Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass Talks Public Transit
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Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts, radio, news. Mayor Bass, thank you so much for joining us. I do want to start with gas prices, obviously a hot topic across the country. When I take a look at California, AAA tells me right now that the average gas price is pushing about $6 per gallon. You think about Los Angeles, obviously it's a city that loves its cars. So what are you doing as mayor, if anything, to try and help reduce the impact of those higher gas prices?
Well, let me just tell you that we are a city that loves our cars. However, we have spent the last three or four decades building out our public transportation system and so encouraging people to use public transit, encouraging people to carpool. We certainly hope that this ends soon enough because gas prices were already high here. because we have chosen to tax ourselves to improve our environment. So adding on the international events and just the uncertainty from Washington, you can only imagine the concern that has when affordability is the number one issue we're dealing with here, period.
Let me stick with affordability if I can. I know that permits for new construction have fallen every year since you took office back in 2022. Curious why that is. Also curious what you can do as mayor to reverse that trend in Los Angeles.
absolutely number one is making it easier to build and so i did that within my first couple of weeks in office i signed an executive directive to fast track the building especially of housing and we have 40 000 units that are currently going through that process now with several thousand actively under construction but once we applied those lessons to affordable housing Then we began to apply those lessons in terms of cutting red tape to other types of building, whether it's commercial, residential, etc. And so that has helped. Now, of course, the other thing that is creating a lot of difficulty is just the larger macro economic issues.
Absolutely, and you're seeing that across the country. I do want to talk specifically, though, about Hollywood, about the filmmaking industry. We learned earlier this year that we saw the consolidation of Paramount and Warner Brothers, a hard-fought bidding war there on Paramount's part. The consensus is that this is likely going to lead to thousands of job cuts. You think about the unemployment rate in L.A. It already stands at about 5.1 percent. That was at the end of 2025. That is higher than U.S. and state averages. So with this wave of job cuts seen as likely, what are you doing to prepare?
Well, let me just tell you, even before that, the entertainment industry is one of our foundation industries. And so I have certainly been doing everything to make sure that filming doesn't continue to leave and, in fact, increases in our city. And so the first thing, of course, was the advocacy on the tax credits on the state level, which did finally pass and get signed.
What impact do rising gas prices have on Los Angeles?
I was involved when I was speaker of the assembly there. many years ago in creating the first tax credits. But I meet with the industry regularly and they came up with a variety of things that the city could do to make filming easier. I put all of those into policy, put them into action, And we do have filming increasing in our city. Of course, I'm concerned about the merger. I think what a lot of people don't think about are all of the jobs that are associated either directly or indirectly with the industry and making sure that filming can be easier. We have over 119 new projects that have started in L.A. since the tax credits and these other initiatives have been put into place.
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