WTF Happened To Los Angeles - Graham Stephan Confronts Nithya Raman

Northwest Registered Agent: Level Up Your Business's Online Presence Today at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/ich Cash App: Download Cash App Today: https://click.cash.app/ui6m/lpr7iap4 #cashapppod Faire: Sign up today and get 50% off your first wholesale order (up to $100) at https://faire.com/icedcoffee Shopify: If you’re ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to https://shopify.com/ich to start your FREE trial Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N. A., pursuant to a license from Visa U. S. A. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card. Cash App Green features, Savings, Direct deposit, Round ups, Overdraft coverage and Discounts provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. *𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗡𝗘𝗖𝗧 𝗪𝗜𝗧𝗛 𝗨𝗦* 𝗜𝗚: https://www.instagram.com/icedcoffeehour 𝗝𝗔𝗖𝗞: https://www.instagram.com/jlsselby 𝗚𝗥𝗔𝗛𝗔𝗠: https://www.instagram.com/gpstephan 𝗖𝗹𝗶𝗽𝘀 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗹: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheIcedCoffeeHourClips 𝗫.𝗰𝗼𝗺: https://x.com/TheICHpodcast 𝗧𝗶𝗸𝗧𝗼𝗸: https://www.tiktok.com/@theicedcoffeehour 𝗦𝗽𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗳𝘆: https://open.spotify.com/show/5c2uoXBQkOjIiCOf60jJj7 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗹𝗲: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-iced-coffee-hour/id1515070058 For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: [email protected] Apply for The Index Membership: https://entertheindex.com/ Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:04:29 - How To Fix LA's Housing Crisis 00:09:42 - Is LA's Mansion Tax Backfiring? 00:15:19 - Sponsor: Northwest Registered Agent 00:16:31 - Graham's LA Landlord Nightmare 00:22:41 - Are LA Landlords Getting Screwed? 00:31:23 - Sponsor: Cash App 00:32:32 - Sponsor: Faire 00:33:46 - Why Affordable Housing Costs $1 Million Per Unit 00:39:46 - Where LA's Homeless Money Actually Goes 00:44:54 - What Actually Causes Homelessness? 00:53:13 - Is LA's $400M Homeless Program Working? 01:01:14 - Sponsor: Shopify 01:02:27 - The $6 Billion Convention Center Bet 01:08:03 - Does LA Need More Police? 01:18:11 - Would Nithya Raise Taxes On The Rich? 01:26:32 - WATCH THE NEXT EPISODE! For Podcast Inquiries, please DM @icedcoffeehour on Instagram! *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan & Jack Selby will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan & Jack Selby are part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Los Angeles, to me, is the epitome of the American dream.

• 0:29Graham Stephan?

  So what would you tell me when I say I'm never gonna invest another dollar in California real estate ever again?

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Well, I hope to change that.

• 0:36Graham Stephan?

  Councilwoman Nithya Raman filed to run just hours before the deadline. Raman and Bass are going from allies to opponents. So what do you think of the biggest issues facing Los Angeles?

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Homelessness and housing costs. And they're two sides of the same coin.

• 0:49Speaker 03

  Researchers found that more than 171,000 people experience homelessness daily across California.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  What I am saying is we will audit every dollar. We will monitor performance. We will ensure that we are.

• 1:01Graham Stephan?

  But isn't that what everyone else said?

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Yes, but I'm actually, I already did it in six years. If we want to raise taxes, we gotta earn trust again. And I am here to earn your trust.

• 1:10Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, but why should we tax first before actually getting the spending under control?

• 1:13Speaker 01

  That's not what I'm, I just literally said the opposite, sir.

• 1:15Graham Stephan?

  Speaking of waste, fraud, and abuse, what do you think of Nick Shirley?

• 1:19Speaker 01

  My hope is that we build a system here in Los Angeles where Nick Shirley cannot come and find anything to complain about.

• 1:29Graham Stephan?

  Hey, everybody. So I usually don't do a disclaimer like this, but with this episode, I have to. I left Los Angeles about six years ago because I was really unhappy with the living conditions there. And Nithya Raman is currently running for mayor of Los Angeles. We reached out to both her and Karen Bass to come on. Karen Bass never got back to us, but Nithya did. And it got a little contentious in a few moments.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  If there's not a crime happening there, if they're not a threat to themselves.

• 1:55Graham Stephan?

  Well, there is a crime. They're, they're doing drugs.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Well, they, no, if they're just sitting on your sidewalk.

• 1:59Graham Stephan?

  No, no, they're doing, they're doing drugs.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Well, that's a different situation.

• 2:02Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, but I do think that we should give her a lot of credit because she agreed to come on. She didn't have to do this. And she said that we could ask her whatever we wanted. So with that said, I hope you enjoy the episode. Thanks so much. Let's get into it.

• 2:15Jack Selby?

  Nithya and Jason, thank you so much for coming on the Iced Coffee Hour. This is a very unique panel of guests. Just the fact that you're willing to sit down and have a conversation, open dialogue, I think is extremely commendable because it's super, super rare. So we appreciate that.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  And I appreciate you guys doing the same thing and, and you.

• 2:34Graham Stephan?

  So this is something that's really interesting for me because you're running for mayor of Los Angeles and I left LA.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41Graham Stephan?

  A lot of the policies for me were really bad.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Well, you left Santa Monica, right?

• 2:45Graham Stephan?

  I grew up in Los Angeles. Before Santa Monica, it was West Adams.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:49Graham Stephan?

  And so I've lived there for years. I moved to Santa Monica and it just progressively got worse. And it wasn't just Santa Monica. It was everywhere. Jack's family is also from, you know, Ventura County. So he grew up there. He was living with us in Santa Monica as well. So I am curious, for mayor specifically, what powers does the mayor actually have?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  We have a weaker mayor system than other cities. So a city like New York or a city like Boston, they have a more powerful mayor system. Here in California, we designed a lot in, you know, historically, people designed more decentralized governance structures. And it was the old progressive movement that was pushing back against corruption, you know, in Chicago. And so they wanted to make it, they tried to ensure less corruption by making it more decentralized. So we have weaker mayors, generally speaking, in California and on the West Coast, and stronger city councils. But about 25 years ago, here in LA, there was a charter reform process that actually put more executive authority

• 3:54Speaker 01

  back in the mayor's seat. And so the mayor of Los Angeles now has the ability to hire and fire every department head. They have the ability to actually set the priorities of each department. And they have the ability to make sure that they are designing the metrics through which those department heads are held accountable. And so if you care about something, like if you care about responsiveness to trash complaints, you can actually generate metrics around that and hold your departmental leadership accountable around that. If you care about homelessness, which everyone does, you can actually say, hey, let's make a map of encampments. Let's make sure that the, that the entity's responsible for it, actually making progress for addressing encampments over time.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  When mayors don't use that power to actually push city departments to deliver for residents, it looks like the mayor is not as powerful. But I want to use those powers. I want to make sure that we're actually governing LA. I want to make sure that we're pushing it in the right direction and that the departments are working to deliver results.

• 4:55Graham Stephan?

  So what do you think of the biggest issues facing Los Angeles?

• 4:58Speaker 01

  The two that are, I think, the biggest are homelessness and housing costs. And they're two sides of the same coin. Obviously homelessness has other complexities in it, including mental health issues, substance use issues. But if you look again at data from across cities in America, where you have the most unsheltered homelessness, people living on the streets, is also where you have the least affordable cities. And so those two issues are very connected.

• 5:25Graham Stephan?

  Is it connected? Or is it that the homeless go to the areas where people have money to give?

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Most of the people who are experiencing homelessness in LA, especially outside of the beaches and Hollywood, like I represent right now, a lot of the valley. And the people who are on the streets in the valley, living near the river or in encampments, are mostly people who are from LA, who came to LA to work, struggled, lost their homes, and are now on the streets, or people who were born and raised here, just like the composition of most Angelinos. In some parts of the city, there are places where it's a lot of people coming from other places. The beaches are, you know, are one of those places. And there's also a little bit of outsider coming to LA

• 6:09Speaker 01

  in a neighborhood like Hollywood, which attracts actually a lot of LGBTQ youth who are, you know, maybe not accepted at home. And then they come to LA seeking that inclusion and acceptance. So there's a couple of neighborhoods where there's definitely a lot of outsiders. But I would say for the most part, people who are homeless in LA are from LA or were last housed in LA, came here to seek their fortunes, failed to do that, and then ended up on the streets.

• 6:35Jack Selby?

  So what would you argue is the highest impact, lowest effort decision that needs to be made or change that needs to be made to positively affect the homeless population and to positively affect the housing costs?

• 6:51Speaker 01

  For housing costs, I think we need to build a lot more housing. The, the government cannot build all the housing that we need. So we cannot all be 100% affordable publicly funded housing to fill this housing shortage. The state estimates we need 500,000 more housing units in Los Angeles to fill the gap, based on kind of what they estimate as the need locally. So we need to make it easier, cheaper, faster to build more housing. And the biggest obstacle to building more housing in Los Angeles is often the government. We make it very hard to build apartments. We say apartments are the thing that we need the most of. But it has, in LA, we have the longest processes for approving new apartments.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  We have a lot of costs, permitting costs, entitlement costs, so on and so forth. DWP costs are often enormous and completely unpredictable. So I think the more that we can do to make it cheaper, faster, easier to build housing and to ensure that we're pushing the private market to build the kind of housing we need, I think we can actually build more housing.

• 7:54Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, I want to push back on that.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:56Graham Stephan?

  What about abolishing rent control? Wouldn't that make housing a lot better for privatized businesses to go and create more housing?

• 8:02Speaker 01

  So here in LA, here in California overall, there is a, a state regulation that prevents new construction from falling under rent stabilization or rent control. So anything built after 1978 actually cannot have.

• 8:21Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, but what about in 1975? Two rent control tenants in there. You can't tear down the building.

• 8:26Jack Selby?

  What, does rent control restrict new build, new construction?

• 8:29Graham Stephan?

  It does.

• 8:30Jack Selby?

  Well, okay, explain.

• 8:32Graham Stephan?

  Because land is limited. And if you have a building, let's just say like my duplex, there was a tenant in there who was making well over $200,000 a year. They were under rent control. Getting them out for the sake of tearing it down and building a new four unit.

• 8:45Jack Selby?

  Ellis Act, if you actually want to tear it down, you can.

• 8:48Graham Stephan?

  But that is another step. That's another regulation that someone now has to overcome to get them out, to apply for the Ellis Act. All it takes is, you know, they go and get a free tenant attorney, delay the project for a year. Landlords say, it's not worth the risk. I'm not gonna do it. I'm gonna go somewhere else.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I would say, you know, we have a ton of real estate that is along major corridors like Ventura or Sunset or Wilshire, which right now has no housing on it. Unlike most major cities, they just have single-story strip malls on it. And in other cities, you would actually see along these major boulevards, you'd see more dense housing. You'd see apartments being built there. And this, I think, is, these are places where it's absolutely appropriate and necessary to build more housing. So I think there's a lot of places where there's potential to build. I'm not sure that a rent control policy that doesn't apply after 1978 is the biggest block to building more housing.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  I would say that making it, you know, by right to build along our major boulevards, making it much easier for the Department of Water and Power to show up and.

• 9:53Graham Stephan?

