L.A. City Council is set to vote on the motion this Friday, February 28, during a Council session at Van Nuys City Hall. You can share written comment around this disastrous public exemption for private enterprise here, or join us in-person on Friday morning at 10 a.m. in Van Nuys.
By NOlympics LA
February 26, 2025
This past December, Los Angeles City Councilmember Traci Park introduced a motion to exempt all Olympics-related development from city planning approval processes. The motion would apply to “temporary and permanent venues, training facilities, security perimeters, broadcast and media centers, transit infrastructure, live sites and fan zones and associated structures,” among other “essential facilities.”
It seems fairly obvious that the Olympic and Paralympic Games—which are scheduled to come to Los Angeles for a mere four weeks in 2028—are anything but “essential.” And so we are extremely concerned that the city is now considering streamlining a bunch of building projects for a purportedly “no-build Olympics.” (Back in 2017, when Los Angeles officials agreed to host the Olympics without having sought any public input, organizers promised a “no-build” Olympics as a way of keeping costs down.)
We are especially concerned about the potential for abuse that Park’s proposed exemption opens up. The motion creates a vague exemption for Olympics-related infrastructure and “associated structures” that might be easily exploited by anyone seeking to advance development projects by bypassing our standard planning approval processes. The exemption could be used by hotel developers, by landlords looking to deplete our rental stock by converting units into short-term rentals, by corporate sponsors looking to turn public space into “activation sites,” and by so many other opportunistic actors. This current motion doesn’t even clarify what makes a project “Olympics-related” in the first place.
Megaevents like the Olympics exacerbate gentrification, displacement, and homelessness by creating new financial incentives for landlords to evict long standing tenants paying below market-rate rents—and now, potentially, for developers to fast-track hastily-designed projects without properly vetting their social and environmental impacts. In tandem, special security designations that invite federal immigration authorities and related procedural exemptions provide cover for local leaders and law enforcement to increase criminalization of the homeless, further worsening already intersecting crises.
For decades, communities across the city have been asking for permanent investments in Los Angeles’ infrastructure that actually serve Angelenos—public housing, better streets and sidewalks, more reliable public transportation, and more green space. This ain’t it. But, as LA28 Chairman Casey Wasserman has said point blank, “We’re not responsible for solving homelessness. We’re responsible for delivering the Olympic Games as a private enterprise in 2028.”
NOlympics LA is a coalition of organizers and organizations opposed to the 2028 Olympic Games, scheduled to take place right here in Los Angeles.
