A 500,000-square-foot cold storage warehouse on the 1400 block of South Los Palos Street in Boyle Heights caught fire on June 17, burned for over a week, and wasn't knocked down until June 24. The fire started while contractors for Altus Power were conducting testing on a rooftop solar array at a facility owned by Lineage, a cold-storage company. Schools had to relocate students. Residents breathed toxic smoke for days.
Karen Bass saw all of that and thought: this is a racism problem.
The Los Angeles mayor took to X on June 27 to deliver what might be the most tone-deaf statement of her already legendary tenure. "People who are familiar with Boyle Heights know this fire did not happen in a vacuum," Bass wrote. She went on to claim that "environmental hazards have too often fallen on communities like this one" and called the warehouse fire a "turning point" in the fight against systemic failures in the neighborhood.
Environmental racism. That's the diagnosis from the mayor of a city that watched 6,000 homes burn to the ground in the Palisades fire earlier this year. The same mayor who was at Barack Obama's presidential library event in Chicago when fires started consuming her city. The same mayor who is currently being sued for "reckless negligence" by her own brother, who teamed up with Spencer Pratt to file the lawsuit.
Ah, Spencer Pratt. The former star of The Hills who lost his home in the Palisades fire and has since become the most effective critic of city government in Los Angeles. Pratt, who ran against Bass in the mayoral primary, quote-tweeted her environmental racism sermon and reduced it to rubble.
"Toxic soil, 6,000 homes destroyed, 12 people burned alive, 400+ excess deaths from toxic smoke exposure…but that was in the Palisades, so who cares about us, right?" Pratt wrote. He pointed out that Bass only discovered urgency when a building connected to her donor network went up in flames. Then he landed the kill shot, calling her "a soulless goblin."
Now, the mayor's office would like you to focus on the environmental justice angle. The argument goes that communities like Boyle Heights have historically borne a disproportionate burden of industrial hazards, and the warehouse fire proves it. That framing works great — right up until you remember that the Palisades fire killed 12 people and Bass's response was to leave town. The Los Angeles Fire Department has been gutted under her watch. A former LAFD chief filed a blistering defamation lawsuit against Bass on June 23, alleging the mayor "lied through her teeth" about the department's preparedness.
The South Coast Air Quality Management District and the EPA both had to get involved in the Boyle Heights warehouse aftermath. Governor Gavin Newsom joined Bass in declaring a state of emergency. The Los Angeles Unified School District pulled kids out of nearby schools on June 22. These are the facts of what happened when a warehouse burned for a week in a residential neighborhood.
But Bass doesn't want to talk about permitting failures, or why a massive cold-storage facility was apparently undergoing unpermitted construction, according to CBS News reporting. She doesn't want to discuss why the LAFD took seven days to knock down a single structure fire. She wants to talk about environmental racism — a concept broad enough to blame and vague enough to fix nothing.
Spencer Pratt, a reality TV personality with no political experience beyond losing a mayoral primary, just delivered a more coherent critique of city governance than every member of the Los Angeles City Council combined. He used specific numbers. He cited actual deaths. He named the double standard.
When a guy from The Hills is running your city's accountability department, the job posting for mayor is already up.