Olympic host cities make guarantees which might be all however unimaginable to maintain, and lately, the organizers’ wishful excited about housing and neighborhood redevelopment has been one of many cruelest Olympic disappointments. Because the 2024 Paris Video games strategy, we’re seeing it over again — displacement, gentrification and the unhoused “voluntarily” lured elsewhere with assurances of assist that by no means materializes. What is going to it imply for Los Angeles, when the Video games arrive in 2028?
In 2017, when Paris and Los Angeles have been the final cities standing as potential Olympic websites — Boston, Budapest, Hamburg and Rome all withdrew — the organizers promised to stage Video games that sidestepped the vexing social issues that emerged in Seoul, Rio, Tokyo and London.
Paris bidders vowed to rejuvenate the town’s banlieues, replenishing the housing inventory by constructing an Olympic Village for the athletes in Seine-Saint-Denis, considered one of Paris’ poorest districts, and changing massive swaths of it into so-called social housing. In Los Angeles, then-Mayor Eric Garcetti said on late-night tv, “I’m assured by the point the Olympics come, we are able to finish homelessness on the streets of L.A.”
How has it labored in Paris?
Within the lead as much as the Video games, French safety officers are executing a “relocation plan” for the town’s migrants, refugees and unhoused individuals, expelling them from their encampments and squats — and from fragile connections to jobs and group — and escorting them onto buses that take them to 10 cities round France the place non permanent shelters and providers have supposedly been organized. A authorities official instructed the New York Instances the quantity was about 5,000. Human rights teams anticipate many extra of the estimated 100,000 Parisians with out regular housing to be exported as removed from Olympic venues as attainable.
Formally, the relocations are supposed to reduce stress on the asylum utility course of and to assist migrants extra effectively apply for refugee standing. However after all, that is all about optics. Most of these banished from Paris received’t qualify for everlasting housing of their new places, and as for asylum standing, one lawyer in France calls the busing program “an antechamber to deportation.”
A current report by a Parisian group whose identify interprets because the Different Aspect of the Medal documented an almost 39% surge in encampment evictions within the Metropolis of Mild within the yr main as much as the Video games, which open Friday. The researchers discovered that greater than 12,500 individuals have been displaced from Paris in 2023-24 alone. They’ve dubbed it “nettoyage social,” or social cleaning.
The French authorities has denied a connection between the Olympics and intensified displacement. However an electronic mail from a authorities official, first reported by the French newspaper L’Equipe, said that the target of the mass clearances was to “determine individuals on the road in websites close to Olympic venues” and take away them earlier than the Video games begin. French Nationwide Meeting member Aurélie Trouvé instructed us that this system “is unquestionably related to the Video games and the necessity to supply a ‘clear,’ idealized picture, although it implies that 1000’s of individuals are pushed afar.”
Trouvé’s district, Seine-Saint-Denis, north of the town middle, is the Paris département most affected by the Video games. It’s residence to a brand new Aquatic Heart and the Olympic Village — block after block of flats and business house constructed on what was industrial land. However it stays to be seen whether or not it’s going to assist the 1.6 million residents of Seine-Saint-Denis, one-third of whom stay beneath the poverty line, or just push them apart. About 40% of the district lives in social housing; solely 1 / 4 of the Olympic Village models are earmarked for that inhabitants after the Video games.
In the meantime, in Los Angeles, the organizers of LA28 have steered away from direct Video games-associated city renewal — no new venues might be constructed underneath LA28’s auspices and UCLA’s dorms and campus will turn into the Olympic Village.
And naturally, Garcetti’s confidence a couple of homelessness treatment is lengthy forgotten. After Mayor Karen Bass checked out Paris’ preparations earlier this yr, she instructed a reporter she was merely “hopeful” the Olympics would “be a catalyst to L.A. lastly addressing homelessness in a means that’s long-term, that ultimately ends avenue homelessness.” She did supply this “main dedication”: The unhoused wouldn’t be moved to the hinterlands in the course of the Video games.
In December, a yr into Bass’s Inside Protected program to deal with homelessness, slightly below 2,000 individuals had been helped off the streets and into resort rooms. And in June, the town’s Homeless Companies Authority introduced that the newest point-in-time rely discovered greater than 75,000 unhoused residents in L.A. County, down a couple of ticks for the primary time since 2018.
LA28 touts the legacy it’s going to go away for the town and county however in a putting about-face from Garcetti’s optimism, Casey Wasserman, the chairman of the Los Angeles organizing committee, has relinquished all accountability for serving to to scale back homelessness. He instructed LAist’s Larry Mantle in 2021, “We’re not accountable for fixing homelessness. We’re accountable for delivering the Olympic Video games as a personal enterprise in 2028.”
Wasserman is just being trustworthy. The Olympics can’t clear up gentrification, the reasonably priced housing disaster or the wants of the unhoused. That’s not what the Video games are created to do. Guarantees made in any other case needs to be seen as public relations. That internet hosting the Olympics could even make issues worse is one purpose so many cities have been pleased to go away the job to Paris and L.A. for 2024 and 2028.
In a couple of weeks, the hoopla and the tally of gold, silver and bronze medals on the Summer season Video games will give solution to a way more consequential reckoning: Paris’ winners and losers. It appears doubtless its most weak residents received’t have fared nicely. Los Angeles ought to take heed.
Jules Boykoff, a former skilled soccer participant, is a political science professor at Pacific College in Oregon. He has written six books on the Olympics. Dave Zirin is the sports activities editor of the Nation and the author of 11 books on the politics of sport.