  Yes, but the problem is that a lot of those buildings are built before 1978.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  But they're not, many of them don't have any apartments in them at all. They're, they're, you know, like a strip mall like this with no, with no apartments. And so it wouldn't, rent control wouldn't apply there. On April 1st, LA's so-called mansion.

• 10:10Speaker 05

  Tax kicks in. Supporters of the new tax celebrating in Koreatown today.

• 10:17Speaker 06

  That money is going to raise much needed funding for affordable housing and tenant protection.

• 10:22Speaker 05

  Here's how the mansion tax will work. Home sellers will have to pay an extra 4% tax on property sales over $5 million. If your home is over $10 million, the tax goes up to 5.5%.

• 10:34Jack Selby?

  Because Nithya, I mean, you, and I think this might have been where we sparred, actually.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Yes, actually, we sparred over the mansion tax. I was a supporter of the mansion tax coming in. It created a new source of funding for affordable housing construction that we didn't have after the CRA was dissolved in California. It created funds for things I know that you're probably very critical of, which is legal defense support and things like that. And rent relief, so direct payments to landlords for renters who have fallen behind, which actually has been a very good intervention that has helped renters stay in their homes and has helped landlords stay whole. So I think there's a mixed bag of potential goods in there that I thought are important for Los Angeles. Mixed bag, according to you, I would imagine. And I was a supporter of it and it came forward and what has happened in the years since.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  And I know that there's a lot of disagreement out there about the data, but I, the studies that I have seen suggest that the mansion tax has actually significantly impacted new apartment construction here in the city of Los Angeles. And for me, as someone who believes that unlocking new housing here in LA is the single most important thing to maintaining the city's resiliency into the future, to keeping it a place where people can come here and build their dreams here. If you can't afford to live here, you can't do that anymore. And if you're not building new housing units, you'll never be able to keep it a city of opportunity. And so for me, reforming that mansion tax to exempt new multifamily construction was something that I felt was very, very important to do.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  I put forward an effort on the city council to do that. It, for many reasons, it hasn't moved forward yet, but I do still, based on the data that I'm seeing, I still think that that's something important for LA. And I actually think that's a bigger factor in inhibiting new apartment construction than rent control, because buildings after 1978 are not subject to that here. And because that has really been, there's been such a stark difference. You can actually see the number of housing units that have dropped.

• 12:34Graham Stephan?

  So what would you tell me when I say I'm never going to invest another dollar in California real estate ever again?

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Well, I hope to change that, you know? I think that there, this, I believe that this is the most incredible place in the world to live. The weather is perfect, the food is incredible. It has the atmosphere that I want from a city, which is an atmosphere that invites people here to dream big here, to be entrepreneurial. Like, I moved to America when I was six years old. Los Angeles, to me, is the epitome of the American dream. Like, it is a place that invites people here to work hard and to change their lives. Like, that's, there's a spirit about this city that feels really powerful to me and that I don't think is everywhere in America necessarily. Or rather, it's much more keenly felt here for me than in any other part of America that I've been to.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  But, you know, I would say that if we can address our unsheltered homelessness crisis and we can get a, we can really wrap our arms around that. I think we can bring investment back into Los Angeles. And I also think that if we can find common ground to, I don't think, whether you're progressive or you're more moderate or you're more conservative, no one likes government red tape. No one likes regulations that stand in the way of creativity and entrepreneurship. No one likes regulations that stand in the way of small businesses being able to function well. Like, there is a lot of common ground here for reforms that I hope can bring investment and trust back to Los Angeles. And that's part of the work that I want to do.

• 14:05Jack Selby?

  I just want to say, though, I feel like we oftentimes hear from politicians that they want to deregulate, they want to make communities safer, they want to protect local wildlife, they want to do this, they want to do that. But what does that actually materially mean from a policy perspective? Like, if you say that we all here agree that we need to build more homes and decrease red tape, it's like, well, what policy is the specific one that's getting in the way of most people that would build if this policy was gone? But because it's there, this is preventing them from actually increasing the housing supply. Like, it, once, once you get into office, people say, day one, I'm repealing this act, I'm fixing this, and I'm removing this person from office and putting this person in.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Though it's, I mean, this is, it feels fairly straightforward to have for simple interventions like sidewalk dining, which in a city like Los Angeles where the weather is wonderful, you want, obviously, to have a few cafe tables on your sidewalk. Rather than having a city process which is lengthy, potentially costly, has multiple inspectors coming in, just have restaurateurs be able to follow a straightforward set of rules and self-certify that they're meeting those regulations. And you come out and audit every once in a while, but that you don't actually need to have a expensive permitting process in order to do something that feels very, very straightforward. Daniel Lurie in San Francisco did the same thing. It was one of the first things that he did when he came into office.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  And I was like, this is very straightforward. And I would not say that this is a left-wing or a right-wing thing. It's just a straightforward thing to allow the thing that we all love, which is great food in LA, to be able to thrive.

• 15:42Jack Selby?

  But what about the housing stuff? Because I feel like, yeah, restaurants are one thing.

• 15:45Graham Stephan?

  And really quick, I just want to say that cutting the red tape on something as simple as a few cafe tables just makes a lot of sense. Nobody is out there opening up a restaurant because they're excited to deal with permits and inspections.

• 15:57Jack Selby?

  Yeah, when you're starting a business, you want your time and money going into the actual business, not a bunch of costly steps before you've even opened up your doors.

• 16:04Graham Stephan?

  And really, one of the first things you need is just a way for people to find you. Because before anyone tries a new restaurant or hires a new business, they're going to look you up online.

• 16:13Jack Selby?

  And if they can't find a website or a business email, a lot of people just move on to the next option.

• 16:17Graham Stephan?

  Which is why we love our partner, Northwest Registered Agent, because they give you a domain, website, business email, and dedicated business phone line for free.

• 16:26Jack Selby?

  Listen, you don't have to be a paying customer, purchase anything, or even form an LLC, so you can get started without paying for those basics or giving out your personal number.

• 16:33Graham Stephan?

  And your domain and website belong to you, so you could move them elsewhere.

• 16:37Jack Selby?

  Northwest just wants to help you get started, support you as you grow, and keep you independent, even if you never buy anything.

• 16:43Graham Stephan?

  So if you're putting in the work to build a business, make it easy for people to find you and feel comfortable reaching out. Get started for free at northwestregisteredagent.com/ICH.

• 16:53Jack Selby?

  That is northwestregisteredagent.com/ICH, or just click the link down below in the description. But what about the housing stuff? Because I feel like, yeah, restaurants are one thing.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Yes, but, so with housing, one of the things that I've proposed is a shot clock. So a shot clock is a deadline by which departments have to respond to your, your request for a permit or an entitlement. And so I'm saying 60 days for a zoning compliant project, 120 days for a non-zoning compliant project, and making sure that the city of Los Angeles is not going beyond that to give you the approval to build.

• 17:32Jack Selby?

  And what is taking them so long? And you get your fees back if they don't come?

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that, that there's an, that you can actually say and enforce that by saying, there's an incentive structure to actually enforce that.

• 17:43Jack Selby?

  And what's the average length of time to pass these things right now? And like, what's taking them so long?

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Oh, LA, they just did a study that compared approval timelines in Los Angeles versus, I think it was one city in Colorado and a city in Texas. And we had double the time that it took in double or triple.

• 18:06Jack Selby?

  Walk through your experience. I want Nithya to hear your, your experience about trying to permit an ADU, if you could quickly just walk through that.

• 18:12Graham Stephan?

  Oh, gosh, yeah, so I set up an ADU and I started building it. The approval to get it initially constructed, really easy, but to get the certificate of occupancy for a tenant to move in, took months.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Was that city of LA or Santa Monica?

• 18:26Graham Stephan?

  City of LA.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 18:28Graham Stephan?

  All of my rental housing, by the way, was city of LA. And I applied for the certificate of occupancy. The first time, the guy never showed up. The second time, the guy showed up, inspected it, and he said, because this AC condenser line was like not properly installed, we had to reschedule him. And my contractor said, it's a 20-minute fix.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Let's just do it right now.

• 18:51Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, we'll do it right now, and then you sign off on it. He said it was Friday and he wanted to get home early and didn't want to wait, but said that he could call in and reschedule it. And that was it. And we rescheduled it. The next guy comes out and comes up with a new list of things that the first guy never even mentioned, said, well, no, that's fine, but this and this and this.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:11Graham Stephan?

  Contractor, you never pointed this out to me. Well, now you need to do that. Fix those things. Now, the third guy comes out, says, no, this is all fine, but we need to do a sewer line inspection. The contractor said, no one's ever told me that. Yeah, but now you need to do it. We did a sewer line inspection. They found a crack in the sewer line. We had a tenant who was supposed to be moving in. And they said, we can't issue the certificate until you get the sewer line fixed. And we said, how about this? We just, we'll sign a writing that we fix it within 30 days, let the tenant move in with a cert, a conditional cert, no, we can't do that. So we go in to try to fix the sewer line, it's $40,000. But to get to the sewer line, you have to break the city sidewalk. And so now we have to wait for another person to come out to give us approval to cut the city sidewalk.

• 19:55Graham Stephan?

  That was another $8,000. It was a delay of about six months. In the process of that, I got a fine for not planting a tree in front of the median. And after, the whole experience made me to say, I'm out of here. It's like, it's not worth it. The rent control restrictions make it so that you cannot run as a mom and pop landlord in California at all. There is zero incentive, which makes me think, if I'm selling, I'm getting out, who is going to maintain any rental housing? And I know a lot of landlords, because their tenants are paying so little, they do nothing. They're living in dilapidated conditions and the rent control is not applicable, it, it applies to the same person making $30,000 as the same person making $500,000 a year.

• 20:39Graham Stephan?

  And I've seen people making a half a million dollars a year who get the same rent control treatment as the other person who's barely scraping by.

• 20:45Jack Selby?

  Didn't you offer your tenant money to leave?

• 20:47Graham Stephan?

  $40,000 to leave, and they said no. And by the way, this is, this is a very well-to-do family. These are not people who are struggling, and they wanted initially $80,000 to leave.

• 20:57Jack Selby?

  They're making over $200,000 a year, these guys.

• 20:59Graham Stephan?

  Correct.

• 21:00Jack Selby?

  I think there's a lot of good that comes with.

• 21:03Speaker 07

  Rent control, but I think that human nature tends to take advantage of of power. And and if you give, if there's too much power on one side, and and we can disagree whether there is or not. But I think you would be surprised at how, because I deal with it all the time. And give you an example, I was trying to sell, uh, well, I was trying to sell a house, four and a half million dollar house in Beverly Hills. Guy's father passed away, he inherited it. He's living in the house, there's a squatter in the house. And he's been trying to get him out for a year and a half. So he's

• 21:31Speaker 01

  In Beverly Hills?

• 21:32Speaker 07

  In Beverly Hills.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  In the city of Beverly Hills.

• 21:34Speaker 07

  The city of Beverly Hills.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Even they don't do better with squatters?

