Spencer Pratt, a reality television star who has relentlessly criticized California’s liberal leaders since his Los Angeles home burned down during last January’s wildfires, said on Wednesday that he will challenge Mayor Karen Bass in the June election.
“The system in Los Angeles isn’t struggling, it’s fundamentally broken,” Mr. Pratt told a small crowd of fire survivors at a rally marking the one-year anniversary of the disaster. “It is a machine designed to protect the people at the top and the friends they exchange favors with while the rest of us drown in toxic smoke and ash.”
Mr. Pratt was living in Pacific Palisades with his wife, Heidi Montag, and their two children when wildfire swept through the affluent coastal enclave last Jan. 7.
Mr. Pratt and Ms. Montag are best known for their appearances two decades ago as a couple on MTV’s soapy show “The Hills.” But over the past year, Mr. Pratt has made the fire, and the government failures he views as the cause, a constant focus of posts on Instagram and TikTok. His conservative viewpoint has made him popular among Republican politicians.
The mayor was out of the country at the start of the fire, which killed at least 12 people and destroyed more than 6,000 buildings. The city’s fire department has also been criticized for failing to deploy more equipment and personnel in advance of the coming windstorm despite warnings from forecasters about the fire danger.
Federal authorities have since said that the Palisades fire appeared to have been sparked by embers from a Jan. 1 fire that had smoldered for days after Los Angeles city firefighters had declared it extinguished.
Residents, including Mr. Pratt, have complained furiously that the city and state should have done more to prevent it. He and others have also sued the city for a disastrous failure in water pressure that they attribute to the loss of a local reservoir, which had been emptied for repairs.
Mr. Pratt’s campaign announcement took some in the audience by surprise and significantly raised the political stakes for Ms. Bass.
A nationally known Democrat, Ms. Bass cruised into office in the 2022 election, handily beating a billionaire business leader who had spent more than $100 million on his campaign.
Her absence last Jan. 7, for a diplomatic trip to Ghana, gutted her approval ratings. Only after the Trump administration enraged Los Angeles voters months later with a series of militarized raids at immigrant workplaces, and she heatedly denounced him, did her popularity begin to rebound.
Ms. Bass is already being challenged from her political left, by Rae Huang, a community organizer and progressive, and from the center, by Austin Beutner, a former school superintendent and civic leader, whose home, also in Pacific Palisades, was rendered uninhabitable due to toxic smoke.
Los Angeles mayoral primaries are nonpartisan. If no candidate wins at least 50 percent of the vote in the primary in June, the two top contenders will go to a runoff election.
Mr. Pratt grew up in Pacific Palisades. The Palisades fire destroyed the $2.5 million, three-bedroom home where Mr. Pratt and Ms. Montag had lived since 2017, along with a house belonging to his parents.
Since the destruction, he has become one of the loudest and most influential critics of California’s Democratic leaders, taking aim in particular at Ms. Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom.
His emotional and often viral posts, spotty accuracy notwithstanding, helped stop state legislation that would have enabled a regional rebuilding authority, and helped prompt two Republican U.S. senators to begin an investigation into the fires in October. “Spencer for Governor” T-shirts have been on sale for months on his website. They were available at a discount after his speech.
This month, Simon & Schuster is scheduled to release his memoir, “The Guy You Loved to Hate.” Mr. Pratt described the book in an interview with The New York Times as a look back on his career as a reality television villain and his subsequent redemption.
Mr. Pratt’s entry into the mayoral contest came as communities across Southern California held memorials on Wednesday commemorating the lives and property lost in the Palisades fire, the Eaton fire in nearby Altadena and other wildfires in the region last January.
As Mr. Pratt’s campaign event in the Palisades began, Mr. Newsom was finishing a visit to Palisades Charter High School, which will reopen later this month, and preparing to meet privately at a local nonprofit with Eaton fire survivors.
Ms. Bass, who had ordered the flags at City Hall to be flown at half-staff, had spent the morning with faith leaders at a landmark spiritual sanctuary in the Palisades, the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine.
Doug Herman, a spokesman for Ms. Bass’s campaign, dismissed Mr. Pratt’s candidacy.
“It’s no shock that in advance of his imminent book release, a reality TV ‘villain’ who once staged a fake divorce to boost ratings and spent the last summer spewing post-fire misinformation and disinformation to pump up his social media following, would now announce he’s running for mayor,” Mr. Herman said.
Shawn Hubler is The Times’s Los Angeles bureau chief, reporting on the news, trends and personalities of Southern California.
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