The Spencer Pratt Aesthetic

For a guy who lives in a trailer, Spencer Pratt has unusually good taste in high-rise architecture.

In a recent interview with the All-In Podcast, Pratt declared, “ we're going to have L.A. so beautiful. No more of these high-density, SB-79, prison-like structures.” The video of Pratt’s interview was accompanied by an AI-generated video envisioning soaring, gleaming towers that represent a new era of order, tranquility, and beauty. He calls out Art Deco in particular as the hallmark of a more attractive city. He even assured “the YIMBY people [that they] can have all their bike lanes going through the sky.” 

I’m not sure that's quite what YIMBY’s want. But, anyhow, this is the city Pratt promises to build when he becomes mayor. It sounds pretty nice.

Let’s back up. 

Spencer Pratt does not actually live in a trailer. As reported recently by TMZ, Pratt has actually been living at the Hotel Bel-Air. That’s controversial because, in a campaign video released April 29, Pratt

alludes to a litany of ills and catastrophes that have befallen L.A., including, and especially, the wildfires that devastated his home neighborhood of Pacific Palisades in January 2025. The video features Pratt standing next to an Airstream on his property snarling, “this is where I live.” (See related CP&DR coverage.)

Pratt is running to usher in a “new golden age,” beginning with his defeat of incumbent Karen Bass; he is polling second in a tight three-way primary race. I would forgive Pratt his #vanlife fiction, except that his entire campaign is built on grievances. Pratt blames Bass not just for the city’s fire response and for being uninspiring but for causing the very conflagration that burned down his home, as if she personally summoned 100-mile-per-hour winds and a six-month drought. 

It’s hard to seem too aggrieved, though, when you live in a five-star retreat that costs upwards of $1,000 per night. 

Whatever his domicile may be, there’s one thing Pratt is not: urban. He gained notoriety in the mid-2000s at age 23 as an enfant terrible on the MTV reality show The Hills, about L.A. rich kids who yell at each other. Pratt later sold New Age crystals and dabbled in various other reality shows. The Palisades, where he and wife Heidi Montag moved in 2017, is lower-profile but only slightly less luxurious. Skid Row, it’s not. 

In look and feel, Pacific Palisades operates more like a suburb than an urban neighborhood — on the fringe, separate, with its own downtown, and incredibly wealthy and incredibly white. Those are characteristics that could just as easily describe Thousand Oaks, Rancho Palos Verdes, Rancho Santa Fe, or any number of other ranchos. Pratt clearly loves his suburban lifestyle, and rebuilding the Palisades is his top priority. 

That’s why Pratt’s turn towards Howard Roark seems more like a jab than a genuine campaign plank. He imagines a shiny new downtown in order to cast a spotlight on the grime and lifelessness that he associates with the current downtown -- and with its most prominent figure. 

This vision is the flip side of Pratt’s antagonism toward homelessness and other unsavory elements of urban life. When we look at gleaming cupolas and cornices and towers, we are also meant to envision clean sidewalks full of respectable, productive people — the sort Republicans often favor. Pratt’s imagined skyline depends, implicitly, on cleaning up the streetfront. 

On that count, Pratt has been ruthless. 

He wants unhoused people moved, arrested, and if necessary, forced into housing against their will -- possibly in the desert on the urban fringe. “We’re going around and we’re just arresting people and the people that aren’t getting arrested, we’re getting to mandatory medical treatment,” Pratt told Joe Rogan. If Pratt has any humanitarian instincts, they are indiscernible. He wants to eliminate homelessness mainly because it ruins his view. 

The great irony, of course, is that one of the primary drivers of urban decay has been suburbanization itself. The very instincts and development patterns that produced the Palisades — and more to the point, hundreds of independent cities across California's urban areas — are what drained center cities of people, energy, money, resources, and political clout from World War II onward. Whatever disdain Pratt has for urban Los Angeles, it was partly produced by white flight and middle-class flight. Pratt’s escape to Bel-Air puts this flight into Ludicrous Mode. 

In that sense, the Palisades Fire is the foil for past crucibles like the 1965 Watts Riots and 1992 Rodney King Riots: every three decades, a neighborhood burns and demands reform. Only this time, the neighborhood is wealthy, and they have only Mother Nature to blame. 

Spencer Pratt's home. Sort of.

***

For a Republican to care about urbanism all of a sudden is ironic, to say the least. Yet, there are lessons worth taking from him. (Los Angeles elections are nonpartisan, but Pratt has made no secret of his affiliations or his sympathy for the MAGA movement.)

In the introduction to my book The Urban Mystique, I noted that the attractiveness and functionality of LA's built environment is inversely proportional to the city's natural beauty. It’s as if some perverse defect in our collective unconscious forbids us from having nice things. We need to break the cycle of mediocrity. I would warmly welcome a copse of Chrysler Buildings or some friends for the Eastern Columbia Building, bedecked in jade and lapis lazuli. Art Deco is lovely, and Art Deco skyscrapers are lovely. We absolutely need more of them: dense, diverse, well located, and beautiful.

I think I would drop my champagne flute if ever I heard a conventional pol mention aesthetics. They are likely afraid of the specters of gentrification or elitism, or they’re wonky enough to know how hard it is to regulate aesthetics. Or -- quite likely -- they simply have no taste and consider aesthetics to be frivolous. 

