What We Need Now: A Community Accountability Agenda for the 2028 LA Olympics

Accountability has a due date. Visual by deluxmultimedia

What We Need Now

A community accountability agenda for the 2028 Olympics, and why the next 90 days matter more than any ceremony

By Paul Asplund | SecondGrace.LA | April 2026

This is the fourth article in a series about Paris, displacement, and the choices Los Angeles still has time to make before 2028. In the first three, I laid out what Paris got catastrophically wrong, documented the gap between what community members designed in LA's co-design sessions and what appeared in the actual budget, and showed where the money to do things differently already exists. This one is about accountability: what specific things need to happen, who has the power to make them happen, and what the rest of us can do when they don't.

SERIES SUMMARY

House Them or Hide Them? LA's Choice Before 2028 is a four-part investigation into Olympic displacement, community expertise, and the funding mechanisms and accountability structures that could still protect unhoused Angelenos before the 2028 Games begin.

But before I get to the agenda, I want to name something that changed while I was writing this series.

In February 2026, while LA28 leadership was in Italy for the Winter Games, two things happened here at home that reveal exactly what kind of Olympics we are heading toward. The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to approve an ordinance exempting Olympics-related construction projects from standard planning and zoning review. And Strategic Actions for a Just Economy published a detailed report calling on LA leaders to put the option of cancellation on the table and urgently compile a full accounting of what the Games will actually cost the public.

These two events tell you everything about the current dynamic. The institutional machinery is moving faster than democratic oversight. Olympic infrastructure is being approved without comprehensive environmental review, without a complete list of planned projects, without community input on what gets built where. The same council that voted 14-0 to waive planning requirements has not voted on a single binding commitment to protect unhoused Angelenos from the displacement those projects will produce.

The World Cup begins in Los Angeles on June 11. The clock is not waiting for anyone to catch up.

What Just Happened and Why It Matters

I want to be precise about the zoning ordinance, because the details matter more than the headlines suggest.

The ordinance, passed February 3, exempts Olympics-related projects from planning review, specific plan requirements, and environmental assessment. When Councilmember Nithya Raman asked city planning staff for a comprehensive list of projects the ordinance would cover, she was told no such list exists. The Office of Major Events offered three examples: EV charging stations, a pentathlon swimming facility, and what an official described as "a bunch of roads throughout the Sepulveda Basin." That last item landed without elaboration. The Sepulveda Basin is also where the county cleared an encampment in March 2025, where many unhoused community members have lived for years, and where Olympic preparation is now progressing faster than any public accounting of its human consequences.

The ordinance explicitly excludes housing demolition. That protection is real, and it matters. But it does not cover the displacement that happens when encampments are cleared for "a bunch of roads." It does not cover the indirect displacement that follows when security perimeters expand into neighborhoods. It does not cover what SAJE's February 2026 report describes as the coordination of Olympic security "hand-in-glove with Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security," including ICE agents operating in an expanded federal footprint around venues.

The ordinance does not protect people experiencing homelessness because it was never designed to. It was designed to get things built faster. The accountability infrastructure for what happens to people during that building process simply does not exist yet.

"The institutional machinery is moving faster than democratic oversight. Olympic infrastructure is being approved without a complete list of planned projects and without community input. The same council has not passed a single binding commitment to protect unhoused Angelenos."

The World Cup Is the Test Run

I have written in every article in this series about June 11. I keep coming back to it because it represents something the abstract future of 2028 does not: a deadline that has already arrived.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup will bring nine fan zones across Los Angeles, 39 days of matches at SoFi Stadium and other venues, international media coverage, elevated security presence, and all the encampment clearings that have historically preceded every major event this city has hosted. During the 2022 Super Bowl, residents living under the 405 freeway at Century Boulevard were forced to relocate. During preparation for that same event, CalTrans swept encampments along the 405 to prepare for tourist traffic. NOlympics LA called it a "practice run" for 2028. They were right.

The World Cup is another practice run. It is also the moment when community organizations, legal advocates, and outreach workers will either have a functioning rapid-response infrastructure or they will not. There is no dry run for the dry run. What happens to people between now and August will shape both the policy choices available before 2028 and the political will to make them.

What specifically should we be watching for between now and the end of the summer?

