Part 1: House Them or Hide Them from Letters to the Housed by Paul Asplund of Second Grace LA
PART 1: House Them or Hide Them?
I was listening to AirTalk last week when Larry Mantle opened a conversation on a topic I've been reading about for months. His two guests discussed why many developers have decided it's no longer as profitable to build in Los Angeles when they have to face hurdles like SB 79, rent control, and eviction laws that actually protect tenants.
I'd like to get mad and remind them of the hundreds of billions of dollars commercial developers have made here, even with our strict building codes, but I doubt anything I could say would change their minds. Housing is a commodity, and they're just investment companies.
But there's plenty of money still to be made. The rebuilding of Pacific Palisades alone will be a boondoggle for whoever lobbies hard enough to win the deal—and Rick Caruso, with his survived Palisades Village shopping center and private firefighting team, is already positioning himself as the inevitable choice.[1]
And while developers complain about slightly lower margins, the housing crisis in LA gets further and further away from a solution. And we need to act.
The New Numbers
Taking into account the new RAND study, stating that we've undercounted homelessness by 32% in key neighborhoods like Venice, Hollywood, and Skid Row,[2] the crisis of homelessness is not getting better. This fits with what I've been hearing anecdotally for years, that there are probably 100K–125K unhoused people in LA County. And the answer to homelessness, ultimately, is building affordable housing.
The California Housing Partnership's 2024 analysis found that 494,446 low-income renter households in Los Angeles lack access to affordable housing.[3] Some estimates suggest the shortage may reach 700,000 units when including all income categories.[4]
To put this in perspective: we need half a million affordable housing units right now, today, to meet current demand.
Even when they find housing, seventy-seven percent of extremely low-income households pay more than half their income on rent.[5] With the average two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles renting for $2,498 monthly, you need to earn an hourly wage of $48.04—nearly three times the city's $16.78 minimum wage.[6]
And we're not even trying to keep up with demand, much less build for the future. The Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) mandates that the City of Los Angeles produce 456,643 housing units between 2021 and 2029, with 184,721 units—40%—designated as affordable to lower-income households.[7] This translates to 57,080 units annually.[7]
Currently, Los Angeles produces approximately 17,000 to 18,000 housing units annually in the city proper.[8] Only about 10% of recent production qualifies as affordable to lower-income households.[9]
We need 57,080 units per year. We're building 17,000. At current rates, meeting the city's state-mandated housing allocation would require 27 years rather than the mandated 8-year timeline.[10]
Over 100K Angelenos are unhoused, most of them unsheltered. Where's our sense of urgency?
When the Money Dries Up
The situation is getting worse, not better. State and federal housing funding dropped 45% from fiscal year 2021-22 to 2022-23, falling from $3.6 billion to $2 billion.[11] Just when we need it most, the money is disappearing.
And the housing we're building costs more than ever. Low-income housing developments in California cost an average of $708,000 per unit according to 2023 data from the Terner Center.[12] These are the highest per-unit costs in the nation and represent a 47% increase from 2019 levels, even after adjusting for inflation.[12]
Again, that's $708,000 per unit. Many factors affect these costs, paying a living wage and financing being two of the biggest. It's insane.
To close LA's 456,643-unit gap through commercial development would cost between $159.8 billion and $226 billion over eight years.[13] That's $28.3 billion annually. The required public subsidy alone would total $39.2 billion over eight years—$4.9 billion annually.[13] That's 14% of LA County's entire annual budget or 38% of LA City's budget.
The commercial development model is broken. We need 500,000 units. They're building 17,000 annually, and only 1,700 of those are affordable to low-income residents. You do the math.
And now, as Larry Mantle’s guests made clear, commercial developers are walking away from the table entirely, complaining that regulations make it unprofitable enough.
But we still need the housing. So what are we willing to do to build it?
The World Will Be Watching Us
In two years, Los Angeles will host the Olympics. The opening ceremony is scheduled for July 14, 2028. Billions of people around the world will watch. International media will descend on our city for weeks, cameras everywhere, reporters looking for stories.
What will they see?
Will they see encampments along the highways leading from LAX to downtown? Will they see tents under every overpass and in every park?
Will they see 75,312 people—or more likely, given RAND's findings, over 100,000 people—experiencing homelessness on our streets?[14]
Or will they see something else?
This question should be keeping every elected official in Los Angeles awake at night. Because regardless of what we do between now and then, the Olympics are coming. That's not negotiable. The only question is what story Los Angeles will tell when the world is watching.
Paris Teaches How NOT to Prepare
We don't have to guess what one possible path looks like. Paris showed us in 2024.
