Nearly 6,000 homeless people could be forced to move when security officials impose expansive security perimeters in advance of the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, researchers estimated in a new study.
That estimate comes from social scientists at UCLA and USC, who said they published what they acknowledged was a rough preliminary estimate to jumpstart public discussion about the challenge of humanely managing the region’s massive homeless population as Olympic organizers and police carve out space for more than 11,000 athletes, officials and hundreds of thousands of fans.
Although Los Angeles city and county officials have acknowledged that they need to come up with a plan for how to manage homeless people during the Games, no specific proposal has been unveiled. And the local governments haven’t said what agency or individual will take ultimate responsibility.
“Displacing unsheltered residents to make way for a ‘security perimeter’ without a credible plan for shelter, services, or housing does not resolve homelessness,” said the report, “It merely hides it and shifts the burden onto unhoused individuals and their well-being. A three-week international event should not come at the cost of basic human dignity for the people who call these neighborhoods home.”
Los Angeles County earlier this year estimated that about 1,600 homeless people lived near roughly two dozen Olympic competition locations and might be affected by the Games.
The researchers from USC and UCLA said the number is likely to be much higher, estimating that 5,975 unsheltered people live within a mile of Olympic venues — which Los Angeles County officials previously said probably would be the size of the zones that would have to be vacated because of security concerns.
The researchers acknowledged that the exact boundaries around the venues have not been set. Officials for the Games’ organizer, LA28, said Thursday that a consortium of public safety agencies, headed by the U.S. Secret Service, will set the security boundaries.
“There will not be a single security plan and timeline that applies to every Olympic or Paralympic venue,” an LA28 spokesperson said.
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority has estimated that the total homeless population in Los Angeles County numbers just over 73,000, of which about 44,000 are “unsheltered” people who live in the city of Los Angeles and its surrounding communities.
The research team mapped where the 44,000 unsheltered people lived and superimposed those over maps of the theoretcial one-mile radius security zones. The analysis produced the estimate of nearly 6,000 people who could eventually be forced to move.
The number of potentially displaced people would change markedly if the size of the actual security perimeters is smaller or bigger. The report concluded that 2,191 homeless people would be displaced if the security perimeters measured a half-mile around venues. It would grow to 15,988 if the zones expanded to two miles around venues.
The researchers pledged to return to the subject with more precise numbers, once security officials specify exactly how large the security zones will be.
Because the cities of Long Beach and Pasadena manage their own homeless populations, the UCLA-USC team did not attempt to assess how many individuals would be displaced around venues in those cities, for sports including beach volleyball and diving. They also didn’t attempt to measure the number living unsheltered around what will become the athletes’ Olympic Village at UCLA.
The movement of people out of those communities could drive the total number of homeless people displaced even higher, the researchers said.
The biggest mass of homeless people facing likely removal live around the multiple Olympic venues coming to downtown Los Angeles and Exposition Park, including the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Crypto.com Arena, the L.A. Convention Center, USC’s Galen Center and BMO Stadium. More than 60% — totalling an estimated 3,633 homeless people — live within a mile of downtown venues and face possible expulsion, the report said.
The second biggest conglomeration of homeless live around Venice Beach, where an estimated 679 could have to move from what will become the site of Olympic triathlon and the starting line for bicycle road racing and both the men’s and women’s triathlon.
In addition, 635 live close enough to Dodger Stadium, home of Olympic baseball, that they face possible removal, as do 614 more who live around San Fernando Valley venues that will host events including three-on-three basketball. skateboarding and BMX biking.
Advocates for people living outside, in campers and other makeshift quarters have long expressed the worry that those vulnerable people get shunted aside when major events come to town.
The city and county have struggled to put a serious dent in the homeless population. Though L.A. leaders have known for a decade that the Olympics would be coming to town, that also has not generated incentive that put a substantial dent in the problem.
“There is a gap in the governance structure when it comes to something like planning [for the homeless] around events like the Olympics,” said Ben Henwood, a professor in the Suzanne Dwora-Peck School of Social Work at USC, who led the research with UCLA sociologist Randall Kuhn and researcher Jessie Chien. “It’s a challenging issue, which is all the more reason we need to have this discussion sooner rather than later.”
The researchers and advocates for the unhoused point to other Olympic host cities that they said failed the test of how to treat the most vulnerable residents.
More than a year before the 2024 Games in Paris, the government began busing thousands of homeless people — many of them immigrants — to places such as Lyon and Marseille. They were cleared not just from neighborhoods around venues, but from the route of the Olympic torch relay.
Though they heard promises that they would find “care centers” in their new locales, many of the dispossessed complained that they got nothing and that their lives became harder. Multiple charities protested what they said amounted to a “social cleansing.”
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