Ask Them First: What Paris Taught Us About Whose Expertise Counts
The gap isn't the problem. It's where the work happens. Visual by delux multimedia.
Co-designing event response with unhoused residents, and what LA would look like if we actually did it
By Paul Asplund | SecondGrace.LA | April 2026
Back to that room I wrote about last fall where 100 of us from Service Planning Area 4 (central LA) had gathered in a community center for two days. We had Post-its and markers. We had breakout tables. We had community members with lived experience of homelessness sitting next to case managers, service providers, advocates, and people from county government offices.
The ChangeWell Project, contracted by LA County to help design the new Department of Homeless Services and Housing, had brought us together with a clear instruction: don't design around scarcity.
Design around what communities actually need.
It was the most honest two days I've spent in policy work in years. People were saying things that don't usually get said out loud: that the system is built for compliance rather than dignity, that data silos destroy the continuity of care people need to stay housed, that when you've been failed repeatedly by the institutions meant to help you, trust is not a given — it has to be earned back one interaction at a time.
I left hopeful. Then I watched the budget come out.
Of the $843 million approved for HSH in February, approximately $443,000 can be traced to ideas generated directly in those community co-design sessions. Less than a tenth of a percent. The rest was allocated through the same institutional processes that have been running for years.
This is the gap at the center of every well-intentioned co-design process I've ever seen: the difference between consultation and partnership, between a county that asks what communities need and one that actually shifts power to let them decide.
Paris, during its 2024 Olympics preparations, lived this exact failure at massive scale. And the people who paid the price for it understood the problem more clearly than anyone in an official planning meeting.
The Collective That Changed the Terms of the Conversation
In 2023, as Paris began accelerating encampment clearings ahead of the Games, a coalition of more than 80 organizations formed under the name Le Revers de la Médaille — "The Other Side of the Medal." Paul Alauzy of Doctors of the World (Médecins du Monde), one of the coalition's member organizations, described French officials' approach with characteristic directness: "These policies were already in place, but the Olympics have accelerated things. There's a push to create what they call a 'clean city.'"
What the collective did differently from most advocacy coalitions was important. They didn't just oppose the government's approach. They proposed a specific, costed alternative. With 10 million euros, they said, they could shelter everyone in Paris who was at risk of Olympic displacement. The Olympic Committee, spending 12 billion euros on the Games, said they didn't have the money. The French state declined as well.
The collective's refusal to accept those answers changed what was politically possible. They documented, publicly and in detail, every displacement, every service closure, every broken promise. They created legal challenges. They brought people experiencing homelessness directly into testimony before city councils and the Paris prefecture. They trained community members not just as recipients of advocacy but as its generators.
Paul Alauzy described a longer-term aspiration in an interview with The Real News Network: "We still have six years, and I read that the games in Denver were canceled in 1972. So we are in this for the long run." By which he meant: this is not just about Paris 2024. It is about Los Angeles 2028. About every city that bids for a mega-event after that.
The collective didn't just oppose the government's approach. They proposed a specific, costed alternative. With 10 million euros, they said, they could shelter everyone at risk.
What Community Expertise Actually Predicted
One of the most striking things documented in the Paris experience is how accurately people experiencing homelessness predicted which interventions would fail and which would work — well before the Olympics began.
They predicted that geographic dispersal (bussing people to temporary housing in other regions of France) would not reduce homelessness. It would just move it somewhere less visible to cameras. They were right. The people sent to temporary shelters in Toulouse, Bordeaux, and Strasbourg were largely returned to homelessness in unfamiliar cities once the three-week placements expired, separated from the support networks they had built over years.
They predicted that service closures near Olympic security perimeters would cause cascading health crises. They were right. When the Doctors of the World clinic in Saint-Denis closed due to proximity to the Stade de France, 30 percent fewer people accessed care there after it reopened in September, because the disruption had broken the fragile trust that outreach workers had spent years building.
