When Karen Bass was elected mayor of Los Angeles, it seemed that the city’s shameful neglect of its housing crisis would finally end. Bass, after all, is a progressive, and she staked much of her political capital during her mayoral campaign on a pledge to tackle the interconnected crises of homelessness and a dearth of affordable or supportive housing in the sprawling city.
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Olympic host cities make promises that are all but impossible to keep, and in recent years, the organizers’ wishful thinking about housing and neighborhood redevelopment has been one of the cruelest Olympic disappointments. As the 2024 Paris Games approach, we are seeing it all over again — displacement, gentrification and the unhoused “voluntarily” lured elsewhere with assurances of help that never materializes. What will it mean for Los Angeles, when the Games arrive in 2028?
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Once again, he was in the psychiatric ward of L.A. County jail, the last stage in a repeated cycle that had led from a promising new start to creeping irrationality or a sudden break from reality, then homelessness, then arrest for trespass or disorderly conduct or public indecency.
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