• 21:36Speaker 07

  No, I guess good point, though, it is Beverly Hills. But um, and and I just walked away. I said, dude, I'm not, I can't deal with this. I can't sell this house with this guy in this house. Then I had a, this is a duplex in LA. And the tenant refused to allow us to photograph her. She wouldn't let us in. And then, so we used this aerial photographs, we got into escrow. And then the appraiser came to measure it. And she wouldn't allow the appraiser access. So we lost that loan, we lost that buyer. And I said, I cannot sell this property. And that tenant had no right to do that, obviously.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration blog, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 22:31Speaker 07

  Actually, um, but what are you gonna do? The, it takes six months, a year to go through court. So I mean, the, a lot of these owners just throw up their hands. They can't, they can't compete with it. They get free legal defense. They abuse the system, they don't want to leave, they don't want a new owner, they don't want anything that can be purposely difficult. This is a small minority of tenants. I'm not suggesting it isn't, but when you have such a, like a dichotomy of power, there's so much abuse going on among tenants that try, that threaten. I have tenants that are making a million dollars a year, living in my house, is paying $40,000 a month. And I can't sell that property because they won't move out unless I pay them a fortune. And I can only get one month's security deposit. I had $300,000 of furniture stolen from some fraudster that lived, ended up living in my house.

• 23:16Speaker 07

  He was a lawyer, I don't know how he lost his license, blah, blah, blah. I can't even get a security deposit for furniture because it goes all the way up to millionaires getting protected by the city of LA who are paying $40,000 a month. And I can't negotiate a fair contract with them because they have tenants' rights, even though they're millionaires.

• 23:33Graham Stephan?

  Let me ask you this, how would you feel if landlords also got free legal assistance?

• 23:39Speaker 07

  If they qualified financially for it.

• 23:41Graham Stephan?

  Correct.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not, first of all, it's not every renter that gets free legal assistance from the city. It's only renters that meet an income threshold. And that kind of policy was put in place because of the imbalance of power that did exist. And that still continues to exist in many of the cases that we're seeing, where when you have a very powerful landlord, a landlord who has a lot more financial resources, they are in court almost inevitably with

• 24:08Graham Stephan?

  How do we know, how do, how do we know the landlord has more financial resources? What if it's someone?

• 24:12Speaker 07

  Generally, they do.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Generally, they're, they're, they're property owners, they're making money, and they're generally represented in courts. And when tenants go into court, especially in cases, look, and exactly like you were saying, a small minority of tenants are bad actors. I think a small minority of landlords are bad actors. Like I, I'm, you know, I'm a real optimist. Like, I really believe that most people are just good people who are trying to make a living. And if we could just find a way for the rules to work better, that most people would be able to get along, right? But there are bad actors who are trying to take advantage of the system. And in those situations, renters without representation end up getting kicked out of their homes more often than not. And so to even the playing field,

• 24:55Speaker 01

  we, uh, you know, there, there has been a push here in the city of Los Angeles to provide more of that legal support for renters as well.

• 25:03Graham Stephan?

  What about for landlords? What about for a mom and pop landlord? And they're breaking even, maybe they're paying money every single month to keep the property that they worked for. And maybe that's something that they saved decades for. And now they're losing money and their tenant stops paying.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  So there are resources for business owners as well. There's small business resources, there's business support that we're providing across the board to any kind of business owner.

• 25:23Graham Stephan?

  But not for evictions? It does not exist for evictions.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know. I'm probably not.

• 25:30Graham Stephan?

  It does not.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. But look, I, I just want, I'm, I hear you on the, that there are exceptions where these kinds of policies feel, I think, harder on landlords. But I will say that as someone who, you know, I have a council office, we get calls from constituents all the time. What we are seeing much more frequently is situations where renters may not know their rights. They're dealing with situations where there's services being taken away in a unit where landlords are trying to, you know, issue eviction notices, even when they don't actually meet the criteria for issuing an eviction notice. So what we're seeing much more frequently is the other side of the case, particularly in the city.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  And a lot of the rules and regulations are really trying to say, hey, this is a necessary thing. And if people get evicted, if people lose their homes, it's destabilizing for our neighborhoods and communities. So is there a way in this environment to make this a more even playing field? What you're saying is, oh, the playing field has gone too far in the other directions.

• 26:33Graham Stephan?

  I do, I do believe that.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  And I would say, I am in constant contact with people from, not just from tenants' associations, but also from landlords' associations to say, show me the data. And if there is, you know, if there's really a crisis out there that people are exiting the market, if smaller mom and pop landlords are really facing those kinds of conditions, like, let's make sure we're changing the policies. And I have always been very open to that, and I continue to be.

• 26:58Graham Stephan?

  So what do you think is a, what do you think is a fair rent control cap?

• 27:02Speaker 07

  Well, I think it's 3% or 4% now.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, one

• 27:04Graham Stephan?

  It's, no, it's less, it's whatever, it's under CPI.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  In, in LA, it is a 1 to 4% uh, uh, range right now.

• 27:13Graham Stephan?

  Yes, but it's under CPI. So whatever, it's 90% of CPI. But that's not necessarily taking into account the insurance raises, the utility raises, the plumber who's costing double, the electrician who's costing double, all of the other expenses, which are way higher than CPI.

• 27:29Speaker 07

  Well, I would argue it's not even expenses. I mean, this, as a, as a, I think, an important data point. Multifamily in Los Angeles is, the value of those properties are down about 30% in the last four years. So a 2 million

• 27:41Speaker 01

  And why, why do you think that is?

• 27:42Speaker 07

  It, it's a multitude of reasons. High interest rates is certainly a significant aspect, although that wouldn't explain the discrepancy between a, a more significant drop in value in Los Angeles multifamily versus, say, Beverly Hills or Newport Beach.

• 27:55Graham Stephan?

  Or single family, because I own, I have a single family and a duplex. A single family is up substantially.

• 28:00Speaker 07

  A lot of people are, I mean, we're, we're now back to prices from about 10 years ago. So if you bought a fourplex in 2017, you made zero money in 10 years. You could have put that money in the stock market and doubled it. So it is hard to get people

• 28:14Speaker 01

  You, you probably made rental income from it.

• 28:17Speaker 07

  No, because you, no, because you generally lose money every, every month. If you buy a fourplex today for $2 million, it's a fourplex, you're probably gonna lose a little bit every month. It's, as a landlord, you cannot break even with rents right now. Even if you don't have rent control.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  If you're buying it new, you're saying.

• 28:32Graham Stephan?

  No, if you're buying any amount of real estate.

• 28:35Speaker 07

  Even if, if you're buying a fourplex that's under rent control, well, then it depresses the price probably another 20, 30%, depending on how many rent control. But let's say there's no rent control at all. If you're buying a fourplex today for $2 million, and that's, it's probably gonna cost you about, call it $12,000 a month to carry that property with your, your loan and your property taxes, whatever. You're not gonna get $12,000 in rent, you'll probably get 10 to 11. So most landlords lose about, you know, whatever, $1,000 or $2,000 a, a month to carry their property. Now, they generally would like to expect and appreciate that their asset's going to appreciate. But we're back down to asset values of 10 years ago. So not only are they losing every month for the last 10 years, most, I'd say most people that own multifamily in LA lose a little bit of money every month.

• 29:19Speaker 07

  And unless they bought it when interest rates were extremely low, maybe they're breaking even. But now they're not making any money on the asset. So they're saying, why am I gonna own multifamily in LA? So they sell, and that reduces the price more, and then you go buy somewhere else. So there's definitely data points showing, I think it's 29% is actually what apartments have gone down in the last four years in LA, across, across the board. Some where you have, let's say, a tenant paying $1,200 a month, and the market is 2,100, where no one wants to go in there and buy that because they know that person's never gonna leave. And so they're never gonna be able to increase the rent. So they're not getting near that fourplex. So that owner who's owned it for 20 years. Everyone's stuck. Now, I get that obviously you don't want to displace that person either.

• 30:00Speaker 07

  So there are a lot of complicated interests, but it is worth understanding like how devastated the asset values of multifamily in Los Angeles have gone in the last few years.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Right. So let's, if we were getting back to the question of kind of the question that you started with, which is what is the big intervention that you would make to increase housing production here? I would ask the same thing to you as someone who's dealing with this issue and looking at kind of changes in pricing. What would you say to a policymaker who wanted to make a difference?

• 30:32Speaker 07

  I agree with a lot of what you said, for one. I really think that you, if you get in there, I think you're going to remove a lot of red tape. And I think you've got a lot of good strategies on increasing housing, including removing the mansion tax possibly, which I think is a huge one.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  It'll take, yeah, we'll have to go back to the voters and all that.

• 30:48Speaker 07

  Yes, of course. I'm not holding you to it, but I know that you at least are willing to look at the data.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:53Speaker 07

  Where I think, and maybe this is superficial because this is a very complicated topic, but where I would appreciate us is saying, as a community, we want to, to make sure that we don't displace people because that's going to make the homeless problem worse.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:06Speaker 07

  And we can't just raise someone's rent from $1,200 to $1,800. But what I would appreciate is if, because it's important and we can all agree it's important, why don't we give vouchers to tenants? Let's let the free market work so that we don't destroy the values and we don't get people wanting to leave from investing in LA. Why don't we give that tenant, say, hey, your rent's going to be able to go up, you know, to market, but we're going to, as a society, we, we believe that we can't, we're going to give you the money so you can give it to your landlord. So it's a way of saying, and I don't even mind, so rather than putting it all on landlords and saying, you're just going to have to suffer, why don't we all pay our taxes, give it to tenants who qualify and let them use that voucher to a landlord so we have a free market?

• 31:48Jack Selby?

  But would that be temporary? Because I feel like that would just then be a bleeding system if you're just constantly feeding these people that can't technically afford the market price.

• 31:56Speaker 07

  I think we do that.

• 31:57Graham Stephan?

  And then it just seems like a lottery system that, oh, you just so happen to have rented your place 30 years ago.

• 32:01Jack Selby?

  And so you're like, okay, as a tenant, I have one year.

• 32:04Speaker 07

  Anyone who makes a very certain amount of money can get a voucher towards rent. It doesn't really bother me. I don't mind supporting the people that need it.

• 32:10Graham Stephan?

  Why should rent control also be indefinite? Why not just apply for something like 10 years?

• 32:15Jack Selby?

  Wherever you land on the rent control debate, going from $1,200 to $1,800 a month is a huge jump, and with rent going up, every dollar matters.

• 32:22Graham Stephan?

  Yeah. So when you do spend your money, you want to get as much out of it as possible. And that's where our partner Cash App comes in.

• 32:28Jack Selby?

  With a Cash App card, you get discounts on everyday purchases and popular brands you're already spending money on with no hidden fees. And the more you use it, the more it rewards you.

• 32:36Graham Stephan?

  Which is exactly what their new Cash App Green status is built around.

• 32:40Jack Selby?

  Cash App does more than you think when it comes to having your back and making sure that your money stays your money. Cash App just released a new status program for the way people actually spend called Cash App Green.

• 32:49Graham Stephan?

  Now, when you spend at least $500 a month with a Cash App card, you earn Green status, which unlocks benefits like up to $200 of free overdraft coverage. So if you overdraft unexpectedly, there are no hidden fees. You also unlock higher borrow limits and custom personalized cash back offers every Friday at places you love to shop.

• 33:08Jack Selby?

  So turn everyday spending into status with Cash App Green. Download Cash App today or visit Cash App to learn more about this and other financial benefits.

• 33:16Graham Stephan?

  New Cash App customers could earn $10 if they use the code CASHAPP10 in their profile at signup and send $5 to a friend within 14 days. Terms apply.

• 33:24Jack Selby?

  Download Cash App today and make your money work for you. Visit our link in the bio.

