Olympic host cities make promises that are almost impossible to keep, and in recent years, organizers’ wishful thinking about housing and neighborhood renewal has been one of the cruelest Olympic disappointments. As the 2024 Paris Games approach, we’re seeing the same thing again: displacement, gentrification, and homeless people “voluntarily” lured elsewhere with assurances of help that never materialize. What will it mean for Los Angeles, when the Games come in 2028?
In 2017, when Paris and Los Angeles were the last cities standing as potential Olympic venues (Boston, Budapest, Hamburg and Rome had all pulled out), organizers vowed to stage Games that would bypass the Annoying social problems that emerged in Seoul, Rio, Tokyo and London.
Paris bidders Fiance To rejuvenate the city peripheriesreplenishing the housing stock by building an Olympic Village for athletes in Seine-Saint-Denis, one of the poorest districts of Paris, and converting large swathes of it into so-called social housing. In Los Angeles, then-Mayor Eric Garcetti fixed On a late-night TV show, “I'm confident that by the time the Olympics come around, we'll be able to end homelessness on the streets of Los Angeles.”
How has it worked in Paris?
On the eve of the Games, French security officials are carrying out a “relocation plan” for the city’s migrants, refugees and homeless people, evicting them from their camps and squats, and from their fragile connections to jobs and community, and escorting them onto buses taking them to 10 cities across France where temporary shelters and services have supposedly been set up. A government official He told the New York Times The figure was about 5,000. Human rights groups expect many more of the estimated 100,000 homeless Parisians to be sent as far away from Olympic venues as possible.
Officially, the relocations are intended to reduce pressure on the asylum application process and help migrants apply for refugee status more efficiently. But of course, this is all a matter of appearance. Most of those expelled from Paris will not qualify for permanent housing in their new places, and as for asylum status, one lawyer in France calls the busing program “a prelude to deportation.”
TO recent report A Parisian group whose name translates as The Other Side of the Medal documented a nearly 39% increase in camp evictions in the City of Light in the year leading up to the Games, which open on Friday. Researchers found that more than 12,500 people were displaced from Paris in 2023-24 alone. They have dubbed it “social network” or social cleansing.
The French government has denied there is a connection between the Olympics and the increased displacement, but an email from a government official, first reported by French newspaper L'Equipe, fixed The aim of the mass evictions was to “identify people on the streets in places close to the Olympic venues” and expel them before the Games began. Member of the French National Assembly Aurélie Trouvé He told us that the program “is definitely connected to the Games and the need to offer a 'clean', idealized image, even if that means leaving thousands of people away.”
The Trouvé district, Seine-Saint-Denis, north of the city centre, is the nerve centre of Paris. Department The Seine-Saint-Denis district is the one most affected by the Games. It is home to a new Aquatics Centre and Olympic Village, block after block of apartments and commercial premises built on what was once industrial land. But whether this will help the 1.6 million residents of Seine-Saint-Denis, a third of whom live below the poverty line, or simply leave them behind remains to be seen. Around 40% of the district lives in social housing; only 1.5 million people live in the same area. A quarter of the units in the Olympic Village are intended for for that population after the Games.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, LA28 organizers have eschewed any urban renewal directly associated with the Games: no new venues will be built under LA28 auspices, and UCLA dormitories and the campus will be converted into the Olympic Village.
And of course, Garcetti's confidence in a cure for homelessness was long forgotten. After Mayor Karen Bass reviewed Paris' preparations earlier this year, She told a reporter She was simply “hopeful” that the Olympics “would be a catalyst for Los Angeles to finally address the homeless problem in a long-term way, that would eventually end the homeless problem on the streets.” She offered this “important commitment”: homeless people would not be moved indoors during the Games.
In December, a year after Bass started, Indoor safe program to address homelessness, just below 2,000 people They had been helped off the streets and into hotel rooms. And in June, the city's Homeless Services Authority announced that the latest point-in-time count found more than 75,000 homeless residents in Los Angeles County, a number that fell slightly for the first time since 2018.
LA28 touts the legacy it will leave for the city and county, but in a surprising about-face from Garcetti's optimism, Casey Wasserman, the chair of the Los Angeles organizing committee, has abdicated all responsibility for helping reduce homelessness. said LAist's Larry Mantle in 2021: “We are not responsible for solving homelessness. We are responsible for running the Olympics as a private company in 2028.”
Wasserman is just being candid. The Olympics can’t solve gentrification, the affordable housing crisis or the needs of the homeless. That’s not what the Games were created to do. Any promises to that effect should be seen as a public relations strategy. The fact that hosting the Olympics might actually make things worse is one reason so many cities were happy to leave it to Paris and Los Angeles for 2024 and 2028.
In a few weeks, the hoopla and tallying of gold, silver and bronze medals at the Summer Games will give way to a much more important reckoning: the winners and losers of Paris. It seems likely that its most vulnerable residents have not fared well. Los Angeles should take note.
Jules Boykoff, a former professional football player, is a professor of political science at Pacific University in Oregon. He has written six books on the Olympics. Dave Zirin is sports editor of the Nation and the magazinetoHoroscope of 11 books on the politics of sports.
