Hosting the Olympic Games is often seen as a generational opportunity for urban growth and renewal and an all-around boon to cities. The promise of hosting can catalyze revitalization efforts, stimulate economic activity, spur job creation, and encourage investments and infrastructure upgrades that deliver real long-term benefits. At the same time, hosting the Olympics carries significant risks. The Games can exact huge financial costs, strain public services, and worsen existing social challenges if not carefully managed. Past host cities have incurred significant debt to shoulder costs, namely the construction of sporting venues, Olympic Villages, and other infrastructure necessary to accommodate the large influx of visitors.
Los Angeles will host the upcoming 2028 Olympic Games, and a primary concern is how the event might impact the region’s homelessness crisis. In past Olympics, host cities have used the Games as a pretext to remove “undesirable” populations to present an appealing, world-class image to international tourists and the media (Ludvigsen & Byrne, 2025). Common tactics include displacing households to build Olympic venues, street cleaning operations, forced busing and relocation, and passing quality-of-life ordinances that can be used to target people experiencing homelessness near sporting venues or other areas heavily frequented by tourists. These practices are often referred to as “social cleansing” by academic scholars who cover the Olympics, and they risk derailing the city’s efforts to house people if deployed again. Los Angeles has the opportunity to learn from the successes and failures of previous host cities. This brief examines how past Olympic hosts have approached homelessness in the lead-up to and during the Olympic Games, focusing on official policy changes and enforcement strategies. Our main research question asks: What lessons can those approaches help inform Los Angeles as it prepares for the 2028 Olympics, particularly regarding their impacts on unhoused residents?