• 33:28Graham Stephan?

  And speaking of places you love to shop, for me, a lot of those are just local spots. We're talking sidewalk cafes that we were just talking about.

• 33:36Jack Selby?

  Yeah, local businesses are a huge part of what keeps a neighborhood going. And the best ones usually have something that you will not find anywhere else.

• 33:42Graham Stephan?

  Right. But finding those products and keeping your shelf stocked is a lot of work. Thankfully, our partner, FAIR, makes that a whole lot easier. They're a wholesale marketplace for local retailers.

• 33:51Jack Selby?

  FAIR gives stores access to over 100,000 unique brands from around the world, across home, apparel, beauty, food, and more, which of course matters right now with everyone planning their holiday inventory.

• 34:01Graham Stephan?

  And the right products, by the way, make a huge difference because they help your store stand out, bring in new customers, and keep your regulars coming back.

• 34:07Jack Selby?

  Plus, eligible retailers get 60-day, interest-free payment terms and free returns on your first order with every brand. So testing new products is a lot less risky.

• 34:16Graham Stephan?

  So if you're ready to join more than 700,000 retailers with access to over 100,000 brands, sign up today and get 50% off your first wholesale order up to $100 at FAIRE.com/icedcoffee.

• 34:31Jack Selby?

  That is FAIRE.com/icedcoffee with the link down below in the description. Terms may apply.

• 34:37Graham Stephan?

  So why should rent control also be indefinite? Why not just apply for something like 10 years?

• 34:42Speaker 01

  So here's, I think, one of the challenges that we face as, as a policymaker looking at the housing market, is that if you are just using, relying on the private real estate market to produce housing, what ends up happening is that the market does a very good job of producing housing for higher-end renters and for like higher-income people. But as you get into, into that kind of section of the population that is making lower than, you know, average incomes in an area or significantly lower than that, the market is just not producing units that people can afford.

• 35:23Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  And so, and so in those situations, what you end up with is overcrowding, right? So what's one way that people have solved that problem? It's by having multiple families live in a single home or by having multiple people live in a single home. And so you have neighborhoods here in Los Angeles that are some of the most overcrowded neighborhoods in the entire country because you have eight people living in a one-bedroom apartment. That's how COVID spread so much in certain neighborhoods here in LA, but it was actually a response to the market not providing housing for the poorest residents.

• 35:57Speaker 07

  Couldn't you allow more density, though, if you build?

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Potentially, right? So, but my question is, if the market is never producing for people who are amongst the lowest income, what is the response? What is the program?

• 36:09Speaker 07

  What about allowing more height, allowing more density?

• 36:12Graham Stephan?

  Well, here's two things. One, look at.

• 36:13Speaker 07

  Maybe subsidizing it?

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's where I think about your program could be helpful, you know?

• 36:18Speaker 07

  But I think we do subsidize and allow, I mean, if there's, if you build low-income housing, you get a lot of subsidy, you get a lot of density bonuses.

• 36:25Graham Stephan?

  Here's two things. Number one is Austin. Look at Austin, Texas. They built a lot. They privatized everything and housing prices are down about 30% because they built so much. Second, here in LA, it's land. Land is so expensive because everyone wants to live in Santa Monica, Venice Beach, Marina Del Rey. Why should those areas have low-income housing when there is cheaper land that's further inland? Why should someone have the right to live in Santa Monica versus 20 minutes east?

• 36:53Speaker 01

  I think it's less about the right to live in Santa Monica and more about what kind of communities you're trying to support here. Like, are you saying, if, if I were a resident of Santa Monica now, I would want a rich, vibrant community around me. I would want residents who've been in Santa Monica for a long time to be able to stay in Santa Monica and enrich the community of Santa Monica. I would want newcomers to be able to come and build their dreams in Santa Monica as well. And I don't think those two have to be in opposition to one another. And so that's the policy mix that we're trying to find here. I don't believe that you have to think about housing policies as a zero-sum game. I think there are ways to ensure that we are stabilizing existing communities, stabilizing

• 37:38Speaker 01

  existing residents, while also encouraging new housing construction in places.

• 37:43Speaker 07

  But wait, look at the voucher program that I just suggested. Under that voucher program, you're still, you, that they won't, they won't live, they won't live in Beverly Hills, they won't live in Santa Monica because they can't afford it. So they'll take their voucher and they'll live where the market dictates that they would live.

• 37:56Graham Stephan?

  It sounds, that sounds like a bleeding system where so much money is going to be just misappropriate and abused. And I'll give you an example in terms of.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  I have more faith that the government would, can do right if, if given.

• 38:06Graham Stephan?

  I'll give you an example for Santa Monica, by the way. There's a parking structure that is being torn down. You could build a ton of units, but instead what they're doing is low-income housing. And each unit is an estimated cost of $1 million because it's government-funded. A $1 million unit is insane.

• 38:25Speaker 07

  We've talked about.

• 38:26Graham Stephan?

  This should not, this should not happen at all. And I think if you privatize the market, people would have an incentive just to build as much as they can. And yes, land is expensive and yes, not everyone's going to be able to live in certain cities. But that just is the name of the game. That's just how life works.

• 38:43Speaker 07

  But I don't think you're for the government spending $800,000 a unit, unit building low-income.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  I think a lot, some of the, the, the policies that have gotten us to a place where each unit is costing so much money, I think do have to, they deserve real scrutiny. So, you know, a single unit in those, or a single building that's an affordable housing unit often requires eight different sources of financing in order to get built, right? So you're getting state funding, you're getting city funding, you're getting federal funding. And by the time you put all of these different pieces of funding together, you've basically sat on the land for six, seven years. Then there's a lawsuit, then you're waiting to build again and you're slowed further. And all of that time, you are paying for the land that you've bought and you're sitting on.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  And so I think you've actually increased the cost of that housing through the, exactly this kind of red tape and regulatory environment that we're subjecting this to.

• 39:41Speaker 07

  And the unions also, by the way, increase costs a lot. I know it's a little sticky topic.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Well, and I, you know, and I think that's, this is a, this is a, I think, something that. Angelinos, Californians have said if we're using public money, we should be making sure that the workers who are working on those units are able to make a good living. That's a policy decision that's been made in California, that's been made in Los Angeles. And I think if you ask most people who lived here, they would support that, you know? And I understand it increases the cost, but I think we say when we're using public funding, it should be trying to do that. So that will, yes, that will mean that each individual unit costs a little bit more. But there's all these other ways that we can reduce the fund, the costs for those individual units, like making it a single source of funding, making sure that Department

• 40:28Speaker 01

  of Water and Power is not adding time and costs to those projects. Like, there are ways to reduce the costs of that funding that the city is not taking up yet, and I want to make sure that it's doing that.

• 40:38Jack Selby?

  What about the amount of money spent on homelessness? That has exploded lately, and homelessness has not been getting any better. I would argue, if anything, some areas have gotten substantially worse over the last six years.

• 40:48Speaker 07

  Also statistically, they went up this year, under Bass, 7.9%, despite 400 million being spent on InsideSafe and 2.2 billion approximately being spent overall.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  So this is a huge issue, and I believe that we do need spending on homelessness to address it. I think we've also lost the trust of the people on this issue. And so a lot of the work that I have done on my time on city council and the work that I want to do as mayor is in making sure that we are tracking every single dollar, that we are investing in what works, and we're making sure that every single dollar is actually leading to people moving off the streets. Here's what has worked. In my district, we had very different outcomes from the rest of the city. I've had a 70% reduction in tents, RVs, and encampments over three years. Just last year, we had a 49% reduction in unsheltered people because of the relentless work of our office and because we're making sure that every single step of that process has oversight and accountability.

• 41:45Jack Selby?

  What did you guys do differently?

• 41:46Speaker 01

  We're ensuring that when we are bringing people indoors, so we're making sure that outreach workers, when we're funding them, are actually going out to encampments and working with people on their path to housing, right? We're holding them accountable for that. We're making sure that, once people get into shelter, that they're able to stay in shelter. So if you look at our housing sites, we have four shelter sites that are in the district. We are working really hard to ensure that every single person in those shelters is getting access to substance use treatment.

• 42:13Jack Selby?

  How much does it cost per person?

• 42:16Speaker 01

  It depends on the intervention, okay?

• 42:18Jack Selby?

  Just on average, like, the average person on the street?

• 42:20Speaker 01

  So the, the most successful intervention, the one that I think is, is scalable, is called a time-limited subsidy program, which is a short-term rental voucher, exactly what, what, what Jason's been talking about. And what we, what we have seen is that, that short-term rental voucher, which is about, it can be up to $2,000 a month for a, for a apartment voucher subsidy, that actually has 75% of participants staying housed after the two-year voucher ends. And they stay housed through a number of different interventions. Maybe they go back to their families and reunite with their families. Maybe they actually build up to self-sufficiency. They're able to get work, they're able to pay for that unit themselves. Or three, they're able to get benefits.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  If they're veterans, let's get access to your veterans' retirement. Let's make sure that you're getting the benefits that you need to stay housed. Whatever it is, that program results in really good outcomes for people, and it's one of the cheapest, $29,000 per year to $35,000 per year per person, significantly cheaper than InsideSafe, which can be up to $100,000 per person per bed.

• 43:24Jack Selby?

  What's the worst program to solve the homeless crisis?

• 43:28Speaker 01

  The worst program is the non-functional program, is the program that is not, it's not held accountable for outcomes.

• 43:35Jack Selby?

  So which one would that be, and like, why is it failing?

• 43:37Speaker 01

  I would say that if you don't have oversight over a program, if you have a lot of turnover amongst your employees, if you have, if you're not held accountable for making sure that people are getting access to their paperwork so that they can move into their next step in whatever it is, that, that, that work doesn't always happen. I mean, you've all worked in jobs before where, if you're not held accountable for results, then you don't always deliver them. If you're, if that's not what you are, if that's not what you're being evaluated by, then that's not what you deliver. And I would say that everyone needs good management, everyone needs transparency, and, you know, you can have the exact same...

• 44:21Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Type of nonprofit doing the exact same type of work, and one will have great outcomes and one will have worse outcomes, and the difference is management. And you know that about every business across America.

• 44:55Jack Selby?

  So you're just better at managing these people that are like, holding the people that get the vouchers accountable?

• 45:02Speaker 01

  We work with, yeah, we, you, if you are monitoring outcomes, you can actually take your dollars and put them in those nonprofits that are delivering results for you. If you're monitoring performance, you actually are able to say, hey, this service provider is not delivering results, let's move to this service provider.

• 45:20Jack Selby?

  What do you do if someone is offered...

• 45:22Speaker 07

  Is that a fair answer, by the way? I mean, you haven't, you've seen two companies, and one's well-run and one's not well-run.

• 45:26Jack Selby?

  It's a completely fair answer. I'm just curious, like...

• 45:28Speaker 07

  Because it's the same people.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  It's the same thing.

• 45:29Jack Selby?

  Yeah, but what is the delta? Is it literally just the management? Like, you have either better employees...

• 45:33Speaker 01

  What is the delta between a great business and a bad?

• 45:35Jack Selby?

  I'll tell you if you, I mean, if you have a question.

• 45:36Speaker 07

  But I mean, I would agree, it's, I would say that answer would be the same answer.

• 45:39Jack Selby?

