(C) Common Dreams
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The Gentrification Scheme Behind Los Angeles’s “No-Build” Olympics [1]

['Mathilde Lind Gustavussen', 'Doug Henwood', 'Ramaa Vasudevan', 'David Calnitsky', 'Jules Boykoff', 'Gia Lappe', 'Jonny Coleman', 'Ian Brossat']

Date: 2025-08

This January, activists gathered in the center of the gymnasium at Cathedral High School in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. They stood surrounded by info placards and screens promoting the construction of a one-mile gondola that would ferry passengers from Union Station in Downtown to nearby Dodger Stadium, with a stop in Chinatown. The gondola project, a $300 million collaboration between former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt and Los Angeles Metro, is slated to open in time for the 2028 Olympics, and the gymnasium event, the project’s third public hearing, was billed as an opportunity for the community to offer input. But anyone who wanted to give public comment was instructed to do so behind a curtain in a corner of the room. Refusing to accept the premises of what amounted to a promotional event, activists took over the meeting, clearing space for residents to voice their opposition to the gondola for the next hour. Phyllis Ling, a Chinatown resident who organizes with the group Stop the Gondola, spoke first, encapsulating protesters’ frustration with a project being forced on a community already besieged by developers that would send van-sized cabins stuffed with forty people over their homes on a daily basis in anticipation of the 2028 Games. “This project isn’t for us,” Ling said. “It’s for Frank McCourt, who’s a developer. It’s for the Olympics, which is for developers. It’s for the politicians, who are in the pockets of developers. Frank McCourt wants to build right over us, forty feet over my neighborhood.” ‘This project isn’t for us,’ Ling said. ‘It’s for Frank McCourt, who’s a developer. It’s for the Olympics, which is for developers. It’s for the politicians, who are in the pockets of developers.’ Gondola proponents, meanwhile, paint the project as an environmentally friendly, traffic-relieving measure for the benefit of Chinatown residents, Dodgers fans, and tourists alike. Aerial Rapid Transit Technology, an LLC owned by McCourt’s family, first submitted a proposal for the project to Metro in 2018, and Metro, with the “pretty unabashed” support of then mayor and Olympics superfan Eric Garcetti, agreed to act as the agency lead for the environmental review process. (It remains unresolved if, given Metro’s involvement, taxpayer money would go toward construction or maintenance of the gondola. Metro did not respond to Jacobin’s request for comment). The resulting Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR), paid for by McCourt’s company and released in October 2022, glowingly asserts that the gondola would likely ferry 20 percent of game attendees to Dodger Stadium while taking three thousand cars off the streets before and after games, leading to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and transportation-related pollution. However, a study carried out by UCLA’s Mobility Lab contradicts these findings, demonstrating that the claims in the DEIR are inflated and that the gondola is “unlikely to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and traffic overall.” Moreover, the gondola towers, some of which would be built on city land — including in Elysian Park and Los Angeles State Historic Park — would sacrifice public and green spaces, helping a developer generate profits through a project that serves no discernable public transit needs. (A free Dodger Stadium shuttle bus already covers the route on game days.) As activists pointed out during the January meeting — and again at a February hearing that was moved to Zoom because activists, according to Metro, made it “impossible” to give public comment at the January event, Metro’s attempt to force public comments behind a curtain notwithstanding — the greenwashing enacted through the misleading DEIR camouflages the actual intentions behind the gondola project: intensified gentrification of Chinatown. Recently, McCourt submitted plans to build over five hundred units near the stadium using Transit Oriented Communities incentives, with only a small fraction of units being made temporarily affordable. He’s also rumored to be planning an entertainment district around Dodger Stadium in the vein of the LA Live complex — McCourt owns 50 percent of the stadium parking lots — which would explain why the gondola is projected to run seven days a week. Why else would people pay up to twenty dollars for a seven-minute aerial ride to what is, the majority of the time, a closed baseball stadium? The project, one of several large-scale developments being proposed and implemented across Los Angeles in anticipation of the 2028 Olympics, is illustrative of city officials’ and developers’ fever-pitched excitement about the games — and residents’ very rational opposition to their impact on cities. From Rio to Tokyo, Vancouver to Beijing, London to Atlanta, hosting the Olympics has come at a devastating cost for local residents who’ve experienced accelerated gentrification, displacement, privatization, municipal debt, environmental damage, and militarization of police alongside the implementation of permanently ramped-up surveillance regimes. Gigi Droesch from NOlympics, a coalition of groups within Los Angeles and abroad organizing against the Olympics, told Jacobin: “All of these processes would be going on without the mega events, but the mega events make them happen faster. There’s a deadline, and it gives everybody a nice, convenient excuse.” In response to these accelerated processes, a growing movement of activists are mobilizing, including through transnational alliances, to either cancel the Olympics altogether or, at the very least, to block individual policies or developments — like the gondola — that are forced onto populations in service of the games. The Olympics intersect with the visions of entrepreneurial municipal governments that view gentrification as a key strategy in the space marketing of cities. Since 1960, the Olympic Games have exceeded their projected budgets by an average of 172 percent, leaving taxpayers on the hook for years to come. But in spite of the well-documented negative outcomes, cities clamor for the opportunity to host mega events like the Olympics. Intertwined with global flows of entertainment and sports-industry capital, the Olympics intersect with the visions of entrepreneurial municipal governments that view gentrification as a key strategy in the space marketing of cities. This form of governance is deliberately designed to encourage investment and maximize the attractiveness of the city for corporations, developers, and more affluent residents. According to this logic, the Olympics — and flashy but pointless projects like the gondola — are valuable weapons in the global place wars precisely because of the processes they accelerate. Or, as Jacobin contributor Jules Boykoff has put it: “Per the machinations of capitalism, hosting mega-events like the Olympics tends to enhance urban exchange value as it kickstarts gentrification, even if the project loses money for the host governments.”

