Part 107: Something is Better Than Nothing – The Unhoused and the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics

Published August 23, 2024.

and

Aug 23, 2024

Photo from Los Angeles City Hall looking out over Gloria Molina Park, formerly Grand Park, in downtown Los Angeles by Zachary Ellison (GoPro Hero 11 Black).

By Zachary Ellison and Rooflesser, Independent Journalists

Citius, Altius, Fortius – Communiter.
Plus vite, Plus haut, Plus fort – Ensemble.
Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together.
—The New Olympic Motto (in 2021, “together” was added to the end of the 1897 version) in Latin, French and English

With the swoop of famous Scientologist actor Tom Cruise, born in Syracuse, New York, and the passing of the flag to Mayor Karen Bass in Paris, France, a bevy of public officials, including Interim Police Chief Dominic Choi and Los Angeles City Council President Paul Krekorian, had traveled to ostensibly prepare for the games. The man in the middle, Chairman of LA28 Casey Wasserman, seemed confident, even as an exposé in the Daily Mail dogged his reputation over his alleged philandering, which was quickly met with denials as to the alleged activity.

They didn’t quite work, with famous pop singer Billie Eilish abandoning his public relations firm over the affair but still performing at the “hand-off” of the torch to LA, a very ceremonial occasion. Most people in Los Angeles didn’t care. They just wanted to know how the city, which hosted the Summer Games in 1932 and 1984, would be able to address such problems as traffic and, most importantly, the crisis of the unhoused, who line the streets, washes, and freeway underpasses. LA would, in fact, be breaking the record as the first triple-host City, but at whose expense? And what about those on the streets of the famed, now summer gamed city?

A world away, a gavel came down in a courthouse. It was the final move in the transfer of 29 properties that formerly comprised the Skid Row Housing Trust, casually called “The Trust," and Leo Pustilnikov, principal of SLH Investments among other entities and principally known for luxury real estate development, was coming away with 17 of them in total. A grand acquisition in Los Angeles was quite easily secured at bargain basement real estate pricing. In fact, a truly capitalistic haul in one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets for housing, with future plans unknown even in court.

According to the Los Angeles Times report by journalist Liam Dillon, in the hearing, Judge Stephen Goorvitch noted, “No formal opposition emerged to the sale” and, in an emphatic quote, “To put it in colloquial terms, something is better than nothing... But I think this is a good something.” City officials backed the deal. Skid Row, the heart of extreme poverty in the USA, is home to an estimated 4,400 people experiencing homelessness, 2,695 of whom are unsheltered. In DTLA, where the average 2-bedroom apartment costs $3k/month to rent, will Pustilnikov follow laws that control rents on these buildings, protect them from demolition, and give tenants rights such as relocation assistance in the event of displacement? What incentive would he have to comply with unenforced municipal codes when it’s unlikely the City would try to retake properties they were willing to give away for practically nothing?

Decades ago, Skid Row had around 15,000 housing units in residential hotels or “boarding houses” (garni in French), but half were demolished due to code violations in the 15 years leading up to LA84. Of the 6,000 or so that remained, one-third, or 2,080 units, were for a long time controlled by The Trust, and recently two receivers, before 11 were sold to nonprofits and the final 17 buildings were secured by Pustilnikov at an impossibly low price of $19 million, net $10 million. If only low-income locals could access such spectacular deals as developers with portfolios like Pustilnikov, how could anyone potentially be without a place to live in Los Angeles?

So even as Wasserman appeared confident on NBC before the closing ceremony in Paris, the hard reality of life on the streets remained. Los Angeles may be able to host a “traffic-less” Olympics, but will it do anything in the end to alleviate persistent housing issues? Are things going any better in Paris or other twice-hosting Olympic cities? Paris is a lot like Hollywood in that it has long been a magnetic destination for ambitious people from all over the world to come seeking plentiful work, only to be run into the ground with little to show for their labor. In France, they have ended up living in “zonards” and "bidonvilles," which are makeshift settlements on vacant public land made out of salvaged materials.