  If it's the same idea, same premise, same tile of two construction companies, one failing, one is not, then it's probably, yeah, the team members.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Right. So that, but so that, I would say management.

• 45:48Jack Selby?

  The management, yeah, the management, yeah. That picks and moves around, organizes the teams.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  And so I would say that you have to be able to build a homelessness response system here in the city of Los Angeles that is building trust with Angelinos again. It has to. And the only way you're going to do that is if you're monitoring performance and making sure you're putting money into those service providers that are delivering on results.

• 46:12Jack Selby?

  So what do you do? So what do you do with someone if they've been offered shelter 10 times and they refuse?

• 46:18Speaker 01

  So it really depends on the individual, and I've dealt with so many people who are on the streets, who, when they're offered a shelter, gladly take it. That's the majority of people.

• 46:27Jack Selby?

  Sure.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  But there are individuals who are deeply mentally ill, who have real, real mental health challenges. There are people who may be dealing with substance use issues. With those individuals, you have to follow different paths. I remember people with, we had a gentleman who had PTSD. He was, he had fought and, you know, been deployed as a, as a, in the army multiple times and dealt with a lot of issues as a result of that. It took outreach staff four months, and he moved around. You know, he'd say, oh, we, you can't be here. And then he would move around, and we were finally able to build trust. He started accepting mental health treatment. He is now in his own apartment. He is working again, and he's doing incredibly well.

• 47:13Jack Selby?

  Right.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  So, you know, and so that, that, again, with individuals who have deeper mental health issues, substance use challenges, whatever it is, there may be people who are, you know, who are doing things that, that are, that are criminal activities, right? Drug sales and all of that. That is an LAPD pathway. For everyone else, it is relentless engagement, relentless work until they get off the street. To be honest with you, Angelinos, I don't think care how you deal with this problem. They would prefer that it be done with compassion, with services, with care, and with shelter. And so what I'm trying to do is make sure that the system that is built on service to shelter and housing works, because I want them to believe that that can work, and I want to make sure that they can trust that system and that they don't mind that their taxpayer dollars are going to them.

• 47:58Jack Selby?

  And what if they set up, what if they set up an encampment? Should that be removed?

• 48:03Speaker 01

  If, whatever the regulations are, should be followed. It's not about...

• 48:06Jack Selby?

  Yeah, but what do you think? Should the encampment be removed if it's on the sidewalk?

• 48:10Speaker 01

  If it's blocking the pathway, if it's doing all of that, of course, it should be removed. But the question is, if you remove it and don't offer that person another place to go, all that will happen is that they move across the street, right? I don't have, no one has, in Los Angeles, we don't have the capacity to compel a person to accept shelter.

• 48:33Jack Selby?

  Do you think that you should?

• 48:35Speaker 07

  Wait, can I, can I jump in?

• 48:36Speaker 01

  This is, yeah, please, go ahead.

• 48:38Speaker 07

  I want to jump in because I actually researched this last night. One of the, by the way, there's, I think, Senate Bill 43, which has been expanded so that you can actually have involuntary conservatorship for people who are unable to take care of themselves, clothe themselves, feed themselves, et cetera. It is really hard to enforce that when you don't have beds and services around there that can actually take care of that person. Because are you going to put them in jail? We can't, we don't have, we don't have the room in jail either.

• 49:03Graham Stephan?

  So I mean, I grew up.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Twin Towers is our largest mental health facility, right? It's our largest mental health, it's our big jail, our county jail is our largest mental health facility. And, uh, you know, that's where a lot of people end up because the mental health care system is not taking people in. Because it is, I think, very, very under-resourced.

• 49:22Speaker 07

  We are, I think we did fund a bond, though, a California bond to build a lot more of these beds.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  You know, it's still playing out. We got some of that funding to build, um, uh, we're gonna do a, um, what are they called? Not tiny homes, like a, yeah, like a tiny homes facility for women in Hollywood.

• 49:38Speaker 07

  Many different types of beds you have to build, some for people that don't need the conservatorship, some that do, some that need the medical treatment. So you have to build multiple different types of beds over the next five years. And it's billions and billions and billions of dollars. Then you can start enforcing the conservatorships and Senate Bill 43.

• 49:56Graham Stephan?

  So the hard part is I, I grew up in, I grew up in Venice and Santa Monica, and it was compassion that I was raised with.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Hold on, I just want, I just want to say to you that what, what you have been experiencing is a system that is, I think, broadly has values that are aligned with Angeleno's, but is not functioning as well as it could. And so people are turning away from it because they're saying, I'm, I'm, I, I can't, I can't have compassion anymore because the problem needs to be addressed. What I am saying is we will audit every dollar, we will monitor performance, we will ensure.

• 50:30Graham Stephan?

  But that, but isn't that what everyone else said?

• 50:32Speaker 01

  Yes, but I'm actually, I already did it in six years in my, in my district. We've delivered results and every Angeleno deserves that. I want you to not have to ask me this question again. Because our homeless services system is so responsive that when you see someone who is in an encampment, that our team is already out there doing the work to get them indoors. That is the city that I want to build for you. I want you to not have to ask this question again. I'm tired of this hypothetical. What I want is a system that works, one that is aligned with the values of Angeleno's, and I will build that.

• 51:04Graham Stephan?

  What I'm seeing a lot is people who are not mentally well whatsoever, being offered shelter, but choosing instead to scream in the middle of the street, to throw rocks, to throw rocks at cars. The police take two hours to show up. People are passed out in the alley, they're doing drugs. My mother doesn't feel safe. Friends with kids don't want to go anywhere near the alley because there's constantly people roaming. Uh, one time they called the police and people who were doing it. And the police said, well, you know, unless they're an active threat, we don't have time to show up. So we called back and said they're ODing. And immediately they showed up.

• 51:43Speaker 07

  But they still can't do anything, even when they do.

• 51:45Graham Stephan?

  Well, once, once they showed up, the people are like, ah, and they, they roamed off. Like that, that's all that happened.

• 51:51Speaker 07

  By the way, this has been around for unfortunately decades, it's been getting worse. It's probably the, what you're going to be judged on as, as mayors is how you handle homelessness.

• 51:59Graham Stephan?

  It's never been as bad as I've seen over the last probably three to four years.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Not in my district, though. Like, it has actually improved in my district. Big encampments that were there are not there anymore because we're doing the work.

• 52:09Graham Stephan?

  What's causing homelessness?

• 52:11Speaker 01

  It's definitely rooted in affordable housing issues, right? There used to be a large number of single room occupancy hotels and cheaper housing in Los Angeles. I'm not saying that people don't have mental health issues or substance use issues. There is a lot of that as well. But when housing was cheaper, people were indoors, uh, people were in the single room occupancy hotels. People were indoors dealing with those same challenges. We had a different set of interventions to respond to those issues. Now, in a very, very expensive housing market, a lot of those people who are vulnerable in whatever way, who are, you know, one, one, one health issue away from, um,

• 52:54Speaker 01

  being kicked out of their apartment are now ending up on the streets. And then once you're on the streets, I think it's very, very hard to get back indoors.

• 53:01Speaker 07

  And way more expensive to deal with it when they get the streets.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  And it's much more expensive. And so I think at the root of it, there is a housing issue that is at the root of it. That doesn't mean that there aren't mental health challenges or substance use challenges as well. But it's just at the root, there is a, it's, it is a housing issue.

• 53:18Graham Stephan?

  So you think if housing was cheaper, we would not have as much homelessness?

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Not as much unsheltered homelessness, not as much unsheltered homelessness.

• 53:25Speaker 07

  I mean, I think that's just a correlative fact. You can't argue that. If we immediately had.

• 53:29Graham Stephan?

  How much is mental health? Because just again, anecdotally, from what I've seen, it seems like 80% are people with severe drug or mental health.

• 53:37Speaker 07

  Thousand of the, how many is it? How many people are homeless now?

• 53:41Speaker 01

  There's a lot. There's 45,000 in the city. County, I think, is like 69 or 70,000.

• 53:46Speaker 07

  I think of the 70,000 estimates are between 11 to 15,000 have, it's anywhere from moderate to severe mental health.

• 53:54Graham Stephan?

  Why does it seem like it should be flipped? That it should be 75%?

• 53:59Speaker 07

  You're not, a lot of the people that are unhoused and are mentally stable, um, are not, you know, screaming and yelling right outside my office here. So it feels like so many of them have drug addiction and mental illness.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  The most visible people, the people who are, so you'll never see the mother who is living in her car with her children or, or couch surfing, um, you won't see them on the streets. But the people you see on the streets are people with mental health challenges. The people you see on the streets are the people who are going to be screaming and yelling.

• 54:31Graham Stephan?

  What do we do for those 20% that are severely mentally ill, that should not be roaming the streets, that could be?

• 54:37Speaker 01

  What we do in the district is what I want to make sure that we're doing citywide. Each of those people has an individual pathway forward, right? And whatever that pathway is, our job as a city is to push them into that pathway. So for some people, it's going to be getting back on your meds. You do that with street medicine teams. You get, take injections of antipsychotics, you're able to normalize, and then you get back indoors. For some people.

• 55:02Speaker 07

  Can you parlay this, by the way, because right now you're calling the cops. I don't mean to interrupt them.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  No, no, no, please. I don't want to be boring.

• 55:08Speaker 07

  But this is one of your policy positions that I agree with because we may agree to disagree on how much we fund the police. And I know that you've agreed that your, your position is not to, to remove any funding from the police. But one way to help the police is to not have the police be doing these types of jobs. So can you get into that a bit?

• 55:24Speaker 01

  So, you know, if we had, what I want to invest in is making sure that we have unarmed, mental health responders that can take so many of those calls for service off of LAPD's plate. That situation that you described where police showed up two hours after you called for help about people who are, who were out of it in an alleyway, we actually have a tool to respond to that, that would be, would have been much more effective in that situation. Yeah, we have something called a circle team, which is a trained homeless outreach and mental health crisis worker who can go out to those calls for service. They have a sobering center that they can bring people to. They say to folks, hey, you, you're having a substance use issue, you can't be here, but come with us.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  And they'll sit in their van and they can, you know, relax there. They can go to a sobering center, they can sit there, or they can go take them to a hospital. Whatever that pathway is, they can actually take them off the streets. Police are, you know, they don't, they don't have the time even to respond to these kinds of calls. And they're not able to take action there unless there's an active crime being committed, unless someone's being assaulted, unless someone is in danger. And so there's actually a response that can work. Let's actually build that out citywide and let's make sure that we're actually getting people with those challenges off the streets and into places where they can get treatment and care. And I think that will make the city better, that will make our, our, our response much more effective.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  There are people who need things, who are dealing with mental health issues, who may need things like involuntary conservatorship. That process is long for a reason. You're taking away someone's freedom. Um, and that process is something that needs to be followed in those cases. There are other cases, though, where people can go into a mental health treatment bed or can get access to medications that can help them stabilize. That's what we need to be doing. Let's be out there doing that work, fighting for every bit of that care, making sure that it's being delivered in ways that actually addresses the issue.

• 57:25Graham Stephan?

  Speaking of police.

• 57:26Speaker 07

  So I want to follow up on this too, by saying, because I, I feel like it's not a good enough answer for you because you're so frustrated with.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  I know.