How Los Angeles “Won” the 2028 Olympics On July 1, 2013, his very first day in office, Mayor Eric Garcetti notified the United States Olympic Committee that he intended to submit a bid for the 2024 Olympics. “I did that because the [1984] Olympic Games captured something in my heart when I was a 13-year-old boy growing up in this city. . . . those sixteen days transformed our city, touched each one of us, that legacy still resounds here strongly every single day,” Garcetti later said of his first decision as mayor. Over the next couple of years, Garcetti put together a private bid committee composed of the city’s business and entertainment elite — many of whom were set to profit from a successful proposal, including Live Nation and the real estate development company Westfield Property Management, which each donated $1 million to the bid. Garcetti also traveled to Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympics to promote Los Angeles’s 2024 proposal to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and to Doha, Qatar to address a general assembly of National Olympics Committees. The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to approve the 2028 games without allowing critics to voice their dissent, ramming the games down the throats of the public. By 2017, the field of competitors for the 2024 Olympics had dwindled to just Paris and Los Angeles. Hamburg and Budapest withdrew their bids after a referendum and a petition against the games, respectively, while Rome bowed out citing cost concerns. (Boston had originally been selected over Los Angeles by the United States Olympics Committee to compete for 2024, but the city terminated its bid due to public opposition.) The IOC, concerned that interest in hosting the event was diminishing, decided to allocate two Olympics simultaneously for the first time since 1921, giving the 2024 games to Paris and the 2028 games to Los Angeles. A lack of bids has also led the IOC to consider a rotating city arrangement for the winter Olympics. Naturally, there was substantial opposition to hosting the Olympics in Paris and Los Angeles too, but when Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to approve the 2028 games — and to serve as the financial backstop in the seemingly inevitable event that the $6.9 billion budget falls short — it did so without allowing critics to voice their dissent, ramming the games down the throats of the public, many of whom remember what happened last time the city hosted in 1984. Contrary to the fond memories of Olympics enthusiasts like Garcetti, many recall how the games accelerated mass arrests, police brutality, and the militarization of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). A week before the 1984 opening ceremony, LAPD captain Billy Wedgeworth famously told the Los Angeles Times: “We’re trying to sanitize the area,” referring to the mass sweeps his department had ordered of unhoused people, drug dealers, and “suspected” gang members, particularly in East Los Angeles, Downtown, and South Central. The military-grade equipment acquired for the Olympics remained with the LAPD and continued to be used against marginalized communities, as did the expanded powers granted to police, culminating in violent enforcement programs like Operation Hammer and ultimately contributing significantly to Los Angeles’s 1992 uprising. The military-grade equipment acquired for the Olympics remained with the LAPD and continued to be used against marginalized communities, as did the expanded powers granted to police. Those wary of how the 2028 games will impact policing and the unhoused community witnessed a dress rehearsal during the 2022 Super Bowl, held last February at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium. The Super Bowl brought federal enforcement agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Secret Service, and Customs and Border Control to the city, leading to increased surveillance, criminalization, and sweeps of street vendors and homeless encampments around the stadium — echoing the “sanitizing” efforts undertaken in 1984. The 2028 games, however, a designated National Special Security Event, will see even more sophisticated surveillance technology such as AI algorithms to monitor crowds and facial recognition technology to conduct mass surveillance. The “sanitizing paradigm” from 1984 is also reflected in current policies such as Municipal Ordinance 41.18, which City Council has steadily expanded in an apparent effort to “banish” unhoused people from public view, and in the LAPD’s long-standing campaign to use the 2028 Olympics as an argument for increased police spending — policies and budgetary priorities that have been met with fierce opposition from the tenants movement, Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, NOlympics, and others. Yet in spite of the nonexistent competition from other cities and the undemocratic measures undertaken by City Council in endorsing the games and assuming financial responsibility, the IOC continues to contend that Los Angeles “won” the bid, and IOC members have praised the city’s existing facilities as a key reason for the choice. This type of statement plays into the sustainability and fiscal responsibility narrative that proponents of hosting have sought to cultivate to fend off the criticism leveled at other Olympic host cities: that the 2028 games will be a “no-build Olympics,” an absurd assertion considering the Olympics-fueled construction boom the city has witnessed in recent years, and the legislative moves facilitating that process.

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[1] Url: https://jacobin.com/2023/04/los-angeles-olympics-2028-development-politics-gentrification

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