In the months leading up to the Paris Olympics, French authorities "relocated" 12,545 homeless people.[15] "Relocated" is the polite word. The reality was forced displacement. Encampments were systematically dismantled. People were put on buses and sent to suburbs far from the city center. The operation was methodical, efficient, and brutal.
Zero permanent housing was created.
Paris had decided that the optics of homelessness were more important than actually housing homeless people. Let's not make this same mistake.
What "Relocation" Actually Means
What happened in Paris would be ten times worse in LA.
When you forcibly remove people experiencing homelessness from their neighborhoods, you're not just moving them geographically. You're severing them from everything that keeps them alive. Many unhoused people have established relationships with specific service providers—clinics they visit, shelters they know, meal programs they depend on, case workers who know their names. They have communities, informal networks of mutual aid, people who watch out for each other.
If we want people to return from homelessness, we need to respect the communities and support systems they rely on.
Olympics as Displacement Machines
Paris wasn't an aberration. It was business as usual for the Olympics.
Beijing 2008: 1.5 million people displaced for Olympic development and beautification projects.[16]
Atlanta 1996: 25,000 people displaced. Fifteen thousand affordable housing units were lost in the process.[16]
Seoul 1988: 720,000 people displaced. Three-quarters of a million people forcibly removed to make way for Olympic venues and infrastructure.[16]
Rio 2016: The Vila Autódromo favela—home to 600 families—was bulldozed. The families were forcibly removed. The Olympic infrastructure that was built in its place is now largely abandoned.[16]
Oxford University research documented this pattern over a 20-year period: more than 2 million people displaced by Olympic Games.[16] The Olympics have been, systematically and internationally, a disaster for poor people in host cities. And Los Angeles is next.
LA's Choice: Two Paths Forward
We can follow Paris. We can follow Beijing and Atlanta and Seoul and Rio. We can sweep the encampments, bus people to Lancaster and Palmdale and Riverside, claim "success" when tourists don't see tents on their way from the airport to the hotels.
The playbook is well-established. Start about six months before the Games. Increase police sweeps of encampments. Offer people bus tickets to other cities. Arrest those who refuse to move. Make homelessness invisible through force and displacement. Tell yourself it's for the good of the city, for the economy, for LA's international reputation.
And when the Olympics end and the cameras leave, the crisis will return. Nothing will have been solved. We'll be back where we started, except with 75,312 people (or more) who've been traumatized by forced displacement, who've lost what little stability they had, who've been sent a clear message that their city doesn't want them.
That's Path 1. The Paris path. The path of temporary invisibility and permanent shame.
Path 2: The Vienna Approach
There is another way.
What if, instead of hiding people experiencing homelessness, we actually housed them?
What if we used the Olympic urgency—the deadline that forces action, the political pressure that comes from knowing the world will be watching—to do what we should have been doing all along?
What if we built permanent housing? Not pallet homes. Not temporary shelters. Not navigation centers where people sleep on mats in warehouses.
What if, when international media arrived in Los Angeles in summer 2028, they saw 10,000 new units of social housing along the Olympic routes? What if they interviewed residents living in beautiful, affordable apartments near transit stations, with rooftop gardens and community spaces and childcare facilities? What if the story they told wasn't about a city hiding its crisis, but about a city solving it?
What if the Olympic legacy wasn't stadiums or athlete villages or infrastructure improvements, but permanent housing for tens of thousands of Angelenos?
This is possible. It's not only possible—it's been done before, at much larger scale, under much worse conditions. Vienna did it starting in 1919, in the aftermath of World War I, when the city was devastated and impoverished. They built 60,000 housing units in 15 years.[17] Today, 60% of Vienna's residents live in social housing that costs a fraction of private market rates.[18]
We have three years. We have more resources than Vienna had in 1919. We have their model to follow. We have existing funding streams. We have the political momentum that comes from an Olympic deadline.
What we need is the collective will to choose Path 2 over Path 1. To choose housing over hiding.
Why LA Can Choose Differently
There's a crucial difference between LA 2028 and past Olympics that makes our situation unique: we're not building an Olympic Village.
Past Olympics were forced to construct temporary housing for thousands of athletes. Barcelona built a village for 15,000 athletes. London built for 17,500. Tokyo built for 18,000. These villages cost billions of dollars and were designed for a three-week sporting event, then had to be converted to residential use afterward—always a compromise, always expensive, always resulting in housing that was either unaffordable or inadequate or both.
LA is doing something different. We're using existing UCLA dormitories to house 17,000 athletes and USC facilities for 3,200 journalists.[19] Students are on summer break. Athletes move in for three weeks. Then students come back. No construction required.