• 57:31Speaker 07

  And by the way, there's no, there's no one, no one can sit here and give you two sentences as to how we're going to address 10, 15,000 mentally ill, homeless people running in the streets. And I'm equally frustrated because it's outside my office all day long. But I will say that maybe the best and first thing that we can do is have a CEO, and I'm not endorsing Nithya, and I've got, you know, I think there's, I'm not endorsing Karen or Nithya, but I do believe that it takes a good CEO to get rid of fraud and abuse, to have, to judge programs on their efficiency and, and on their success, and better man.

• 58:06Speaker 07

  Manage the money. I mean, that really is the first step in solving homelessness.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  And I would say in this, you know, I am in a mayoral race, right? And I would just say, I feel like the trust in the system and the results that we're seeing are worse under Bass, are worse under Bass.

• 58:21Graham Stephan?

  Speaking of waste, fraud and abuse, what do you think of Nick Shirley?

• 58:24Speaker 01

  I think that the, I want people to trust government again. And so my hope is that we build a system here in Los Angeles where Nick Shirley cannot come and find anything to complain about. That's what I want to do. That's what I want to do.

• 58:39Graham Stephan?

  What do you think about the work he's doing and the fraud that he's allegedly uncovering?

• 58:42Speaker 07

  Well, I don't think it needs to be personal to Nick. I think, why don't we just address fraud, waste and abuse?

• 58:46Speaker 01

  It's bad. It's like, I believe in a system where people should trust that their taxpayer dollars are going towards good outcomes and good results, right? And so that kind of, if he's uncovering fraud, it's bad for government. It's bad for the cities that, that, that he's operating in. I, again, I want to make sure that we're building a city that he can't come to and-

• 59:07Graham Stephan?

  It just seems as though there's a lot of money funneling to homeless advocates and homeless programs, and it creates an incentive for people not to really solve the problem, but rather-

• 59:20Speaker 01

  But that's why, that's why audits are important. That's why performance management is important. That's why transparency is important. That's why data is important.

• 59:27Graham Stephan?

  How do we get all of that, though?

• 59:28Jack Selby?

  I want to know, how do we increase transparency? Because that's the main thing. Like, if I could go, documentation on the budgets of local governments, federal governments is so complicated, it's inaccessible. But if there was a sheet that was passed out to every citizen or whatever, like an email or something that was sent out once a month, hey, this is how much we made, this is how much we spent, this is what the spending actually achieved, like, I don't understand why we don't have something like that.

• 59:55Speaker 07

  Almost like public corporations have to do every quarter.

• 59:56Jack Selby?

  It should be. Like, the government would never pass an audit, right? And yet I'm supposed to be able to keep control of-

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  Well, governments are audited all the time. There's so many audits.

• 1:00:04Graham Stephan?

  And they don't pass, I mean, the Pentagon has failed. It's like eighth audit. And, and everything runs in a deficit. There's a billion dollar deficit here. Like, where does the money go?

• 1:00:11Speaker 07

  Well, why don't you use the example of the controller? Because I think that Bass is-

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  Yes. So to me, it feels like transparency is-

• 1:00:18Jack Selby?

  Oh, transparency is number one.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  Transparency is the key. Transparency is the absolute key. And I, what part of the reason why I'm, I'm, you know, I'm endorsed by our city controller, who has asked to audit our homelessness dollars, including Mayor Bass's Inside Safe intervention, which is $400 million, 40% of participants back to the streets. You know, $100,000 per person per year, some of those most expensive motel rooms, most expensive interventions in homelessness. That is the exact kind of thing that we need to be auditing and being transparent about. And the way you can do it is by partnering with people like the city controller to not just make it transparent, but to make it easily legible for the public. Let's really show where our taxpayer dollars are going.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Let's show where our beds are, how many of them are full on any given night, and how we can actually restore trust in the data that we're putting out there. Are we doing in-person visits to those sites? Are we actually making sure that this data is robust? That system is one that I have actually been trying to build at the city. I pushed really hard to create a Bureau of Homelessness Oversight. I created the first set of data and performance metrics at the city on these issues. And when I pushed harder to make it something that would be for every dollar in the city, this mayor and other people in leadership pushed back. And so that's part of the reason why I'm running. I want to do that.

• 1:01:38Graham Stephan?

  Why did they push back? Why do they not want the problem to get better?

• 1:01:41Speaker 07

  Have you seen the stats on Inside Safe? Forty, over 40%, I don't know if the word recidivism is, is accurate, but 40% of the, of the people that went into the program are back on the streets. It's an abysmal record. The, the homeless count is up, unsheltered count is up 7.9% this year. We spent Inside Safe. Bass had a chance to, to work on homelessness. That was her baby. Inside Safe, it has been an abject failure, I think, in many metrics. And homelessness is up. So, I mean, I don't think she wants people to audit that. I don't, I mean, naturally, I don't think she'd want to have that audit.

• 1:02:18Jack Selby?

  I think that we keep going back to homelessness, which is obviously, it's a very pressing issue and extremely important to a lot of people that live here. I do want to go to the, the fraud, though, and I am curious if you could answer one of two possible answers. Is it a spending problem or is it an income problem?

• 1:02:35Graham Stephan?

  And that's another question that a lot of business owners also ask themselves. It's like, am I having a spending problem or an income problem? Either way, more sales never hurt anybody.

• 1:02:44Jack Selby?

  And with Black Friday coming up, this is the biggest chance all year to get them.

• 1:02:48Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, this is the time of year when more people are already shopping online and ready to buy. So if your store isn't online yet, our partner Shopify could get you there fast.

• 1:02:56Jack Selby?

  Before I started working with Graham, I set up maybe six or seven different Shopify stores, and I just kept going back to Shopify because there was truly not even a competitor. If a simple tin like me can figure it out, I'm sure everybody else can. If you want to start an online business and start selling your product or service, Shopify is absolutely the best place to start.

• 1:03:14Graham Stephan?

  And now they've got Sidekick, which is Shopify's AI assistant. It helps you every step of the way, from setting up your store to planning your Black Friday promotions.

• 1:03:23Jack Selby?

  Plus, their pre-built themes in AI Site Builder can help you create a professional storefront without ever having to hire anyone to build your website.

• 1:03:30Graham Stephan?

  So if you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com/ICH to start your free trial.

• 1:03:36Jack Selby?

  That is Shopify.com/ICH.

• 1:03:38Graham Stephan?

  Again, just go to Shopify.com/ICH today to hear your first-

• 1:03:44Jack Selby?

  I think that we keep going back to homelessness, which is obviously, it's a very pressing issue and extremely important to a lot of people that live here. I do want to go to the, the fraud, though, and I am curious if you could answer one of two possible answers. Is it a spending problem or is it an income problem?

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Both are true. Okay. We, we definitely do not have the management and oversight that we need over many of our essential services to ensure that the city is delivering what Angelenos expect and deserve. Whether it is on fixing potholes, fixing streetlights, on picking up trash, addressing graffiti,

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  investing in our parks and public spaces. These are all things that I think the departments can do better on delivering. And I think with better management, better oversight, we can deliver better outcomes and results.

• 1:04:35Graham Stephan?

  Why does it seem like Orange County, though, is so much better in terms of their services?

• 1:04:39Speaker 07

  I want to interject, because that's, by the way, it's such a complicated question, what you just said. But I want to interject on a particular point, but you, you didn't raise, but I think it's a good kind of litmus test for this. And I think we'll disagree on, on the income, because, you know, I'm not as pro-tax as you probably. But Mayor Bass put, pushed for a remodel slash expansion of the Downtown Convention Center. 2.9 billion dollar project with another nearly $3 billion in financing. So it's going to cost nearly $6 billion.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  And by the way, that, that, that debt now is so much more expensive because of the, the bond, the government. Have you seen the government bond market and all of it?

• 1:05:15Speaker 07

  I think it did go up a few hundred million dollars.

• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  Yes, it's going to be more expensive.

• 1:05:17Speaker 07

  It's like there's a high-speed rail. It's our, it's the LA version of the California high-speed rail in terms of a boondoggle.

• 1:05:22Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23Speaker 07

  Now, I understand that, my personal belief is that, is that Mayor Bass want to do this to placate the unions, to get, bring jobs to downtown, to get money in, and endorsements into her campaign.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  Downtown, a lot of the downtown business interests, Airbnb, were really pushing these, this intervention.

• 1:05:41Speaker 07

  I think there was one or two city council members, I know you were one of them, I think there might have been one other, that voted against this. And by the way, probably not in your, in your political interest, because the unions probably wanted this, and the DSA probably wanted this, et cetera. But I give her a lot of credit for this. It's actually one of my favorite things about your, I think, your approach to this, is that you're not, you don't just say yes to every project, even if the unions are for it, et cetera. But the cities, and I'm sorry to belabor this because you're a national audience, but I'll be really quick. The city's own rosy scenario, meaning their own best-case scenario, is that the city of Los Angeles loses $90 million a year. We don't make money on this investment.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  For the next 30 years.

• 1:06:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, for 30 years. So we lose $90 million, and Karen Bass pushed this. And now our tax dollars, which, who cares if it's income or spinach, let's say it's both. The, you don't need to agree on the income. We definitely should not be throwing our money away so that politicians are getting endorsements and money into their, into their political campaigns. And yes, of course, the $6 billion is going to create jobs, and it's, obviously, we're not burning the money. It's going to do some good. But why would you spend $6 billion if you're getting $5 billion back? That makes no sense. And she said, no, this makes no sense. I give you credit for that.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and but this is the kind of thing that I, you know, this is part of why I want to bring more people into into politics. I want more people looking at our local political system. I want more people making sure that politicians are actually pushing for things that actually deliver results for people. And I think that's that's at the heart of what you're asking for is transparency and accountability. And I I do think that if we have more people engaged in our local politics, that these kinds of decisions which often get made, you know, in back rooms, like they will come out into the open and people can can say, hey, this isn't the kind of city I want. This is not where I want my taxpayer dollars going is into a convention center expansion

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  when the convention business is shrinking, that just because downtown business interests want this, that we don't necessarily need to invest $6 billion of our public funds in it at a time when the city is already financially unstable, when we have the Olympics coming in and we may be facing financial issues as a result of that. So I think this is exactly the kind of thing that we that I believe that cities can do better at is actually making the case for our public spending, making sure that dollars are being tracked, making sure that we're actually delivering results in what I want to do as mayor.

• 1:08:13Jack Selby?

  Honestly, even if it was an abject failure, but there was transparency, I would be like the first person in line, like rooting just at the ballot box, like, here we go, knit the wrong, like, let's go.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  Okay, well, I can I can cert I will commit to transparency, but I also hope that it's not going to be an abject failure. We're actually going to deliver results.

• 1:08:32Jack Selby?

  Of course, yeah, right, naturally.

• 1:08:33Speaker 07

  Let's have some loftier goals.

• 1:08:34Jack Selby?

  Obviously, that would be an amazing thing, as if it was a success. But for me, it's I just like feel like the the average person experiences all of the negatives and virtually zero of the the positives of the local policy. And they also have no idea why things are so bad. They don't even know. And they ask questions like, oh, well, how do you reduce homelessness? Well, we're gonna bolster the initiatives and we're going to make it easier to build homes and we're gonna do that. It's like, okay, that's like sort of descript, sort of nondescript. It's not very specific. I don't know what change I can actually expect because it's really easy just to say, this is the villain.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  Well, we're

• 1:09:09Jack Selby?

