What Paris Taught Us, and What LA Could Still Accomplish
Between intention and action, people fall through the cracks. Visual by delux multimedia.
Mega-events, displacement, and the choice in front of Los Angeles
Letters to the Housed by Paul Asplund | SecondGrace.LA | April 2026
On the morning of July 26, 2024, Paris opened its Olympic Games with a ceremony that stretched the length of the Seine. Millions watched. The city sparkled.
A woman living in irregular housing watched on her phone from inside a squat she was afraid to leave. "There were too many controls and I don't have papers," she told outreach workers from Doctors of the World. "What am I going to do if the police find me?"
She was one of 19,526 people evicted from their living spaces in the 18 months leading up to and during the Paris Games. Among them were 4,550 children, three times more than in previous years, as documented by the coalition Le Revers de la Médaille (The Other Side of the Medal).
I've been writing about the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics for months now. I've written about what Paris did, what London did, what Rio did. I've written about what LA is planning. And I keep coming back to the same question: why do we keep watching the same disaster unfold and pretending we'll be different?
Why do we keep watching the same disaster unfold and pretending we'll be different?
The answer requires us to look carefully at what actually happened in Paris, and to be honest about what is already happening here.
In early March, we met with a member of Mayor Bass's team addressing the impact of these events on LA's unhoused neighbors. This is the first of four articles offered in response to that conversation.
Olympic Confinement: A Phenomenon We Need to Name
Activists and researchers who documented the Paris Games gave a name to something we hadn't named before: "Olympic confinement." It describes what happens when people in precarious situations severely restrict their own movement out of fear of police encounters during a major event.
It is different from displacement. Displacement is when authorities physically remove you. Olympic confinement is when you remove yourself, because the risk of being seen is too high.
A Sudanese street vendor in Paris described working under these conditions: "With the Olympics there's too much police, controls everywhere. So I haven't worked for 10 days. It's more difficult to get by and feed myself."
The cascading effects were documented across every dimension of daily survival. Five pregnant women supported by the Solipam association chose to forgo medical appointments rather than risk police encounters on the way there. A woman in irregular status walked two and a half hours with her baby through Seine-Saint-Denis to reach a food distribution, taking detours to avoid patrols. Food distribution organizations reported their client lists dropped by two-thirds after being forced to relocate outside Olympic security perimeters. The Doctors of the World clinic in Saint-Denis, serving one of France's poorest departments, closed entirely during the Games due to proximity to the Stade de France. When services resumed in September, 30% fewer people accessed care than before.
Olympic confinement doesn't show up in the official displacement numbers. It's the harm that happens when people make themselves invisible to survive.
This is the part that doesn't show up in official displacement numbers, because it's not being counted as displacement. It's what happens when people make themselves invisible to survive. And it is already happening in Los Angeles.
When I wrote about MacArthur Park last July, I described 90 National Guard troops, 17 Humvees, Border Patrol agents on horseback, zero arrests. When I wrote "When Sanctuary Becomes a Hunting Ground" in February, I described shelter workers scanning the block each morning before walking residents to the bus. People in Hollywood hiding in their tents, not going to work, not riding the bus, not accessing the services we built for them.
We already have Olympic confinement. It's just not being caused by the Olympics yet.
What Paris Actually Did: The Failure and the Brief, Remarkable Success
The French government's response to homelessness before and during the Paris Games followed a pattern familiar from every previous mega-event: disperse, relocate, and declare the problem managed. Encampments were cleared. People were bussed to temporary accommodations outside the city. Services were moved away from Olympic security perimeters. The result, as documented by Doctors of the World and multiple humanitarian organizations, was the systematic disconnection of vulnerable people from the care networks they depended on.
What makes Paris worth studying carefully is that it also contained a small program that worked, and the contrast between the two approaches is instructive.