The organizing committee estimates this "no-build" approach will save approximately $2 to $2.6 billion compared to building and converting a traditional Olympic Village.[20]
That's $2 to $2.6 billion that doesn't have to be spent on temporary athlete housing.
This is an unprecedented opportunity. We can take that $2-2.6 billion in savings, combine it with other funding sources, and build something that actually solves our housing crisis instead of creating a handful of luxury units that price out the people who need housing most.
The Deadline Effect
Deadlines force action. When you have years or decades to solve a problem, it's easy to delay, to study, to commission another report, to wait for perfect conditions that never arrive.
When you have three years, you have to move.
Normal development timelines in Los Angeles average 3.9 years from initial application to completion.[21] But Olympic-compressed timelines have 2-3 year timeframes. The Olympics give us a deadline. July 14, 2028. Non-negotiable. The opening ceremony happens whether we're ready or not, whether we've solved our homelessness crisis or not, whether we've built housing or not.
That deadline creates political pressure. It gives advocates leverage. It makes it possible to do things that would normally take a decade of political wrangling. Deadlines don't solve problems by themselves. But they create the conditions where problems can be solved by people who want to solve them. The Olympics give us those conditions. The question is whether we'll use them.
What 10,000 Units by 2028 Could Mean
Let's be realistic about scale. If we mobilize every resource available, if we redirect existing funding streams, if we use Olympic urgency to compress normal timelines, if we establish a public development authority and begin land banking immediately, if we do everything right—we might build 10,000 units of permanent social housing by summer 2028.
Ten thousand units out of a 500,000-unit need is 2%. It's not solving the entire crisis. It's not even making a major dent in the crisis.
But here's what 10,000 units by 2028 could mean: It would be proof of concept that the Vienna model works in America. That cost-rent financing is viable here.[22] That limited-profit housing associations can be established and function.[23] That quality-focused design competitions produce better results than lowest-bid contractor selection. That broad eligibility prevents stigmatization and builds political support. That social housing can be beautiful and desirable and something people want to live in, not a last resort.
It's infrastructure built. A public development authority that knows how to build social housing. A land bank that will continue acquiring strategic sites.[24] Revolving loan funds that will finance future construction. Partnerships with community land trusts and limited-equity cooperatives. A pipeline of projects beyond the first 10,000 units.
It's political momentum that extends beyond 2028. If we build 10,000 units by summer 2028 and they're full of residents who are paying affordable rents in beautiful buildings, that becomes the new baseline. It becomes politically impossible to go back to business as usual. It creates demand for more. It proves that another way is possible.
It's a foundation for producing 5,000-10,000 units annually for the next 20 years. Vienna took 15 years to build their foundation—60,000 units housing 10% of their population.[17] Then they sustained and expanded that for a century, eventually reaching 60% coverage.[18] We can't replicate Vienna's scale in three years. But we can start the foundation Vienna built in 15.
Ten thousand units by 2028 isn't solving the crisis. It's building the infrastructure to solve the crisis by 2045.
We Need to Start Now
If we're going to build 10,000 units of permanent social housing by summer 2028, we need to start now. Not after another study. Not after another commission. Not after we see how the next election goes. Now.
Our neighbors—the 75,312 experiencing homelessness, the 494,446 households lacking affordable housing—they won't survive another 27 years of business as usual. They need real housing. Not pallet homes. Not temporary shelters. Not navigation centers with mats on warehouse floors. Not buses to Lancaster.
They need beautiful, permanent, dignified housing. Housing designed to last 100 years. Housing with community spaces and green roofs and childcare facilities. Housing that's affordable not because it's inferior, but because it's built on a different financial model that doesn't require extracting maximum profit from human need.
We have three years to build that housing. We have the funding—Measure ULA alone provides $270+ million annually.[25] We have the model—Vienna proved it works over 100 years. We have the urgency—the Olympics create a deadline that forces action. We have the opportunity—saving $2-2.6 billion by not building an Olympic Village gives us resources past host cities never had.
Two years. Half a million units needed. Seventy-five thousand people on our streets. The world watching. What will we choose?
This is Part 1 of a three-part series on building social housing in Los Angeles by 2028. Part 2 will explore the Vienna model in depth and examine past Olympic housing conversions. Part 3 will detail the specific funding mechanisms available to LA right now.