  Like identifying the problem is not solving.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Right, but let's let's audit every dollar. Let's be transparent about what what we're spending on and let us invest.

• 1:09:19Jack Selby?

  I love that.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  Let's invest in what works. That's it. Let's invest in what works.

• 1:09:22Graham Stephan?

  And how do you how do you expect to reduce crime?

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  I think people are feeling unsafe. They feel a sense of of kind of insecurity because of street homelessness, because of, you know, because of encampments being on the streets.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  And I think making sure that we're able to bring people indoors is really important, is really important for safety, and it's also important for perceptions of safety. You know, studies have shown that people who are on the streets are also mostly the victims of crime. Like, if there is crime in an area connected to homelessness, it's usually people who are experiencing homelessness themselves.

• 1:10:01Graham Stephan?

  Is it homeless on homeless crime, though?

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  That it's hard, you know, people are, but people are victims out there. It's, you know, it's not safe to be on the streets for mostly for people who are actually on the streets themselves. Like, bringing people indoors into safety is really important for me. It is a humanitarian crisis on the streets. But I also think that if we can address graffiti, address pickup trash, make sure that we're addressing street homelessness, bringing people into safety, I actually think that people will feel safer.

• 1:10:29Graham Stephan?

  Do you think, do you think that, yeah, but do you don't think that we need more police officers?

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  So the city has, you know, tried to hire more police officers and our police force is shrinking. And so what a lot of the policies that I'm I'm talking about, I've said I want to maintain the size of our existing police force. We need to make sure that we're hiring to attrition, which means improving our personnel department, making it easier and faster to recruit people, all, you know, all stuff that I think needs to happen at the city of Los Angeles across the board.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  But I also really do think it's important for us to take a lot of the calls that are currently coming to LAPD off their plates, that there's thousands of calls that are coming in, calls for service that are for things that you don't need armed officers to go out for, like the issue that you had with with a person who is on your sidewalk, who is clearly homeless, who is maybe not someone you feel comfortable talking to. LAPD would come out to that situation and not be able to do anything, right? If they're not, if there's not a crime happening there, if they're not a threat to themselves.

• 1:11:36Graham Stephan?

  Well, there is a crime. They're they're doing drugs.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  Well, they're no, if they're just sitting on your sidewalk.

• 1:11:40Graham Stephan?

  No, no, they're doing, they're doing drugs.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  Well, that's a different situation.

• 1:11:43Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Right? What I'm talking about is someone sitting on your sidewalk, talking to, talking to themselves potentially.

• 1:11:49Graham Stephan?

  Oh, no, no, no, I mean, that that's, that's not what I'm taught. Anytime the police have been called, it's because they're doing drugs in public.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  Right, so but what I'm talking about is there's a whole set of calls that are coming in for situations where people feel uncomfortable talking to an individual, but they clearly need some assistance, right? That is where you have this unarmed mental health responders. And if you actually build that out, you can take thousands of call load off of LAPD, thousands of calls off of LAPD's plate, leave armed officers able to respond to the calls that you need armed officers to respond to, and you'll have actually trained responders for these other calls. We've done it in parts of Hollywood. We've done it in Los Feliz. There's a group that's responding to calls in Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys. And all of those places, what we've seen is that they are actually responding more effectively to those calls.

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  They don't often, almost never do they actually need to call LAPD as backup because those situations don't require police response at all, but they're actually able to deliver more safety, you know? More safety for the people who are calling.

• 1:12:50Speaker 07

  Also, if you can't hire, and listen, I think both of us would want more police officers. There's obviously budgetary constraints, but it would probably be more of a priority for me than.

• 1:12:57Graham Stephan?

  I don't think there's necessarily budget constraints because we're spending, you know, we're wasting all this money.

• 1:13:01Speaker 07

  Putting it aside.

• 1:13:01Graham Stephan?

  So we have the money for it.

• 1:13:03Speaker 07

  I don't disagree with you on on hiring more police, but I think the there's.

• 1:13:09Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies. 18 plus.

• 1:13:34Speaker 06

  Your credit card company is hoping you don't hear this. They're charging you 21% APR interest, making it hard to pay down your balance. A home equity loan from Rocket Mortgage could cut your interest rate by more than half, so you could wipe out your high-interest credit card debt with the equity you've built in your home without touching your current mortgage rate. See how much you could save at rocketmortgage.com. Rocket Mortgage LLC, licensed in 50 states. NMLS, consumeraccess.org, number 3030. Call 8004-ROCKET for full program details.

• 1:14:03Speaker 07

  There is a compromise, which is if we're gonna keep, at least not let the police force shrink and keep it the same size, that at least get those police officers out there handling crimes instead of being at desk jobs.

• 1:14:14Jack Selby?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:14Speaker 07

  And instead of going out to call.

• 1:14:16Graham Stephan?

  But it also seems as though police officers lately have been villainized. And there's less of an incentive anymore to become a police officer. Like, I remember as a kid, when I was like six years, I want to be a police officer. I thought that was the coolest thing in the world.

• 1:14:28Speaker 07

  Same.

• 1:14:28Graham Stephan?

  Now it just seems like, oh, the police officer's the bad guy. We don't like the police officer.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  You know, I think that that environment is changing. I think that may have been true in the past, but I I don't feel like that is the that is the reason why we are not able to hire here in in Los Angeles. The reason why we're not able to hire is because our personnel department is very slow. It's because we're not able to even fill our recruit classes fast enough. It takes a year to bring someone into a recruit class. This is bureaucratic barriers that we're facing to hiring.

• 1:15:02Speaker 07

  What about the desk jobs? Because I don't think.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, so there's like people in LAPD now who are doing jobs that are civilian jobs, administrative jobs, desk jobs. We need to think about how we can actually get people, hire civilians to do that work and get police officers deployed. And I think thinking about deployment, making sure deployment is adapting to meet new conditions, our basic car and patrol plans are from 30 years ago. Like, let's actually have a conversation about what deployment looks like and what it needs to be for 2026.

• 1:15:32Graham Stephan?

  But you think we should keep the police officers the same? You don't think we should hire more?

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  I want to maintain the size of our police force. That's what that's where we're at right now.

• 1:15:39Graham Stephan?

  Why, why do you believe that that is the right amount of police officers?

• 1:15:43Jack Selby?

  I think it's too many because I got pulled over on the way over here.

• 1:15:45Graham Stephan?

  He did. On full self-driving, by the way. Thanks, Jason.

• 1:15:49Speaker 07

  I want the record to reflect that I donated $100,000 to the police department and fire department.

• 1:15:53Jack Selby?

  What's it on pull you over?

• 1:15:53Speaker 07

  And then, and then, yeah. And I wanted, all I wanted was a bumper sticker to put on that I donated to that I can't get messed with, and I didn't get a bumper sticker.

• 1:16:01Graham Stephan?

  But what makes you think that the current amount is the right amount? Why not less and why not more? Why is this the perfect?

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  So I think that's a good question. I that's, by the way, a question that should be asked is like, what is the right number of officers to respond to these?

• 1:16:14Speaker 07

  Per citizen than like New York and other cities.

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  No, that is actually true. But if you, it's interesting, I just looked at a comparison list of the number of officers, like per capita officers, comparing a number of cities in California to other cities across America. And except for Beverly Hills, which is an outlier.

• 1:16:33Speaker 07

  It's too small, anyway.

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  Well, but they have a lot of cops per population.

• 1:16:36Speaker 07

  But how do we compare to like Chicago, New York?

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  So compared to those cities, we have fewer officers per capita. But we have, across Californian cities, we have almost the same per capita.

• 1:16:47Speaker 07

  Compared to San Francisco, yeah.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, like we're compared to San Francisco, or I think San Diego. I can look this up. This was a Rand study. I'm sorry, I don't have all of the.

• 1:16:55Speaker 07

  No, but you're right, because I looked at it, too.

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  It it's interesting, like California has fewer officers per capita than other Californian cities.

• 1:17:03Speaker 07

  But our cities are relatively similar.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I don't know, so what is the right number? The right number is the number that you need to respond to the calls for service that you're getting, right? So the question that I would have is, how do we get to that answer? What are the number of calls that we're getting? What kinds of calls are we getting? What is the appropriate deployment for the kinds of calls that we're getting? That's not a study that the city of LA has done recently. Let's do that work. Let's actually answer those questions, right? This isn't, what it, what has, I'm sorry, but this, this has become just like an ideological test is like, you know, what, what do you?

• 1:17:37Speaker 07

  Well, that's why I want to push back and ask you, what's the difference between hiring more officers and hiring people to take the desk jobs and respond to the calls that don't require officers so that officers are available to do their work? Isn't that the same thing as hiring my office?

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  Right, and I would say that-

• 1:17:51Graham Stephan?

  I think whatever it takes to have a call under 10 minutes, I think is reasonable to get someone out there.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  And here's what I would say, I want to have a system in Los Angeles where if you call 911 for help, that someone picks up the phone quickly and that the right person shows up for your call. And I will do whatever it takes to build that system out here in the city of Los Angeles. It's not an ideological response, it's literally how do we make sure that residents of Los Angeles are getting the help that they need?

• 1:18:16Jack Selby?

  I think that's a really good data point because what I love about your perspective is you want everything to back into some sort of metric. That you can say, okay, you know, this used to be 45 minute average call time responding, you know, person on scene. I'm going to get that down to 32.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:34Jack Selby?

  And you slowly kind of like try to chip away at that. I really enjoy that. What would be, you said every single call gets responded to, you're going to have someone there. What would be a good amount of time that the citizens of Los Angeles could kind of fall back into?

• 1:18:48Speaker 07

  There's too much nuance from, I mean, that's just a-

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a tough question because depending on the call, right.

• 1:18:53Jack Selby?

  Because, well, yeah, you're going to have people, my cat's stuck in a tree and stuff like that.

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:56Speaker 07

  And also where they live. I mean, it's an impossible question to give a minute, you know, eight minutes or 12 minutes. I mean, is it a murder?

• 1:19:02Speaker 01

  And there's, if it's a crime in commission, if there's violence happening, you need someone to show up immediately.

• 1:19:09Speaker 07

  Drones, just saying.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  Sure. But if you, but if you have a situation where you have a burglary that's already occurred, right? So let's say the burglar is gone, your home has been burglarized. What is the appropriate and minimum time that you think someone should take?

• 1:19:26Speaker 07

  Well, it's not three days, which is what it is.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  Well, let's not, yeah, three days is too long, hours is too long. What is the appropriate time? Let's try and meet that goal. I don't know off the top of my head what, what that goal should be that we should set, but let's set a goal and let's meet it. You know, and let's say if you don't need PD armed officers showing up to take the report after a burglar has already left, but you need someone to show up there and collect evidence and to make sure that you're filing the police report appropriately, who can we send out? How do we make sure that that person goes out quickly? How do we actually make sure that system is responsive? These are questions that I want to ask about the city and how it functions that I think, that I believe require real discussion and analysis. We don't have that in standards and I want to set those standards.

• 1:20:09Speaker 07

  Guys, I don't want to interrupt you, but I know, I know you probably are going to tap it at some point. And I want to push on this-

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  I don't know how you guys have the standards.

• 1:20:14Graham Stephan?

  Oh, yeah, we can keep going.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  I mean, it's wild.

• 1:20:17Graham Stephan?

