Karen Bass just signed a budget — and whether she meant to or not, she put a homelessness theory into law. If you're just joining us, LA has gone from a celebrity-splintered primary to a Bass-versus-Raman runoff. With nearly all votes counted, Bass led with 34.3 percent, Councilmember Nithya Raman was at 29 percent, and Spencer Pratt sat at 25.5. Bass opened the general by going after Raman's encampment record — so homelessness policy is the first real fault line of November. I'm Adam, that's Sarah, this is LA Mayor 2026. Today: a signed FY26-27 budget we can finally read for receipts — and a Pratt post-mortem that asks what a quarter of the electorate was actually voting for. Let's start with the document, because for the first time, this race has one. The FY26-27 budget funds homelessness spending and police hiring — Bass's theory in actual dollars. Raman's still a challenger with no budget of her own. Right, this is the affirmative case she couldn't make on debate night. So let's actually open the ledger — is there a deed-restricted affordable line in here, or is affordability still something they talk about and never fund? And here's my test. Does the homelessness money go through LAHSA or around it? Because nobody's put forward a replacement governance model — but the routing of dollars is the restructuring answer, whether they say that out loud or not. The other thing I keep coming back to: the council cut that 500K outside-counsel check without blinking. If that same body passes a budget with no affordable-unit target, the 12-to-1 energy question gets a lot sharper. Then there's ED 1. Bass approved 33,000 units; only about 5,000 have pulled building permits. If this budget doesn't touch the financing wall between approved and permitted, that gap is now baked into a document she owns. And one silence is louder now — SB 79 lands soon, the transit-upzoning mandate, and neither candidate will say where they stand. A mayor who funds police and homelessness but won't touch upzoning is making a values statement either way. City of Los Angeles writes:
Mayor Karen Bass today signed the City budget for Fiscal Year 2026-2027 focused on continuing her work reversing longstanding trends by reducing homelessness, building more housing, hiring more officers, and investing in basic city services.
Okay, the runoff finally has a document in it. Bass signed the FY26-27 budget today, with reducing homelessness, hiring more police, and basic city services at the center of it. So this is the governing blueprint now. Raman's still a challenger with a wish list; Bass just turned her pitch into a signed budget. Right, and that's the part I want to read line by line. Homelessness spending and police hiring make the headline — but I want to know if there's a deed-restricted affordable housing target anywhere in those pages, with a number attached. That's the tell I'm watching too. "Building more housing" is in the press release, sure. But does the money chase production, or does it chase enforcement and call it homelessness? And look at who's standing behind her at the signing — Harris-Dawson, Yaroslavsky, McOsker, Hernandez. That's the Budget and Finance crew co-signing the same framing. Hernandez and McOsker in the same photo tells you the council made its peace with this. Sam Quinones, writing in Sam Quinones:
But Angelenos may miss him because, I thought, he did one crucial thing well: He changed the conversation surrounding the complex tangle of homelessness, addiction, mental illness, methamphetamine and fentanyl. He aired it out. Spoke frankly in describing reality that most Angelenos knew to be true.
Quinones says Pratt's campaign failed for a lot of reasons, but it forced addiction, mental illness, meth and fentanyl into the homelessness conversation — and says he 'described a reality most Angelenos knew was true.' And that's a policy question now, not a horse-race question. The budget Bass just signed is the test: does the homelessness spend reflect that shift, or does it still run through the old language? Right, but the frame he popularized starts with behavioral causes. Quinones even flags the line he says got 'stifled' — that the root is a lack of affordable housing. The data keeps backing that up, and Pratt's pitch mostly stepped around it. So after the budget signing we just covered, here's what I'm looking for: did Bass put dollars behind production, or behind the enforcement-flavored version of this conversation to court a quarter of the electorate she now needs? I'd push back on the binary, though. You can name addiction and meth as real without pretending housing isn't the floor under all of it. Quinones is right that LA talked about this exactly one way for years. Sure. I just want to see it in a line item, not a postmortem. If LA Mayor 2026 helps you stay ahead of the race, take a moment to subscribe and leave a review wherever you're listening. It really helps other people find the show.
What we're watching next: Bass and Raman now head toward the citywide general election in November.
We've put links to every story we covered today in the show notes, so if something caught your ear, you can read through the source material there.
That's LA Mayor 2026 for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.