By Dr Adam Talbot, Centre for Culture, Sport & Events, University of the West of Scotland
My mobility included part of the International Research Training School hosted by Western University, which has been written about by other participants.
After attending the training school, I continued my mobility in Los Angeles, host of the 2028 Summer Olympic Games, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the city and how the Olympic Games is impacting upon the lives of Angelenos. As an ethnographer, I see it as fundamental to get first hand, on the ground experience in a city to really understand it and this trip was my first attempt to get a sense of Los Angeles, with the anticipation of more fieldwork in the city in the years to come.
The glaring, highly visible challenge in the city is the sizeable unhoused population (organisers in the city use the term unhoused instead of homeless, as community and a sense of home can still be found living on the street). This is recognised as a serious issue across the city – recently elected Mayor Karen Bass made addressing what she called the “full-blown humanitarian emergency” of homelessness the centrepiece of her campaign. Of course, previous research on the Olympics suggests the event has deleterious consequences for housing, whether directly through evictions to make space for event-related construction, or indirectly through gentrification as land values increase as a result of event-related investment, thereby pushing out poorer communities. Alongside these specific impacts on housing, the Olympics is also often accompanied by a criminalisation of poverty and homelessness, that further marginalises these already vulnerable groups.
Almost everyone I spoke to described housing and homelessness as the key challenge facing the city, and in two areas, the Olympic Games are clearly having a detrimental impact on this problem. In Inglewood, where the most expensive sporting venue in history, the $5 billion SoFi stadium, was recently completed, gentrification is clearly underway, with tenants forced out as landlords seek higher rent. This is particularly the case around high profile events, such as the 2022 Super Bowl hosted in the stadium. Alongside this, construction of a metro link to the SoFi stadium is set to displace many locally owned businesses. Similarly, working class communities such as Flower Drive that have long lived close to Exposition Park, home of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the main stadium for the 1932 and 1984 Olympic Games, have faced threats of evictions in the run-up to the event. To be sure, this is not a purely Olympic threat – these threats of eviction are largely understood to be based on the possibility of building either hotels or student accommodation for the nearby University of Southern California (and with students usually holding only a 9-month lease, accommodation buildings are likely to be used for the Olympic Games as well).
Resistance to these threats has been well organised. The Los Angeles Tenants Union supports communities through a range of actions. Often, this is based on ensuring tenants understand their rights and have the confidence to assert their rights – key ingredients in ensuring legal rights are effective in practice. This takes different forms depending on the situation. In Inglewood, the local Tenants Union has fought to support residents of the community, threatened by both the SoFi stadium and a new stadium for the LA Clippers which is currently under construction. In Flower Drive, close to Exposition Park, some residents were evicted, but through with the support of the LA Tenants Union were able to negotiate compensation agreements, while others still remain. While eviction threats have subsided for the time being as a result of effective resistance, previous research on the Olympic Games suggests these threats will return before 2028.
Back in 2017, when it was announced that Los Angeles would host the 2028 Olympic Games, the NOlympics LA coalition emerged rapidly with a lot of energy. Growing out of the Democratic Socialists of America’s Housing and Homelessness committee, the coalition mixes concern around the Olympics with anti-capitalist organising. As NOlympian Steve Ducey explains, quoted in Jules Boykoff’s book on the group, “The Olympics are the perfect metaphor for global capitalism: this unelected body of unaccountable rich people who basically get to take advantage of the public in various ways, to their enrichment and to the detriment of regular people”. While some of the initial energy seems to have dissipated in recent years, a core group of organisers continue to draw the links between diverse causes in the city, constructing a narrative to join together existing movements to contest the mega-event. The longer time Los Angeles had to prepare for the Games (11 years, where previously most cities were chosen 7 years before the event) has created challenges in maintaining mobilisation. However, while NOlympics LA itself is relatively small they are working with and supporting organizing across the city to ameliorate the harms perpetrated by the mega-event, particularly with the Tenants Union.
This is surely an issue to watch as the Olympic Games draw closer. Whether the political consensus that something must be done about the large unhoused population translates into meaningful action of the kind supported by groups like the LA Tenants Union, or the Olympics dominates local development agendas as it has in previous host cities remains to be seen. Without meaningful action over the coming years though, it seems likely we will see the familiar pattern of criminalisation of homelessness to cleanse the city that we have seen previous in Olympic cities as diverse as Vancouver and Rio, Tokyo and London. Angelenos don’t need to look around the world to see this process – it happened in the city when it last hosted the Games in 1984. Homelessness promises to be one of the major stories about the LA28 Olympic Games Watch this space…
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