LA is hosting the olympics. What will happen to the homeless?

Los Angeles has been preparing for the past few years to hold the Olympics in 2028. Millions of people are expected to travel to The City of Angels, and it knows that it must look its best. LAX is getting renovated, the subway is getting modernized, but what perhaps is not being talked about enough is what will happen to the 70,000+ individuals in Los Angeles living on the street? Lets take a look at what the city is doing to tackle its homeless problem, and wether or not this will actually work.

Hollywood walk of fame

1984 Olympics

In 1984, LA was hosting the Olympics, and faced the same problem. There solution? Send 30 Police Officers downtown on horseback to rid the area of the homeless. People were arrested, there belongings taken, and most alarmingly they were all taken out of public view. What was left was an undoubtly clean Downtown Los Angeles, but at what expense? As Los Angeles’s 3rd Olympics creeps up, Civil Right advocates warn of what could happen to the unhoused if the city decides to rid them of public view again.

2028 Olympics

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass promises to take a housing first method to rid the streets of homelessness, and plans to expand shelter sizes to accommodate for the roughly 50,000 unsheltered people in Los Angeles. She also has planned on distributing resources to the homeless to make this transition a lot easier.

However, increasing Los Angeles’s shelter capacity by 2.5 times in a little over 2 years seems like an ever increasingly difficult feat. This pressure might come from the White House, who have expressed concern with the rising homelessness issue around the country and have stated commitment in removing encampments, but have yet to cleary outline what they will do with the people they remove from the streets. In sum, Homelessness in Los Angeles appears to be getting solved in a more humane way than in 1984, but on this current trajectory, it does not appear that enough people will be resheltered by the time the Olympics comes to town.