PLANNING WATCH - Housing is expensive in Los Angeles, leaving many people without a place to live. Those priced out of housing are divided between the homeless (those who cannot afford any place to live) and those, like the family in the photo above, forced to live in overcrowded conditions.
The 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles will make the situation of both groups worse because Olympic tourists will rent available rooms at elevated short-term prices, far above what both the homeless and overcrowded can afford.
So far, the 2028 Olympic Organizing Committee has recognized this is a major problem, but they do not have any solutions. According to Libby Rainey, a reporter at KCRW/LAist:
There's no plan for how those people will be relocated, where they'll go, or who will pay for it. . . Since 2016, one year before L.A. secured the bid to host the 2028 Olympics, homelessness in the city is up 59%.
If these trends continue, which is likely, by the summer of 2028 the number of homeless people in the City of Los Angeles will be 12 percent more than August 2026 or 50,617 people.
If we include the overcrowded, the number and percentage of people who will be negatively impacted by the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles is much larger. This is because LA County has over one million people living in overcrowded conditions, and in the most overcrowded neighborhoods, such as Westlake, the number of overcrowded people is over 36 percent of the local population. Furthermore, LA County has experienced overcrowded housing – three times the national overage – for several decades.
At this point we don’t know exactly how the 2028 Olympics will impact LA’s two ongoing housing crises, other that it will make an already bad situations worse, especially for the homeless. Preliminary information is that over 1600 homeless people will be forced to relocate from Olympic venues, although where and how is unknown.
With details made worse because the two connected housing crises will become worse between 2026 and 2028, we already know that the situation for the homeless and overcrowded is dire. After all, even if the establishment Democrats retake Congress and the White House, which is certainly possible given President Trump’s failures, the chance that these pols will restore public housing is nil. Yet, without the restoration of the Federal Government’s public housing programs, cancelled over 50 years ago by the Nixon administration, there is no chance that that the private and nonprofit sectors can meet the genuine housing needs of these two populations. For example, 60 percent of Angelenos live in overcrowded housing, and 16 percent – nearly all renters - live in acute overcrowded conditions, more than 1 ½ people per room.
What to expect? Whether the Trumpists, the non-Trump Republicans, or the mainstream Democrats prevail in the November 2026 and 2028 elections, there is little chance that a majority will support a return of public housing. Even though Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York State Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called for the restoration of public housing, few other members of Congress hold their views.
While there is always a chance that this opposition will eventually become a majority, until this happens, the situation of the overcrowded and homeless in LA and similar American cities will remain unchanged.
(Dick Platkin is a retired Los Angeles city planner who writes about planning issues in LA. He is a member of United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles (UN4LA). Previous columns are available at the CityWatchLA archives.)
