoused people with places to begin rebuilding their lives. The two crises — rebuilding the Palisades and housing the homeless — may help each other.

All of this will be expensive, but Bass has resources at her disposal. For the city’s unhoused population, she has the money being generated by voters’ recent approval of a countywide homeless service tax that is raising $1 billion a year. LA is in line to receive the bulk of the money, helping fund new construction as well as services for addiction and the other ancillary crises of homelessness.

For the Palisades, Bass has the attention of the world, for better and for worse. The Grammys last weekend and FireAid concerts highlighted the potential of the entertainment industry to focus attention and money on fire recovery. Beyond that, she has the attention of the state government and plenty of input from residents and civic leaders. 

All of that will pull her in different directions, a reminder that a mayor’s time may be her most precious resource. In the end, she will be judged by one metric: Did she house the people of Los Angeles?