Plenty of Hollywood hopefuls end up in tents on the Boulevard, under the LA28 Hollywood sign, sometimes moving to Skid Row, but many of the people under highways and on sidewalks were legitimately housed in LA at some point before getting evicted or displaced. The idea of the chaotic-bad single male who came here from elsewhere is a trope that dates back to the LA32 era of hostility toward “Okies” and “Arkies” escaping the dust bowl from other states. The Great Depression was an era of expatriation during which mass expulsions of Mexican-American families occurred. Former OC Senator Joseph Dunn estimated there were approximately 1.8 million removed in the 1930s, the majority of whom were born in America.

Public sentiments against “others” gave police convenient covers for carrying out racial “removal” operations, such as a pre-LA32 raid at La Placita Park at the plaza near Olvera Street. On February 26th, 1931, at 3:00 pm in the afternoon, the plaza was barricaded. Approximately 400 people were confronted by authorities from LAPD, the Border Patrol, and other jurisdictions who traveled to assist with the large-scale raid! They were forcibly transported to Mexico after they failed to produce satisfactory documents, and millions more got word of this thanks to cooperation from the complicit mainstream media (LA Times), Chambers of Commerce, and labor unions (The Fed). Many people voluntarily moved themselves, hoping to avoid the additional trauma of being “rounded up” in this terrifying manner before being indefinitely displaced into a strange, unfamiliar place.

The PR approach was strategic because forcibly transporting that many uncooperative people would have been unbelievably expensive, and they would have returned. But scaring people so deeply that they expelled themselves was cheap in comparison, and it worked better. Plus, the press must have felt important when the police handed them exclusive announcements to print. This was bad practice, though, as reporting the things that police want to happen as if they are gospel is working for the State. Journalists should challenge things that are wrong, especially if they can be changed, and simply accepting and announcing things on command isn’t great work.

The Greaser Act in 1855 and Operation Wetback in 1954 terrorized and removed the same population. But the Olympian hypocrisy of pretending to be apolitical in the name of sports while carrying out brutal sweeps introduced the use of sportswashing as a distraction, an excuse, and a cover-up. For this strategic reason, the Mexican expulsion of the early 1930s remains a relatively obscure event in history. LA County Supervisor Hilda Solis got an official apology while she was in Congress, and it was delivered while she was US Secretary of Labor, even though The Fed aided in the repatriation campaign. A memorial was installed at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes on the 81st anniversary of the La Placita raid in 2012. But the next President of the United States, Donald Trump, made promises that sounded exactly like everything the State of California had admitted was wrong and apologized for, to no one’s surprise.

Prior to 2024’s French Olympics, Paris last hosted the Olympics exactly 100 years ago, when the IIIVth Olympiad was held there. The 1924 Games in Paris featured a prototype for an “Olympic Village” where athletes and coaches would stay together. 8 years later, the Xth Olympiad was hosted in Los Angeles, which was then known as a remote “suburb of Hollywood.” People were languishing in cardboard shacks in many of the same places where encampments still persist today, albeit with colorful dome tents, tarps, and RV’s more so than salvaged boards and corrugated metal.

Anti-Olympics protesters took to Sacramento, chanting "Groceries, not Games! Olympics are Outrageous!” in objection to the $1 million State loan that enabled LA32. Despite the housing precarity and prevalent hunger affecting Angelenos, LA ran with the idea of an Olympic Village and, at a price of $400,000, constructed a development of 600 14‘x24’ two-bedroom cottages in Baldwin Hills, which were auctioned to VIPs as souvenirs (starting at $140 unfurnished, including free international shipping) following the event. From then on, it became an official requirement for all host cities to develop Olympic Villages as athlete accommodations, causing some of the biggest Olympic injuries in the past century.

For example, an abandoned village is still intact in Berlin from 1936’s “Nazi Olympics," where one cottage now serves as a shrine to Black American gold-medalist runner Jesse Owens. It’s taken nearly 100 years for an attempt to turn at least part of it into public housing to be considered. In a more recent example, Rio’s 2016 Olympic village displaced organic, thriving multigenerational communities like Vila Autodromo with parking lots and hastily erected 31 dangerous housing towers full of gas leaks, faulty alarms, “construction sites," wet plaster, faulty pipes, and rife with crime.