A program called "highly precarious places" placed 256 people from the most vulnerable situations into dignified, stable accommodations during the Games. No lengthy application process. Housing near existing support networks. Social workers who understood complex situations. Private space and minimal rules. Outreach professionals who worked with this program noted that when solutions are "adapted, dignified, and humane, they are accepted and allow exits from the street even for the most complicated situations."
Outreach professionals who worked with this program noted that when solutions are "adapted, dignified, and humane, they are accepted and allow exits from the street even for the most complicated situations."
256 people in a city of two million. A footnote. But that footnote proved something important: previous refusals of housing by people experiencing homelessness had reflected inadequate offers, not personal deficiencies. When the offer was right, people said yes.
The full failure and the small success carry the same lesson: people make rational decisions when given rational choices. The question is whether the city is making rational offers.
What LA Is Actually Planning
In January 2026, LA County issued a strategy report advising local governments on how to clear encampments near Olympic venues. The report acknowledged that there are concerns there won't be enough beds, and that no new funding is attached to the plan.
Shayla Myers with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles described the strategy plainly: "You're not actually getting people off the streets. You're simply attempting to make specific locations clear. It is about taking resources to clear encampments in the most visible locations when you have cameras and tourists all putting their focus on Los Angeles."
On March 4, Mayor Bass held a press conference at the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area, announcing cleanup progress at a site that will host BMX, skateboarding, pentathlon, and 3-on-3 basketball in 2028. The area has long been home to encampments. The press conference framed their removal as public safety and fire prevention. The displacement of the people living there received no comparable announcement.
Mayor Bass has said LA's strategy will "always be housing people first" and will "never be putting people on a bus and shipping them out." She deserves credit for stating that commitment. The question is whether the infrastructure exists to fulfill it. Right now, the county's own report says it doesn't.
The 2022 Super Bowl was the practice run for the World Cup. The World Cup, starting June 11, is the practice run for the Olympics.
NOlympics LA has been documenting what they call the practice runs. When Caltrans swept encampments along the 405 freeway before the 2022 Super Bowl, they called it a rehearsal. The World Cup, which begins in Los Angeles on June 11, 2026, with nine fan zones across the city and matches running for 39 days, is the next rehearsal. Then comes 2028.
This escalation of scale matters. Paris had to manage displacement with a single central Games footprint. Los Angeles has four separate Olympic zones spread across the county. There is no concentrated area to sweep. The displacement will be distributed across the city, encampment by encampment, neighborhood by neighborhood, for the next two years.
What the People Being Displaced Know
One of the most important insights from the Paris documentation is about what people experiencing homelessness actually do when faced with displacement, and what they need from services that work.
In Paris, people didn't simply accept displacement or disappear. They built information networks, sharing real-time data about police presence, open services, and safe sleeping locations. Encampment residents organized communal responses to housing offers, recognizing that individual solutions often meant separation from support networks. They adapted their routines while maintaining connections through phones and social media when physical presence became too dangerous.
This is expertise. It is the kind of expertise that, as I wrote last week about the IGH Vanguard cities, gets dismissed when it comes from people experiencing homelessness. Greater Manchester co-designed their youth homelessness prevention program with the young people it serves. Uruguay's NITEP was founded by people living on the streets. These models work because they start with the knowledge that already exists.
The Paris failure was, at its core, a failure to ask. The 256 successful placements happened because outreach workers with existing relationships made offers that were actually responsive to what people needed. The 19,526 displacements happened because officials designed a strategy without talking to the people it would affect.
We are repeating this in LA. The county's encampment strategy report was directed by the Board of Supervisors and designed by county staff. I have not seen evidence that people currently living near Olympic venues were meaningfully consulted about what they would need to stay housed, what barriers prevent them from accessing services, or what kind of offer would actually work for them.
The Convergence We're Not Talking About
Here is the thing that should be keeping every homelessness advocate in Los Angeles awake: the Olympic displacement pressure is arriving on top of everything else.
ICE sweeps have already created Olympic confinement conditions for undocumented residents. People are avoiding shelters, avoiding services, avoiding public transit, making themselves invisible to survive. The Grants Pass Supreme Court ruling removed the constitutional protection that once limited encampment sweeps. Governor Newsom's July 2025 executive order accelerated state-level clearings. $200 million was cut from the LA County homeless services budget in February.