REFERENCES
[1] Rick Caruso Pacific Palisades reconstruction. Fox LA. "Palisades Village to reopen in 2026, Caruso confirms." https://www.foxla.com/news/palisades-village-reopen-2026-caruso
[2] LAist. "LA's official homeless tally increasingly undercounts people on the streets, RAND study finds." https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/homeless-count-undercounts-rand-study
[3] California Housing Partnership. (2024). "Los Angeles County 2024 Affordable Housing Needs Report." https://chpc.net/resources/los-angeles-county-2024-affordable-housing-needs-report/
[4] Abundant Housing LA. "How Many Affordable Homes Does L.A. County Need?" https://abundanthousingla.org/how-many-affordable-homes-does-l-a-county-need/
[5] California Housing Partnership. "KEY FINDINGS: 494,446 low-income renter households in Los Angeles County do not have access to affordable housing." https://chpc.net
[6] California Housing Partnership. "Renters in Los Angeles County need to earn $48.04/hour." https://chpc.net
[7] Los Angeles City Planning. "2021-2029 Housing Element." https://planning.lacity.gov/plans-policies/housing-element
[8] California Housing Partnership. "Los Angeles County Annual Affordable Housing Outcomes Report." https://chpc.net/resources/los-angeles-county-annual-affordable-housing-outcomes-report-2024/
[9] LAist. "LA continues to fall far short of reaching state-mandated housing goals, city report shows." https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/la-housing-production-far-short-state-goals
[10] Based on RHNA targets (456,643 units / 8 years = 57,080 annually) vs. current production (17,000-18,000 annually) = 27-year timeline
[11] California Housing Partnership reports on state and federal housing funding decline 2021-2023
[12] Terner Center for Housing Innovation, UC Berkeley. "The Hard Costs of Construction: Recent Trends in Labor and Materials Costs for Apartment Buildings in California." https://ternercenter.berkeley.edu/research-and-policy/the-hard-costs-of-construction/
[13] Based on LIHTC costs ($708,000/unit) and market-rate costs ($350,000/unit) applied to 456,643-unit gap. Terner Center data.
[14] LAHSA. "2024 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count Data." https://lahsa.org/dashboards?id=37-2024-greater-los-angeles-homeless-count-data
[15] Paris Olympics affordable housing policy. Arizona PBS. "Paris Olympics put spotlight on city working on affordable housing." https://azpbs.org/2024/07/paris-olympics-put-spotlight-on-city-working-on-affordable-housing/
[16] Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions and Oxford University research on Olympic displacement. Multiple academic sources document displacement: Beijing (1.5M), Atlanta (25K + 15K units lost), Seoul (720K), Rio (600 families at Vila Autódromo), with over 2 million total displaced over 20-year period.
[17] Red Vienna era construction. "Red Vienna" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Vienna; Municipal Housing Vienna history https://wienerwohnen.at
[18] Vienna social housing statistics 2024. Housing Europe and Vienna municipal data showing approximately 60% of Vienna's 1.9 million residents live in social or rent-controlled housing.
[19] UCLA Housing. "UCLA GETS READY TO WELCOME THE WORLD." https://housing.ucla.edu/ucla-gets-ready-to-welcome-the-world; LAist. "Where are we housing everyone for LA's 2028 Olympics?" https://laist.com/news/la-history/where-housing-everyone-2028-olympics
[20] LA 2028 Olympic "no-build" savings estimate based on comparison with traditional Olympic Village construction costs (London ~$2B, Tokyo ~$2B)
[21] Study on Los Angeles development timelines. The Real Deal. "Study finds it takes nearly four years to build apartments in LA." https://therealdeal.com/la/2024/02/27/study-finds-it-takes-nearly-four-years-to-build-apartments-in-la/
[22] Vienna limited profit housing cost-rent model. University of Liège. "The system of limited-profit housing in Austria: cost-rents." https://orbi.uliege.be/handle/2268/236388
[23] Vienna limited profit housing associations. Socialhousing.wien. "Limited profit housing construction." https://socialhousing.wien/en/limited-profit-housing-construction/
[24] Wohnfonds Wien land banking. Housing2030. "Wohnfonds Wien - a land bank for the public good." https://housing2030.org/wohnfonds-wien-a-land-bank-for-the-public-good/
[25] Los Angeles City Controller. "Revenue Forecast for Fiscal Year 2025" showing Measure ULA projected revenue of $271.1 million annually. https://controller.lacity.gov/
AUTHOR'S NOTE: All statistics have been verified against original sources. Where original reports are referenced, links are provided to primary sources including government agencies (LAHSA, California HCD, LA City Planning), academic institutions (Terner Center at UC Berkeley, RAND Corporation), and nonprofit research organizations (California Housing Partnership). Olympic displacement figures come from Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions documentation and Oxford University research. Vienna housing data comes from official Austrian government sources and Housing Europe reports.