What We Owe Each Other: When the Party Is Over
Somewhere between the fan zone and the freeway, a life got swept aside and called progress. Visual by deluxmultimedia
Staying Housed · Part 4 of 4
Letters to the Housed | Staying Housed, Part 4 of 4 | June 23, 2026
What We Owe Each Other When the Party Is Over
The World Cup brought the world to Los Angeles. But what did we show them?
This is the last piece in the Staying Housed series, and I want to begin where we began four weeks ago: with a neighbor in trouble.
The friend I wrote about in the June 2 piece is still in her apartment. Her husband is still detained. She has made her rent. She has not been evicted. She is exhausted and frightened and still there. That is not a triumphant ending. It is the only kind of ending that is actually available in a situation like hers, which is to say: surviving, for now, with the help of people who showed up.
I wrote that first piece to explain what a three-day notice actually means and doesn't mean, because the knowledge gap alone costs people their housing. I wrote the second piece about the cascade, the way that one destabilizing event — a detention, a job loss, a medical bill — can set off a sequence that ends in homelessness if nothing catches the fall. I wrote last week about the investment math: what it actually costs, over time, to underinvest in public housing, and why that accounting is almost never done.
This week I want to talk about what it means to be the housed neighbor. The one watching all of this.
What the city showed the world
Los Angeles is hosting eight matches at SoFi Stadium this summer. The Fan Festival at the Coliseum drew thousands. The watch parties at Union Station and the Farmers Market will undoubtedly be joyful. The city is alive in a way that is genuinely hard not to love, even for those of us who spend most of our professional lives focused on what the city refuses to fix.
I don't want to be the person who can't let a city enjoy something. I'm not arguing that the World Cup shouldn't have happened, or that the joy wasn't real. This is a beautiful place full of people who know how to celebrate, we know how to throw a good party.
But alongside the fan zones, the city was also doing what cities do before global company arrives. Cleaning. Clearing. Making the streets look like what we want visitors to see rather than what is actually here. The coverage in LAist and Knock LA documented the pattern during the group stage weeks: encampment clearings near transit corridors and fan zones, enforcement operations timed to match schedules, the familiar displacement of people to somewhere less visible.
None of this is new. It is the World Cup version of what we wrote about in the Paris/LA series in March: the documented choice that cities with mega-events make, over and over, between genuine investment in community housing and expensive, temporary social cleansing that produces international criticism and accomplishes nothing for the people moved. Paris displaced 19,526 people before the 2024 Olympics. The only intervention that worked was a 256-placement housing program implemented too late and too small. Los Angeles watched that happen and has, so far, made most of the same preliminary decisions.
The question I keep returning to is not whether the city should have hosted the World Cup. It's what kind of city we want to be on the days when the cameras aren't here.
The housed neighbor's role
Four weeks ago I wrote that this series was addressed to the housed neighbor, which is most of the people reading this. The ones with stable addresses. The ones whose names are on leases or mortgages. The ones who have enough to worry about that homelessness can feel like someone else's problem, happening in a different part of the city, managed by agencies they've never had reason to call.
Here is what I want the housed neighbor to understand about this moment in Los Angeles: the clearings that happened near the fan zones were not a solution to homelessness. They were a solution to visibility. The people moved from those blocks are still in Los Angeles. Some are in shelter placements that may or may not hold. Some have moved to adjacent blocks. Some have lost the service connections, medications, and outreach relationships that were the fragile infrastructure of whatever stability they had before. The World Cup coverage will move on. The people won't.
This is where the housed neighbor has a role that no outreach worker or advocate can play. Outreach workers can push for better implementation and document what's happening. Advocates can file legal challenges. But the political will to do things differently — to fund the rapid housing infrastructure instead of the enforcement operation, to ask for public reporting on displacement outcomes rather than accepting press releases about successful event management — comes from people who vote, who show up to council meetings, who call their supervisor's office.
It doesn't require expertise. It requires attention and a willingness to ask: where did they go? What was offered? How many placements held at two weeks? The city rarely volunteers these answers. The housed neighbor asking the question is part of how accountability gets made.
What Radical Hope looks like from here
I have been thinking about Fr. Greg Boyle's line from the Radical Compassion event I attended earlier this year: "You don't go to the margins to make a difference. You go to the margins so that the folks there make you different."
Radical Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It does not require believing that things are going well, or will go well automatically, or that the systems doing harm are capable of correcting themselves without pressure. It requires seeing clearly, including the parts that are hard to look at, and choosing to show up anyway. Not because showing up is guaranteed to succeed, but because not showing up is guaranteed to fail the people already on the edge.
What I can tell you is that while the fan zones were running, other things were also running. Outreach workers were showing up. Small organizations you've never heard of were doing the daily, unquantifiable work of knowing people's names and showing up again next week.
The work of ending homelessness does not stop for the World Cup. Neither does the housing crisis. They coexist, and the practice of Radical Hope means holding both at once without letting the magnitude of either one become an excuse for looking away from the other.
The Staying Housed series wasn't just about preventing eviction, though that's where we started. It was about the structure of a city that produces housing instability for hundreds of people every day and then, when a global audience arrives, makes the instability invisible rather than addressing it. The notice that arrives at the door is the end of a very long chain of decisions. The chain runs through investment choices, through budget allocations, through what we decide matters and what we decide we can afford to ignore.
What comes next
The World Cup continues through July 19. The quarterfinal here is July 10. After that, the cameras shift to the final in New Jersey, and Los Angeles returns to being the city it actually is rather than the city it performed for visitors.
In July, Letters to the Housed will begin a series that does something I think is worth doing now that we have enough data to do it: hold the FIFA rehearsal up against the predictions and recommendations from the Paris/LA series we published in March. We said the World Cup would reveal whether LA had built the infrastructure for something different. Now we can look at what it revealed. And we can talk honestly about what the 2028 Olympics will require if we want a different outcome.
There are two years left. The investment argument we made is already working in the models from Manchester and Buenos Aires and Vienna and Lisbon, which show what is possible when a city decides to treat the mega-event as an opportunity rather than a test of how well it can hide its failures. The community co-design work done through Change Well Project has already appeared in the language of the new Department of Homeless Services and Housing, but as of today those recommendations have not been implemented. The recommendations sent to the Mayor's Office and the Board of Supervisors in March are still on the table.
Two years is not very much time, but it's also not nothing. Radical Hope means believing that the time we have is worth using.
To my friend who is still in her apartment: I see you. Keep going.
Thanks for reading the Staying Housed series. If any of these pieces reached someone who needed it, please share them. If you know someone facing an eviction notice right now, send them back to Part 1. The resources are there, and more can be found at secondgrace.la.
The Staying Housed Series
Related series
Paul Asplund is the founder of Second Grace LA and author of Letters to the Housed, published weekly at secondgracela.substack.com. His work focuses on ending homelessness through community building and systemic change.
Art direction, production & deployment by Delux Multimedia