First: whether any encampment clearings near World Cup venues include genuine housing offers, not referrals to the coordinated entry waitlist. The distinction, which I've drawn before in this series, is between giving someone a path to a door and giving someone a door. A two-year wait for permanent supportive housing is not a housing offer — it's inhumane.

Second: whether the city's emergency coordination structure — the Office of Major Events and its interagency partnerships — produces any public reporting on displacement outcomes during the World Cup period. If it doesn't, that silence becomes the baseline for 2028.

Third: whether the organizations that sat in the co-design sessions in September 2025, generated specific solutions that were later collapsed into less than a tenth of a percent of the HSH budget, are given any formal role in monitoring World Cup implementation. If they are not, that exclusion will need to become a demand.

What a Community Accountability Agenda Looks Like

The source material for this series proposes a detailed framework for community-driven protection: early warning systems, rapid response teams, mobile service hubs, community-controlled oversight bodies, binding agreements with Olympic organizers. All of it is right. All of it is also, at this point in 2026, a set of demands rather than a description of what exists.

Let me translate those demands into specifics, addressed to the people with the power to act on them.

To the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors: The same HSH budget process that allocated $843 million for FY 2026-27 needs a dedicated line item for Olympic-period displacement response. Not a contingency fund that requires new bureaucratic approvals to access. A pre-authorized, pre-staffed rapid housing fund, administered by organizations with existing community relationships, with a 48-hour maximum from displacement to housing offer. Measure A and Measure ULA together are generating enough revenue to fund this. The political will to connect those dollars to this need is what is missing.

To the LA City Council: The same body that voted 14-0 to waive planning requirements for Olympic construction projects should pass a binding ordinance requiring that any encampment clearings within a defined radius of Olympic or World Cup venues include a documented housing offer. Not a referral. Not a shelter bed for 30 days. A defined pathway to stable housing, administered by a named organization with accountability to the community member, not just the city.

To LA28: Your Impact and Sustainability Plan, released in August 2025, commits to "community benefit" and "inclusivity" as core principles. Your Resilience Champions Fund opened applications in February 2026 for grants focused on wildfire resilience, ocean protection, and cooling solutions. These are legitimate commitments. They also entirely exclude the community most directly at risk from your operations. When AfroLA asked LA28 about specific anti-displacement measures, the organization did not respond. Community protection needs to be in the venue agreements, in the budget, and on the record — not absent from the press release.

To the organizations that were in those co-design rooms: Your expertise has already been proven correct once. The early warning signs you identified — increased police presence near encampments without corresponding service expansion, anti-homeless infrastructure appearing before housing is available, service disruptions cascading into health crises — are all visible right now in the Sepulveda Basin clearings, in the zoning ordinance passed without a project list, in the ICE coordination SAJE documented. You don't need to wait for an invitation to name what you're seeing. The documentation you're building right now is the foundation for accountability demands that officials cannot easily dismiss.

"The documentation being built right now by community organizations is the foundation for accountability demands that officials cannot easily dismiss. You don't need to wait for an invitation to name what you're seeing."

What Accountability Actually Requires

The accountability mechanisms I'm describing are harder to achieve than the funding mechanisms I wrote about in Article 3. The money is there, and money moves when political will is assembled. Accountability is different because it requires changing who holds power in a process that has, from the beginning, concentrated power in a small number of people who signed contracts without voter approval, without a final budget, and without binding human rights commitments.

The Host City Contract for the 2028 Olympics was approved in 11 days in 2017. There was no community input process. There was no environmental review. There was no requirement that LA28 disclose detailed spending projections to the city. Knock LA's analysis of the Games Agreement noted that the contract included no commitment not to displace or sweep unhoused Angelenos, no protection for low-income tenants from Olympic-driven gentrification, and no cancellation clause that would give the city leverage to protect itself from cost overruns. None of those omissions have been corrected in the nine years since.

What has changed is the political landscape. Three City Council members have called for LA28 chair Casey Wasserman's resignation. The SAJE report asking LA leaders to consider cancellation has generated more mainstream coverage of Olympic accountability than anything in the preceding five years. The Inglewood Transit Connector project — which displaced more than 40 businesses and nearly 500 workers while only 23 of 41 impacted businesses completed relocation surveys despite 15 months of outreach — is now documented. The pattern is visible in a way it wasn't in 2017.