And they predicted that dignified, local, relationship-based housing placements would work if the government was willing to fund them. The 256 people placed in the "highly precarious places" program near the end of the Olympic period — which I wrote about in the first article in this series — validated exactly this prediction. When the offer was right, people said yes.
Community members also developed what you could call an early warning system for harmful displacement, identifying the specific indicators that reliably predicted clearings were coming: increased police presence without corresponding service expansion, installation of anti-homeless furniture before alternative housing was available, service relocations without community input, media narratives focused on "cleaning up" areas rather than supporting residents. These patterns were documented through lived experience in ways that no external research process could replicate.
This is not soft knowledge. This is operational intelligence about a system that the people most affected by it have studied far more carefully than the officials managing it.
What LA's Own Co-Design Process Revealed
The September 2025 ChangeWell design sessions across LA County were, in many ways, the right idea. Eight convenings across all eight Service Planning Areas. Community members sitting alongside providers and policymakers. A human-centered design methodology. Real questions about what wasn't working and why.
The people in those rooms generated sophisticated, specific, actionable insights. In SPA 4, the table I was at identified the same patterns the Paris collective identified: that data silos destroy service continuity, that trust is a prerequisite not a byproduct of effective outreach, that geographic barriers in the county's service structure create exactly the kind of disorientation that makes it harder for people to stay housed after an encampment clearing.
LA also has its own organizations doing this work. Lived Experience Advisers (LEA) was founded by and for people with lived experience of homelessness, building leadership and advocacy skills directly in the community the system is supposed to serve. Their approach to policy engagement — starting from the knowledge that people experiencing homelessness have expertise rather than deficits — is the model the Paris collective demonstrated and the model that generates solutions that actually work.
What the SPA 4 sessions revealed about what communities need reads almost identically to what the Paris collective documented: immediate response without lengthy intake processes, housing near established support networks rather than dispersal to unfamiliar areas, flexible services that adapt to individual circumstances, peer navigation built on relationships rather than transactions. The community-identified insights were sophisticated, evidence-grounded, and replicable.
The HSH co-design process for its annual evaluation agenda went further in the right direction, spending three months in the summer and fall of 2025 engaging providers, people with lived experience, and governance partners to generate a list of evaluation questions. The most popular questions — receiving support from more than two-thirds of respondents — focused on gaps in mental health and substance use capacity, and on whether the Coordinated Entry System's prioritization rules are actually equitable across populations. These are exactly the right questions. The gap is in what happens next.
The community-identified insights were sophisticated, evidence-grounded, and replicable. The gap is in what happens next.
The Difference Between Consultation and Co-Design
Consultation says: we want to hear from you before we decide. Co-design says: you are part of making the decision.
The distinction matters enormously in practice. Consultation can gather good information and produce no change, because the power to decide still rests entirely with the institution. Co-design requires the institution to actually share that power — which means accepting that community priorities might differ from official priorities, and that this is not a problem to be managed but the point of the exercise.
The Paris collective maintained what the organizers called an independent voice: they met with officials but kept independent funding and decision-making. They refused to be co-opted into advisory roles that carried no authority. When official statements contradicted what was happening on the ground, they documented and published the contradiction rather than softening it for political palatability. That independence is what gave their advocacy credibility, and what made it possible for them to sustain pressure over 18 months rather than fading into the background after a single consultation event.
What co-design actually requires, in practice, is not complicated — but it is demanding. It requires that stipends be paid for participation, so that people in survival mode can afford to engage. It requires that meetings be scheduled flexibly, not just when it's convenient for government offices. It requires translation, not just of language but of institutional jargon that functions as a barrier. It requires that there be real accountability mechanisms for what happens to community input — not just a record that input was received.
The ChangeWell sessions in LA tried to do this. The explicit instruction to "design around what communities actually need" rather than around available budget was a genuine attempt at co-design rather than consultation. The $443,000 that made it into the actual budget suggests the attempt did not succeed at scale. The system absorbed the input and produced roughly the same outputs it was already producing.
What an Actual Partnership Would Look Like Before 2028
Los Angeles has two years. That is not a lot of time to build housing infrastructure. It is enough time to change the planning process.
The Paris collective started organizing 18 months before the Games. LA is currently 27 months out from the Opening Ceremony. If the city and county were to begin genuine co-design partnerships with people experiencing homelessness near Olympic venues right now, there would be time to prototype at least some of what communities actually need before the pressure peaks.
What would this look like concretely? The RAND LA LEADS study found that 91 percent of unsheltered people surveyed expressed interest in becoming housed, but only 13 percent reported having received an offer of supportive housing. The gap between those two numbers is not a motivation problem. It is an offer problem. The community knows this. The research confirms it. A genuine co-design process would start with the people in that gap and ask them: what would an offer have to look like for you to say yes?
The answer to that question is not the same for everyone. It never is. But patterns would emerge from those conversations that could directly inform how LA approaches Olympic-adjacent encampment outreach from now through 2028. Geographic stability. Relationship continuity. Peer navigators who speak the same language, literally and culturally. Service hubs that move with displaced communities rather than requiring displaced communities to find their way back to fixed locations.
These are not new ideas. They are what communities have been saying for years. The Paris collective's documentation proves they work. The ChangeWell sessions generated the same insights in an LA context. The gap is not knowledge. The gap is power: who has the authority to make these decisions, and whether they are willing to share it.
The gap is not knowledge. The gap is power: who has the authority to make these decisions, and whether they are willing to share it.
The Ask
The Paris collective asked for 10 million euros. It was a specific, costed request tied to a specific outcome. The Olympic Committee spent 12 billion on the Games and said no.
I don't want to write that sentence about Los Angeles.
The county has an $843 million budget for homelessness services and a credible, documented community co-design process that generated exactly the right recommendations. Supervisor Holly Mitchell said during the budget discussion that she looks forward to seeing HSH "advance into a consensus building model of constituent engagement." Supervisor Hilda Solis described 2026 as seeing "an improved resident engagement and input process." These are meaningful commitments, stated on the record.
What makes them real is what happens between now and 2028. Specifically: whether the people currently living near Olympic venues are consulted before encampment clearings begin, not after. Whether community expertise is incorporated into the county's Olympic planning strategy, not just acknowledged in a press release. Whether the organizations doing this work — the ones with trusted relationships in the communities most at risk — receive the funding and decision-making authority to actually implement what communities have asked for.
Radical Hospitality means we build the response around the person in front of us, not around the program that exists. That is co-design in its most direct form. You ask. You listen. You build what's actually needed. It requires giving up the comfort of predetermined answers. It requires accepting that the person you're sitting with knows things about their situation that you don't.
Paris showed us what happens when cities refuse to do that. The 256 people housed through the dignified program showed us what's possible when they try. We have two years to decide which version of this story Los Angeles is going to tell.
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Sources and Further Reading:
Doctors of the World / Médecins du Monde, Paris 2024 field documentation
Big Issue: "Olympics 2024: Fury as homelessness swept under the rug" (July 2024)
Paul Asplund, "The Six Prototypes: What SPA 4 Designed," Letters to the Housed (February 2, 2026)
LA County Department of Homeless Services and Housing, FY 2026-27 Spending Plan (February 2026)
LA County HSH Annual Evaluation Agenda, co-design process documentation (Fall 2025)
RAND, LA LEADS: "Number of Unhoused Residents Drops Across Three LA Neighborhoods" (July 2025)
LAist: "LA County considers plans to remove unhoused people around Olympic venues" (January 2026)
Editor’s Note:
This is Article 2 in a four-part series on mega-events, displacement, and community expertise. Article 1, "What Paris Taught Us, and What LA Could Still Accomplish," established the Paris context and LA's current planning posture. Articles 3 and 4 will address the policy infrastructure needed to operationalize community co-design, and the specific choices LA faces before the World Cup 2026 and the Olympics in 2028.