Spencer Pratt is torching Nithya Raman and Karen Bass over a $10 million homeless housing “boondoggle,” using a single project to show City Hall is blowing through billions of dollars with weak oversight and poor results.
“Nithya Raman and Karen Bass are running a grift with the Homeless Industrial Complex,” Pratt told The Post. “There are too many unanswered questions surrounding these housing projects, and their funding is unacceptably opaque.”
He blasted projects bankrolled with public cash during Wednesday night’s debate, framing them as part of a runaway spending machine with little accountability and even fewer answers about who’s actually in charge.
“These ideas cost us over $400 million to house about 3,000 people,” Pratt said during the debate. “That’s an absolute failure for both of them.”
When Raman brushed it off, saying she didn’t know what he was talking about, Pratt tightened the vise.
Pratt took to social media the next morning and zeroed in on a single target. The Oak Tree Inn in Raman’s district. A battered roadside motel now being flipped into transitional housing through California’s Homekey program.
“As I promised in the debate, here’s the ludicrous $10M boondoggle in Nithya Raman’s district,” his post on X read. He attached records tied to the Oak Tree Inn to back it up.
Those documents show the site was assessed at roughly $4.6 million, yet the city moved forward with a purchase price of about $7.3 million, with no clear public explanation for the gap.
The city is now rehabbing the property, adding roughly another $10 million so far and pushing the total past $17 million. That brings the price to about $774,000 per unit, with each unit classified as a studio apartment.
“The public has every right to question the return on investment and their safety,” he said.
Raman pushed back on Pratt during the debate framing the criticism as political and defending her record.
“My ideas are based on real data, real analysis of the system and a focus on accountability,” she said, arguing that public dollars are being used effectively and should be expanded.
But the Encino project has already been a flashpoint.
More than 700 residents packed into a virtual community meeting last August, raising alarms about safety, oversight and the building’s past.
Some pointed to drug activity and prostitution tied to other Homekey Sites. Others questioned whether the neighborhood could absorb the project at all.
Raman stood by the plan and the nonprofit operators running it.
An investigation by the California Post found Los Angeles has poured at least $2.6 billion into hotel and motel conversions through Project Homekey, the same pipeline funding the Oak Tree Inn. In some cases, the cost per unit has climbed toward $1.5 million.
That is the scale Pratt says he’s exposing as he takes aim at power inside City Hall and the people controlling the money.
“She [Raman] is a powerful person on the city council,” he said, pointing to the council member’s role overseeing homelessness policy.
All of this is colliding with an election that remains wide open.
New polling after Wednesday’s debate suggests Pratt did more than draw contrasts. He may have changed the trajectory of the race.
Surveys of debate viewers showed Pratt as the clear winner of the night, with a large share saying he outperformed both Bass and Raman.
Nearly one in five said the debate changed how they plan to vote.
In a race where a candidate can win outright by crossing 50 percent in June, even a small shift could decide whether the contest ends early or explodes into a runoff.
The Post reached out to Bass and Raman for comment.
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