Visible patterns create political openings. The question is whether the organizations with the expertise, the documentation, and the community relationships can translate that visibility into binding commitments before the opening ceremony makes the question moot.

What binding looks like: the SAJE report lays out a minimum threshold for public accountability. LA28 should be required to provide detailed spending and revenue projections — not just a chair's assertion that 72 percent of the budget is committed. The city should compile and publish a complete list of all Olympics-related expenses not covered by LA28's official budget. And some formal mechanism — a community oversight body with decision-making authority rather than advisory status — should be in place before the World Cup period begins.

None of this requires cancellation. It requires the city to treat its own residents with the same seriousness with which it is treating its international obligations.

Radical Hope in the Face of a Closing Window

I have been working in homeless services for over a decade. I spent years at Lava Mae watching what happens when cities treat hygiene — and by extension human dignity — as a problem to be managed rather than a right to be protected. I've sat in enough rooms with enough people to know that the gap between what is possible and what actually happens is almost never about knowledge or resources. It is almost always about power and whose interests the existing structures are designed to serve.

The Olympics is not a departure from that dynamic. It is an amplification of it. The same forces that have produced LA's homelessness crisis — the same competition for land, the same prioritization of development over community stability, the same deference to private capital over public need — are operating at Olympic scale with Olympic timelines and Olympic media attention.

Radical Hope, the framework I've been developing through this newsletter, is not optimism. It is the choice to see clearly and remain engaged anyway. It is not the belief that things will work out. It is the practice of working toward outcomes that reflect our values even when the structural forces are running the other direction. What I've seen in the organizations doing this work is not naive hope. It is the specific, disciplined hope of people who know exactly what the obstacles are and have decided to work on them anyway.

The World Cup begins June 11. Here is what I am watching for as the test of what 2028 will be.

I am watching whether organizations that participated in the ChangeWell co-design process are included in any formal monitoring of World Cup encampment clearings. I am watching whether any City Council member introduces legislation requiring documented housing offers before venue-adjacent clearings. I am watching whether the LA County Board of Supervisors uses its authority over the HSH budget to create a pre-authorized Olympic displacement fund before the summer. I am watching whether LA28's Resilience Champions Fund — currently funding wildfire resilience and ocean protection — expands to include the most immediate resilience challenge its operations are producing.

I am also watching whether the community organizations doing this documentation work are resourced enough to sustain it through the summer, through the run-up to 2028, and through the Games themselves. Documentation is accountability. And accountability requires people who are present, organized, and funded to do it.

This series has been about Paris because Paris is the clearest recent example of a city that had choices and made the wrong ones. But the series has always been about Los Angeles — about whether this city, with its extraordinary community expertise, its existing funding mechanisms, its network of organizations that have been working on these questions for years, will make different choices.

The 256 people who were housed through Paris's dignified placement program were housed because outreach workers with existing relationships had flexible funding and the mandate to use it. That is the model. It is not complicated. It does not require new legislation in most of its essentials. It requires someone with the political authority to say: this is what we're doing, these are the organizations we're resourcing to do it, and this is how we'll know if it worked.

That person has not yet said that. There is still time for them to say it.

The world will be watching in 2028. What they see will depend on decisions being made right now, in budget rooms and council chambers and organizational strategy meetings and community gatherings that most of the world will never know about. Those decisions will be made by people who are choosing, day by day, whether to treat the people already living here as the point of all of this — or as a problem to be managed before the cameras arrive.

The community organizations doing this work have always known who the point is. The question, as it has always been, is whether the institutions will catch up.

"Radical Hope is not optimism. It is the choice to see clearly and remain engaged anyway. It is the practice of working toward outcomes that reflect our values even when the structural forces are running the other direction."

If this series has been useful to you, the most meaningful thing you can do is share it with someone in a position to act on it. Subscribe to Letters to the Housed for weekly analysis. Support the work at SecondGrace.LA.

Sources and Further Reading

Paul AsplundLettersToTheHoused, SecondGraceLA, EndHomelessness, HousingFirst, LosAngeles, HomelessnessResponse, 2028Olympics, OlympicLegacy, OlympicDisplacement, RadicalHope, HousingJustice, CommunityAction, SystemicChange, CommunityAccountability, FIFAWorldCup2026, MegaEvents, EncampmentSweeps, NothingAboutUsWithoutUs, SAJE, NOlympicsLA, ICEandHomelessnessComment