Except, aesthetics matter. Not as much as poverty, homelessness, or housing--but they still matter a lot. Planners are not architects, of course. But, anything that is planned is also something that needs to be designed. Good plans warrant good design -- and vice-versa. 

According to the recent article by David Broockman, Chris Elmendorf, and Joshua Kalla titled, “How Sociotropic Aesthetic Judgments Drive Opposition to Housing Development,” stakeholders oppose new housing because much of what they see is ugly. They find that “voters oppose new development not just out of self-interest or NIMBYism, but because they find certain types of development aesthetically unappealing and seek to enforce these aesthetic preferences through policy.” They’re alluding to the oversized, unadorned “five-over-one” buildings and all sorts of stucco aberrations that developers build in order to maximize their permitted square footage and minimize costs. 

The problem, according to Broockman, et. al., is that a developer’s payday can be a neighbor’s eyesore. Opposition leads to greater expenses for developers, which leads to less capital for niceties like design. The less housing is available, the more prospective tenants are willing to pay regardless of how a building looks and the more people end up on the street. It’s a vicious cycle. 

I don’t know if Pratt has read that research, but he clearly has an intuitive sense of its conclusions and an effective way of discussing them. In the All In video, Pratt refers to “soulless, SB 79 , prison-like structures” and shares images of typical five-over-ones. (It’s true that SB 79 hasn’t kicked in yet, but I actually take his point at face value; I don’t think we have any reason to expect that it will produce much other than utilitarian boxes.) 

Pratt's vision may be simplistic but at least it's a vision. He is, with the help of AI renderings, literally showing pictures of what Los Angeles could look like. It's fitting for someone whose fame derives from reality television, and it’s vastly more effective than the bureaucratic word salad tossed by many planners and their planning documents. 

What Pratt also draws from reality television is his anger. Pratt knows that comity does not make for good entertainment. Neither does consensus-building or good-faith negotiation. Whether for personal or ideological reasons, he has channeled his anger over the fires -- occasionally blaming Bass for “letting (his) house burn down”, as if he thinks she’s gleeful about it -- into relentless criticism of city leadership. Pratt’s rage is that of someone who has, admirably, woken up to these problems but who may not appreciate that a Lego version of L.A. is a lot easier to govern than the real thing is. That’s why he's doing well in the polls--not because he knows anything about governance, fire suppression, or even real estate but because he makes governance simple. 

To be fair, Pratt has released a more comprehensive housing and development platform. It includes many provisions -- such as streamlining -- that housing advocates and many planners would welcome. He includes a surprisingly nuanced critique of SB 79: density should focus on commercial areas rather than on transit stops, with a nice zinger: “Sure, taking a train to work is cleaner than driving, but taking an elevator to work is even cleaner than that.” Truth be told: his approach isn’t necessarily original, but, if we overlook (or embrace!) some of its impolitic language, Pratt’s platform is a lot more compelling than the incumbent’s is. 

I wish the capable people were more angry. Or the angry people more capable.

Pratt’s turn toward aesthetics expresses a sentiment that no major LA public figure has articulated in recent memory. He is disgusted by the city's response to the crises--not just the fire but to so many other crises lying on the sidewalk in plain sight. On that count, I think almost every Angeleno — except perhaps certain members of city government — agrees with him.

And yet, Pratt’s absurdities and offenses persist. 

***

What's interesting is that Los Angeles’s natural beauty is the very thing that put him in this situation in the first place. Los Angeles is ringed and bisected by mountains. Mountains have brush. We have a Mediterranean climate. Brush catches fire — not that it can catch fire, but that it does, and has, and will again.

That is maybe the most absurd part of the Pratt campaign. He acts as if he was caught unawares, as if someone who lives on the urban fringe does not know — or does not care — that the hills may burn, and so will his house. It is that lack of judgment, more than any lack of responsibility, that I think disqualifies him from being mayor. 

Pratt, who reportedly did not have fire insurance, is now reportedly filming a reality show about his campaign, which he intends to extend into his mayoralty, if he can. Do I need to mention that the second-largest city in the country is simply not a serious place? 

Then again, who can blame Pratt? Producing a reality show surely pays a lot more than running the city does. As long as public-sector compensation is so woefully out of whack with similarly rigorous private-sector jobs, it will never attract top talent and always foment corruption and amplify the influence of special interests. 

Here is what I'll grant Pratt: he believes this city can be greater. He believes it can be governed better, look better, and that on average, people can live better here. If he is elected, those things may or may not come to pass. If he is not, I hope that whoever becomes mayor — and whoever fills the next round of council seats and department head positions — proves Pratt right anyway. I want Pratt, for all his weirdness and bombast, to be right. I want city leaders to learn the ample, if inadvertent, lessons that he so plainly offers. If that means we get some curves, tubes, and neon, all the better.

I hope that, whenever he checks out of the Bel-Air, Spencer Pratt unpacks his bags someplace safe and comfortable. Maybe in an art deco high-rise. Maybe in his rebuilt Palisades house. Maybe in a box on a sidewalk. Really, I don’t care -- as long as he’s nowhere near Getty House.