Reality TV personality Spencer Pratt announces bid for LA mayor after losing home in Palisades fire

Spencer Pratt has announced he is running to be the next mayor of Los Angeles.

The 42-year-old found fame when his relationship with his now-wife Heidi Montag featured on reality television show The Hills in 2007.

The couple lost their home in Pacific Palisades in last year’s wildfires, and subsequently became outspoken critics of the city’s response. They were part of a group who sued Los Angeles.

Pratt announced his candidacy in front of around 1,000 demonstrators at a “They Let Us Burn” rally in the Palisades Village on Wednesday, marking one year since the devastating fire.

As CBS reports, Pratt told the rally: “Business as usual is a death sentence for Los Angeles, and I'm done waiting for someone to take real action. That's why I am running for mayor.”

He continued: “And let me be clear, this just isn’t a campaign, this is a mission, and we are going to expose the system. We are going into every dark corner of LA politics and disinfecting this city with our light. And when we are done, LA is going to be camera-ready again.”

The fires brought significant attention back to Pratt and Montag, with The Independent’s Holly Baxter writing last January: “If there’s one consequence I didn’t expect to come out of the California wildfires, it was a flop Heidi Montag album from 2010 topping the iTunes charts and her husband, former most-hated-by-millennials Spencer Pratt, going on TV to cry about it.

“Yet, here we are, living in a timeline where Superficial (yes, the album you might have seen once on Perez Hilton’s blog and immediately forgotten about) is getting the resurgence no one asked for but TikTok demanded.

“Let’s rewind: The California wildfires have been devastating, prompting widespread evacuations. Many normal people have lost their homes, their livelihoods, their pets and even their lives. So have many celebrities.

“Spencer and Heidi, who’ve spent the better part of the last decade building their ‘crystal-loving reformed villains’ brand, posted a tearful TikTok about having to flee their home.

“Largely under the radar (in celebrity terms) since their heyday on The Hills, it turned out the two had been quietly living a luxurious lifestyle with their sons in the Pacific Palisades. And now everything they’d built had quite literally gone up in flames. It was a genuinely sad tale, told engagingly by a heart-on-his-sleeve Spencer.”

Pratt said at the time that he had earned $4,000 through TikTok and around $20,000 through TikTok Live after posting updates about his family’s situation.