Each of these pressures is significant on its own. Together, they are compressing people from every direction simultaneously: off the streets through sweeps, out of shelters through fear of ICE, away from services through funding cuts, into smaller and smaller spaces with fewer and fewer resources available to them.
Paris had to manage one of these pressures. Los Angeles has all of them, plus the Olympics.
Daniel Flaming and his team at the Economic Roundtable identified the core reality clearly: the median monthly income of unsheltered individuals in LA is $387. You cannot house someone on $387 a month in this city, or in any major city in America. The displacement pressure of the Olympics is ultimately a displacement pressure built on the foundation of economic inequality that was already here. The Games don't create this problem. They reveal it, accelerate it, and make it visible to two billion people watching.
The Choice in Front of Us
The Paris Games documented both what happens when a city fails and what happens when it briefly, partially succeeds. The 256 people housed through the dignified program offer one set of lessons. The 19,526 displaced offer another. Both point to the same place: the outcome depends on what kind of offer the city makes.
Right now, Los Angeles is preparing to make the same offer Paris made to the 19,526. A plan to clear encampments near venues. No new funding. No guarantee of beds. No meaningful engagement with the people who will be displaced.
We have two years. That is not a lot of time to build the housing infrastructure that would make a different offer possible. But it is enough time to change the planning process, to require that people currently living near Olympic venues be consulted and their expertise incorporated. It is enough time to attach real funding to the county's encampment strategy, rather than issuing plans without resources. It is enough time to connect Olympic preparation to the affordable housing pipeline, as every credible research institution has recommended.
In my work with the unhoused communities in San Francisco and Los Angeles, I see every day what happens when people are given offers that are actually responsive to what they need. When the offer is right, people say yes. When the offer is "get out of sight," people make themselves invisible to survive, and we call that success.
We are two years out from an event that will put Los Angeles in front of the world. We have the evidence from Paris, from London, from every Olympics before this one, about what happens when cities choose visibility over housing. We have the evidence from Santiago, Manchester, Buenos Aires, and Lisbon about what works when cities decide to try.
The question for LA is the same one Paris faced: are the officials responsible for planning ready to hear what the people most affected have to say? In Paris, they mostly weren't. The 256 placements prove they could have been.
We still have time to choose differently. The clock is running.
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SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
Doctors of the World / Médecins du Monde — Paris 2024 field documentation
Le Revers de la Médaille (The Other Side of the Medal) — displacement data
NPR: "In Paris, the Olympics pushed out thousands living on the edge of the city" (August 2024)
The Nation: "The Paris Olympics Has Launched a War on the Poor" (August 2024)
The Big Issue: "Olympics 2024: Fury as homelessness swept under the rug" (July 2024)
Institute of Global Homelessness, Vanguard Cities Case Studies (2026)
LAist: "LA County considers plans to remove unhoused people around Olympic venues" (January 2026)
NBC Los Angeles: Sepulveda Basin cleanup update (March 4, 2026)
AfroLA: "2028 Olympics: LA's 'no-build' promise faces housing crisis reality" (May 2025)
LA County Department of Homeless Services and Housing, FY 2026–27 Spending Plan (February 2026)
Paul Asplund, "When Sanctuary Becomes a Hunting Ground," Letters to the Housed (February 23, 2026)
Editor’s Note
This article updates and significantly expands an earlier piece, "Listening to the Experts: What People Experiencing Homelessness Tell Us About Mega-Events." The Paris research and testimony from Doctors of the World outreach teams remains central to the argument. New sections connect that documentation to current conditions in Los Angeles, including the county's January 2026 Olympic encampment strategy, the March 2026 Sepulveda Basin cleanup, the convergence of ICE enforcement and Olympic preparations, and the World Cup 2026 as an immediate preview of 2028 displacement dynamics.
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