  It's just chatting with friends.

• 1:20:18Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:20:18Jack Selby?

  It's all this. I mean, it's a muscle.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  But I'm in the hot seat here, you just-

• 1:20:23Jack Selby?

  You can turn us in the hot seat, ask us questions, yeah.

• 1:20:25Graham Stephan?

  Pin it around. I am so down, we can flip it around.

• 1:20:28Speaker 07

  I want to keep you in the hot seat for a second. But for benevolent reasons, and that is because I think a lot of people dismiss you because of the DSA Association. And by the way, in most elections, probably so would I, if I hadn't met you. And I probably didn't, and I didn't take the time to follow your policies and follow your, and actually figure out what you're about. I probably would have dismissed you because I, you know, not everyone has the time.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:51Speaker 07

  So I want to press you on some, the, the DSA has some pretty extreme policies, which I highly doubt you, you espouse. And I'm not going to force you to like, you know, it's not a litmus test here.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:21:03Speaker 07

  But at the same time, I do want to get out some of these policies, which concern a lot of people, moderates and conservatives moreover. And that is, you know, abolishing prisons and abolishing the Senate and abolishing the Constitution.

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  Well, I don't want to do any of that. So I just want to be very clear about-

• 1:21:20Graham Stephan?

  What about a wealth tax?

• 1:21:21Speaker 07

  Wait, but I want to, hold on, I want to finish on the DSA policies, if you don't mind.

• 1:21:24Graham Stephan?

  Sure.

• 1:21:24Speaker 07

  Because one of them is also getting rid of expropriating property from private ownership, which means basically the government owns housing and landlords and individuals like me and Graham can't own housing.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  I, so I believe in a public housing as well, like public housing plays a role, right? There's no-

• 1:21:47Speaker 07

  But does private-

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  Private also plays a role, must play a role in, I mean, does play a role and must play a role.

• 1:21:53Speaker 07

  And must continue to play a role.

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  And must continue to play a role. And my goal is to make it better. And to make it a better environment for people to rent in, make it a better people, environment for, and I would say even make it a better environment for people to build and invest in, right? I don't think those two goals are-

• 1:22:07Speaker 07

  But not, I just want to check out these boxes so people can't say that, oh, she's a- But there's, well, I apologize for not, but there's a couple others that I'm trying, oh yeah. Government owning large businesses. So literally part of the policy is that the government would take over ownership of Walmart or Tesla or other large companies. I mean, do you believe in corporate enterprise and, or did the government mention all those?

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  I mean, I do believe in corporate enterprise and I would say the Trump administration has actually been doing more of this government ownership.

• 1:22:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, I don't disagree.

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:22:42Speaker 07

  But I just wanted to check these off so that people can't just say, because if you go on the DSA website, it is a concerning platform.

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:50Speaker 07

  But I don't think you're espousing, even though you're endorsed by them, I don't think you're espousing that platform.

• 1:22:55Jack Selby?

  Didn't they like refuse to endorse you after the housing thing or the mansion tax thing happened?

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  They were, no, they've endorsed me again. But yes, we have some disagreements. But I would just say, look, the DSA, I think there's, I don't want to, I don't want to delve too deeply necessarily, but I will just say that I think there's a lot of robust conversations out there, even within the DSA about housing policy. And it's a big tent and, and the coalition that I'm bringing into this race is the biggest possible tent, you know? And it has to be because we're up against establishment politics. And to me, the definition of establishment politics in a, in a, in a city like this is one where you take the voters for granted, where you're not working every single day to earn their trust.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  And I have never been that kind of politician. And that's what I want to, I want to be a mayor that works every day to earn Angelino's trust.

• 1:23:46Speaker 07

  And we shouldn't, by the way, we should not be going to the ballot box, holding our noses and casting a vote. And I will say that every single person I've talked to that supports Karen Bass, and I'm not taking a position, but I don't think I've met someone who actually is excited to vote for Karen Bass. If anything, they are going to hold their nose and check on Karen Bass in the ballot box. And that is not how we should be voting for a mayor.

• 1:24:09Jack Selby?

  Yeah, but on financial policy for millionaires like Graham and billionaires like Jason, would you introduce it or do you support, do you support some sort of a wealth tax? And how would their taxes change?

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  I think that wealthier people should pay more in taxes. I do believe that. Okay, I know this, we may-

• 1:24:25Speaker 07

  So do I, so do I.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:24:27Speaker 07

  I'm not philosophically against taxation.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  But I will, yes, and I think, you know, I think that people who are making more money should pay more because we are all contributing to a society and that society, the more stable that society is, the better off everyone is, right? And I believe that people who are wealthier should pay more.

• 1:24:45Jack Selby?

  How much more?

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  Hold on, I don't have, look.

• 1:24:48Speaker 07

  I think we all agree on that.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  Yes, but here's the reality, here's the reality right now.

• 1:24:51Graham Stephan?

  I disagree.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Here's why, here's why I-

• 1:24:53Graham Stephan?

  I'll tell you.

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:24:54Graham Stephan?

  I'll tell you why.

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  Here's why I really believe, I keep harping on the issue of trust though. Because the city of Los Angeles, it does not have the trust of its residents right now. The city hall has lost the faith and trust of Angelino's. And so even if I wanted to pass a tax right now, I don't think I could get it passed. In fact, I know that because in June, there were two taxes on the ballot. A tourism tax, meaning residents weren't even going to pay it, tourists were going to pay it. And the residents of the city of Los Angeles said no to that tax increase. And they said no to a tax increase to fund streetlight repairs. So the city of Los Angeles, if we want to raise taxes, we got to earn trust again. And I am here to earn your trust. That is what I'm-

• 1:25:37Graham Stephan?

  Here's my flashback on it. Here's my, no, no, no.

• 1:25:39Speaker 07

  I would hate that if I trusted it was going to-

• 1:25:41Jack Selby?

  Oh, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Everything hinges on transparency.

• 1:25:44Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, but that's why, but that's why I'm saying no on higher taxes because it's raising taxes and then it's just being squandered. It is just being wasted.

• 1:25:51Speaker 07

  Two separate arguments.

• 1:25:52Speaker 01

  Those are two separate arguments and I-

• 1:25:53Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, but why should we tax first before actually getting the spending under control?

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  That's not what I'm, I just literally said the opposite, sir. You know, I'm saying let's build trust again and then I'll come back to you.

• 1:26:03Graham Stephan?

  But you also said that rich people should pay more.

• 1:26:06Speaker 07

  Well, I would say that too, but I would also say-

• 1:26:08Jack Selby?

  That's not more than what they're currently paying, that's just more than vacuum.

• 1:26:11Speaker 07

  Before we increase taxes.

• 1:26:11Graham Stephan?

  California is already, you're paying more than 50%. So like, when is it just purely just-

• 1:26:17Speaker 07

  This is not LA policy by the way, we're not dictating federal policy.

• 1:26:19Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  What I'm here to say is that, not have a hypothetical argument. What I'm here to say is that the city of Los Angeles needs to deliver essential services-

• 1:26:28Graham Stephan?

  Agreed.

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  And earn your trust again. And that's why I am running for mayor. I want to do that. I really believe in city hall. I think it can, I want people to raise their expectations for Los Angeles and I want to work as hard as possible to meet them. That is my goal.

• 1:26:40Jack Selby?

  So in all honesty, if I'm at the ballot box with the limited information that I have, I would vote for you.

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:26:47Jack Selby?

  And the reason is, the reason is, I mean, you and I probably disagree pretty aggressively on things.

• 1:26:51Graham Stephan?

  We do.

• 1:26:52Jack Selby?

  But I deeply, deeply, deeply admire your willingness to come and sit down on a podcast. And like, I don't even know, I don't, I don't, I don't think you asked for editing privileges or anything. You're like, yeah, I'm going to come, I'm going to sit down, like I'm going to have a conversation. I'm willing to have nuanced discussions and I really admire that. Not just because it's really nice for us because we want to make episodes, but also because like it's great that you're, you're willing and able to do that. A lot of people completely deny that. And the only thing, the only logical conclusion that I can have is that they're too ideological and they're not willing to actually back into their beliefs. They just want to say something, get people to support them and then leave.

• 1:27:29Graham Stephan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:30Jack Selby?

  So I appreciate you doing this.

• 1:27:30Graham Stephan?

  And in fairness as well, we did reach out to Karen Bass, we never heard back. So for the record, we tried, you responded back, you came on. I really appreciate that. And so-

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  And I appreciate you too. And I, I really, I want to say that I know that, yeah, there's probably a lot that we have real disagreements about. But I hope that if I am elected mayor, that we can have this conversation in two years and that you'll say, yes, I have more trust and faith in the city of Los Angeles. That's my goal and that's, and we're going to ring that bell.

• 1:28:03Graham Stephan?

  And if I could ever be of service or just a sounding board-

• 1:28:06Jack Selby?

  Housing policy.

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  Okay, good.

• 1:28:07Graham Stephan?

  Yeah, for anything. Seriously, I would love to be available at any point because I, like I said, I grew up here and unfortunately I've had really bad experiences. So if there's anything I could provide from my perspective, whether or not it goes anywhere, I'm always open.

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  Let's see what happens on November 3rd, but let's keep this conversation open. So I just want to say to everyone who's watching out there, maybe with some skepticism, my, my strongest ideology is delivering results for the residents of Los Angeles. And definitely go out and vote, definitely go out and make your voices heard. And I hope that I have the chance to deliver for you.

• 1:28:41Jack Selby?

  Thank you so much for coming on the Ice Coffee Hour.

• 1:28:43Graham Stephan?

  Really appreciate it.

• 1:28:43Jack Selby?

  Thank you for making this happen, Jason. Thanks for watching. Until next time. Bodybuilding is the worst sport you could possibly do.

• 1:28:51Graham Stephan?

  What do you think about fat shaming?

• 1:28:53Speaker 03

  I think fat shaming can absolutely work.

• 1:28:54Graham Stephan?

  Is it really bad that I don't want to be fat? That I don't want to be unhealthy? So if someone's trying to ascend, give us the first five things they do today.

• 1:29:04Speaker 03

  Number one is Mr. Mike is delusional. He's convinced himself in order to cope that he's on low doses.

• 1:29:10Jack Selby?

  What if Mike Isratel came to and said, look, I don't like it when you make these videos on me?

• 1:29:14Speaker 03

  Mike Isratel has literally said, you can do anything you want, talk about me whenever you want. Just because I'm popular. And if I fall off tomorrow, Greg will never make another video about me again. What muscles do you think women look for most in men? All these guys doing hand workouts to try to impress, I'm like, look, spend less of the time on that and get a job and have some money. Girls care about your wallet. How does a 16 year old look like this? A lot of steroids and a lot of working out. Like 16 year olds are doing steroids now and bragging about it. At this point, it's insane.

• 1:29:45Graham Stephan?

  Who is the worst fitness influencer right now?

• 1:30:04Speaker 07

  You're listening to a quick ad.

• 1:30:06Jack Selby?

  You know what else is quick?

• 1:30:07Speaker 07

  Selling your car on Carvana. Just put in your vehicle information and we'll give you an offer. Done. No hassle, no negotiation, no guy from an online listing lowballing you. Which means by the time I'm done explaining this, you could have basically done it.

• 1:30:27Speaker 07

  Still haven't started? Hey, better late than ever. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply.