We Have The Money

When the money exists but the door stays locked, that is not a resource problem. That is a choice. Visual by deluxmultimedia

What it would actually cost to protect unhoused Angelenos before 2028, and where the money already exists

By Paul Asplund | SecondGrace.LA | April 2026

Let me run through some numbers with you.

The LA28 organizing committee's total budget for the 2028 Olympics: $7.1 billion. The federal government's security and planning allocation for the Games, signed into law by President Trump in July 2025: $1 billion. The city of Long Beach alone is spending $747 million on Olympic legacy projects. LA Metro is requesting $2 billion for Games-related transit operations alone. The region's rail expansion program, accelerated around the Olympics, is estimated at $35 billion.

The amount LA County's Olympic-adjacent encampment strategy allocates specifically for housing displaced residents: zero new dollars.

In the first two articles in this series, I wrote about what Paris did wrong and what a small program there briefly got right. I wrote about the co-design processes LA has tried, what communities said in those rooms, and the gap between what was heard and what made it into the budget. This article is about the money: where it exists, why it isn't being directed toward protection, and what a credible timeline for doing so would actually require.

The World Cup starts in Los Angeles on June 11. The clock on 2028 is already running. The choices being made right now, in budget rooms and planning offices across LA County and City Hall, are the choices that will determine what happens to 75,000 people when the cameras arrive.

What Paris Spent on Displacement Versus What It Spent on Housing

Before talking about LA's finances, it's worth being precise about what Paris actually spent on its approach to homelessness during the 2024 Games.

The French government funded daily police operations to disperse the same encampments, repeatedly, across 18 months. It built anti-homeless infrastructure — the concrete blocks, the steel spikes, the sealed archways — that has become so prevalent in European cities it has its own academic literature. It funded temporary shelters in ten cities across France (Toulouse, Bordeaux, and Strasbourg) to hold people removed from Paris for periods of roughly three weeks, after which most were released into homelessness in cities they didn't know. It processed thousands of appearance bans and detention orders, generating administrative and legal costs that continued as courts overturned many of those orders.

Nobody has published a precise total for these displacement costs. The French government has not done so, and Le Revers de la Médaille has focused its documentation on human impact rather than government accounting. But the collective made a specific claim that has not been credibly challenged: with 10 million euros, they said, they could have housed everyone at risk of Olympic displacement in dignified, local, relationship-based accommodations. The Olympic Committee spent approximately 12 billion euros on the Games and declined to contribute that amount. The French state, which funded the dispersal operations, also declined.

The 256 people who were eventually placed in the "highly precarious places" program — which I've now written about three times in this series because it keeps being the most important data point from Paris — were housed for a fraction of what was spent on the police operations that failed to reduce visible homelessness by a single person. They were moved into stable housing by outreach workers with existing relationships, using flexible funding, near their existing support networks. The program cost less. The outcomes were better. It was implemented too late and at too small a scale to matter systemically.

That math is what I want Los Angeles to work with.

The 256 people housed through the dignified program were moved into stable housing for a fraction of what was spent on police operations that failed to reduce visible homelessness by a single person.

Where the Money Already Exists in LA

Los Angeles is not Paris, and not only because our homelessness crisis is larger. We also have funding mechanisms that Paris didn't have — some of which are already generating substantial revenue and are specifically designated for housing and homelessness.

Measure ULA, passed by LA voters in 2022, is a transfer tax on high-value real estate sales — 4 percent on transactions between $5.3 million and $10.6 million, and 5.5 percent above that. Its revenue is legally designated for affordable housing construction, emergency rental assistance, and homelessness prevention. As of early 2026, Measure ULA has raised over $1 billion since its inception. It has restarted nine housing developments and assisted more than 11,000 households. It is, as CalMatters noted, "by far the largest single contributor to the city's overall homelessness spending."

Measure A, the county's quarter-cent sales tax approved by voters in November 2024, is projected to generate approximately $1 billion annually for homelessness services, affordable housing, and prevention programs. The $843 million HSH spending plan approved in February draws heavily on this revenue. That is real money, at scale, dedicated to exactly the problem at hand.

There is also the federal security allocation: $1 billion signed into law for "security, planning, and other costs" related to the 2028 Olympics. The exact parameters of what this money can fund are still being determined, but the language is notably broad. The question of whether any portion of it could support the kind of rapid-housing infrastructure that would protect unhoused residents near Olympic venues is one that advocates have not yet forced onto the table publicly.

None of these funding streams has been explicitly connected to the county's Olympic encampment strategy. They exist in parallel, serving related but separate bureaucratic processes. The county plan acknowledges it has no new money for housing displacement. The county simultaneously holds $843 million in homelessness funding and sits inside a city that has generated over a billion dollars from Measure ULA.

The money is not absent. The alignment is.

What a Credible Timeline Actually Requires

The source material for this series lays out a clear phased timeline for community-driven protection systems. I want to apply that timeline to where LA actually is right now.

The framework suggests starting foundation work three to four years before an event. The Opening Ceremony is July 14, 2028. Three years before that was July 2025. We are already past that window. We are inside the period that the framework describes as system stress-testing — the 12 to 24 months before events when pilot programs should be running, partnership agreements should be formalized, and emergency response protocols should already be in place.

We are not in that place. The county's Olympic encampment strategy, released in January 2026, is still at the analysis and recommendation stage. The World Cup, beginning June 11 of this year, is weeks away. It will bring nine fan zones across LA, 39 days of matches, and an estimated surge in both police presence and encampment clearings near venues. It is the stress test. And we are not ready.

What would readiness look like at this stage? Based on the Paris experience and LA's own ChangeWell co-design findings, a minimum credible plan for the World Cup period would include three things.

First, a designated rapid-response housing fund — drawn from existing Measure ULA or Measure A revenue — with pre-approved protocols for emergency placement near Olympic venues. Not a new bureaucratic process requiring months of approvals, but an existing fund with designated outreach workers authorized to make placements within 48 hours of a displacement event.

Second, a community monitoring system run by organizations already trusted in affected communities. Lived Experience Advisers and the coalition organizations that participated in the ChangeWell sessions already have the relationships. They need a formal role and a funded mandate, not a gesture toward consultation.

Third, a public commitment from the mayor and the Board of Supervisors that displacement near World Cup and Olympic venues will include a housing offer — not just a referral to a waitlist. The distinction matters. A referral to LAHSA's coordinated entry system, where the current wait for permanent supportive housing can exceed two years, is not a housing offer. It is a bureaucratic gesture that allows officials to say the word "housing" while people remain on the street.

These are not impossible asks. They are asks that would require someone with political authority to say: the Olympics are not going to happen at the expense of the people already living here. Nobody has said that yet.

The Costs of Getting This Wrong

Paris's approach to Olympic homelessness generated sustained international criticism throughout the Games. The coverage in The Nation, NPR, The Guardian, Euronews, and dozens of international outlets directly contradicted the French government's narrative of a clean, successful event. The IOC's own stated values around human dignity and inclusion were publicly weaponized against an organization that had declined to spend a fraction of its budget protecting the people most affected by the Games.

Los Angeles is operating under higher scrutiny, not lower. The city's homelessness crisis is internationally recognized, more visible than Paris's, more entrenched, and more directly tied to policy choices that have been covered in global media for years. The presence of 15,000 athletes, 14 million ticket holders, and several billion television viewers does not create a window for LA to hide its homelessness. It creates a moment when the contrast between Olympic infrastructure and street-level survival will be documented by every media outlet on earth.

There is also the straightforward economic argument, which I want to make briefly because it is often more persuasive to officials than the human case. Every person displaced from an encampment near an Olympic venue who ends up in a hospital emergency room, in a jail, or cycling through the shelter system over the following months represents a public cost that exceeds — sometimes substantially — what stable housing would have cost upfront. The Economic Roundtable's research on the 2028 Olympics makes this case in detail: housing people is cheaper than the accumulated costs of not housing them. This is not a new finding. Every credible housing researcher has been making it for twenty years. The challenge has never been the evidence. It has always been the political will to act on it.

The Measure ULA debate illustrates this precisely. The tax has raised over $1 billion, restarted housing developments, assisted thousands of households, and contributed to LA's first recorded decline in homelessness in years. It is also under sustained attack from real estate interests and faces a potential statewide repeal initiative in November 2026. The Olympics creates urgency that could either accelerate housing investment — or accelerate the displacement that Measure ULA's critics have always preferred. Which direction it goes depends on decisions being made right now.

What Success Would Actually Look Like

The original framework for this series defines community success through metrics that rarely appear in official planning documents: housing stability maintained after events end, not just during them. Service access preserved through venue preparations, not disrupted by them. The ability to move freely through public space without fear of criminalization. Economic participation in event-related employment rather than exclusion from it.

These metrics require measurement systems that LA does not currently have in place for Olympic planning. The RAND LA LEADS study provides rigorous longitudinal data on Hollywood, Skid Row, and Venice. The HSH co-design process generated specific evaluation questions from community stakeholders. These are the building blocks of a community-accountable measurement system. They are not currently connected to the county's Olympic planning process.

What connection would look like: the LA28 organizing committee, which has formal agreements with venue cities about reimbursing municipal service costs, should be required to include community protection metrics in those agreements. If the Games generate displacement, that cost should appear somewhere in the accounting. If services are disrupted, that disruption should be measured. If people are housed versus relocated versus lost to the streets entirely, those outcomes should be tracked and reported publicly.

This kind of accountability structure does not require new legislation. It requires the county and city to insist on it in the negotiations that are already happening with LA28. The window for those negotiations is closing.

I've spent this series making the case that Paris showed us what not to do, and that LA has the community expertise, the research base, and in many respects the funding to do something different. The third article in a four-part series is probably not the place for optimism, but I find myself holding it anyway. Not because the political will is there yet. Because I've seen what happens when people in rooms together refuse to accept the predetermined answer. I sat in that SPA 4 session. The expertise in that room was extraordinary. The gap between what was generated there and what appeared in the budget is not inevitable. It reflects decisions that can still be made differently.

The money exists. The knowledge exists. The community relationships exist. What is needed is someone with the political authority to say that the 2028 Olympics will be judged not by the opening ceremony, but by what happened to the people who were already here when the world arrived.

Ready to join the community committed to housing justice? Subscribe to Letters to the Housed for weekly insights on solutions that work. Support our work at SecondGrace.LA.

Sources and Further Reading

This is Article 3 in a four-part series on mega-events, displacement, and community expertise. Article 4 will look at what accountability structures could still be put in place before the World Cup and the Olympics, and what the community organizations doing this work need right now.