The tendency of athletes to “grin and bear it” and the media to take a generously forgiving approach when covering the Games does no one any favors except the top executives of the IOC themselves. The Olympics’ refusal to be political is problematic because it is an unhealthy fantasy. Pouring billions of dollars into a utopian tradition for the benefit of a handful of people who are so out of touch with reality that they orchestrated an elaborate international party pit using mostly volunteer labor during the Great Depression and then declined to join in the boycott of the Nazi Games because the Nazi’s had been “good sports” in the past is a good gauge of their priorities. This also puts political pressure on poor international athletes to make trips they can’t afford to try to keep their nations in the good graces of Olympic Hosts.

So what does this all mean for LA28? First, many have already expressed deep concerns, especially within the unhoused community, who fear institutionalization. Some have speculated that the Sears Mail Order Building in Boyle Heights, with developer Izek Shomof’s proposed “Life Rebuilding Center,” is back in play. Shomof, who last December published an effusive memoir, Dreams Don’t Die, through Simon & Schuster, partly to promote the project, clearly is not out of the picture. A successful developer of real estate on downtown’s Spring Street and beyond, Shomof recently bought the former headquarters of Union Oil from the San Francisco-based Swig firm at bottom-barrel pricing as a “re-development play," with The Real Deal journalist Isabella Farr reporting that it was a 47% loss for the firm as the downtown real estate market has cratered over the last decade. A lawyer for Shomof did not respond to a request for comment, and Pustilnikov famously takes pride in being shy.

All of which makes you wonder: if empty residential buildings can be obtained so cheaply in Los Angeles, how are so many people still on the streets? To be fair, Mayor Karen Bass’s Inside Safe program, centered around the usage of existing motel properties, has reported some minor successes. No one thinks that Los Angeles is out of the proverbial woods yet on homelessness, despite turning its nose at Governor Gavin Newsom’s executive order N-1-24 to clear encampments, including the potential use of arrests. If the French Revolution was stirred by the rabble’s disgust at the aristocracy, how long until Los Angeles again experiences significant unrest, like that in 2020 over the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis or the beating of Rodney King in 1992?

This summer in France, ahead of the Olympics, activists sabotaged rail lines and phone lines, leading to one arrest. Neighboring Long Beach, in the wake of Newsom’s edict and the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling concerning Grants Pass, Oregon, has already declared that it plans to use fines and even arrests to remove “its most problematic encampments.” Callousness is not likely to solve the problem of encampments. In Los Angeles, in a video posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, by People’s City Council activist Adam Smith, LAPD’s officers working in conjunction with the Department of Sanitation in Skid Row cleared encampments running over a reportedly “disabled houseless” man’s property with the sports utility vehicle.

Asked for comment, LAPD Media Relations did not respond. Sent to the Office of Inspector General, it was forwarded to the Complaint Section” for determination of any potential appropriate action.” The Mayor’s Office of Karen Bass did not respond to a request for comment on the video, nor did Councilmember Kevin De León, who, according to a report by Los Angeles Times Journalist David Zahniser, has now funneled more than $600,000 from previously formed statewide campaign committees to save his council seat. De León faces challenger Ysabel Jurado in the November election, having barely survived the primary, burning his bridge with the powerful Izek Shomof, with the latter criticizing the former in his book for having spurned the proposed “Life Rebuilding Center” in Boyle Heights.

What happens next with the Skid Row properties now under the ownership of Leo Pustilnikov just might be anyone’s guess. Some have speculated that he’s unlikely to want to keep the properties as low-income housing in one of the cities most economically challenged areas, with encampments lining the streets that allegedly devalue properties, although hard proof of that has yet to reveal itself. According to reporting in The Real Deal, the price per unit of The Trust buildings works out to $8,333 each for 1,200 of them at a $10 million dollar price tag, a bargain-basement price. Pustilnikov and Shomof are well-known long-time business partners.

As part of the total deal cost of $19 million, he will “receive $9 million back to cover renovations and repairs.” The AIDS Healthcare Foundation had considered buying the entire portfolio for $53 million, but balked at the repair costs, according to The Real Deal report, and moreover, “Eleven of the trust’s properties, mostly those newer and in better condition, have already been sold to nonprofit landlords.” Pustilnikov had sought a partnership with a nonprofit provider to continue services to the low-income residents, many of whom struggle with mental and other health issues, but that fell through in lieu of continuing public services to the residents. Shomof previously told Los Angeles Times journalist Gustavo Arellano about homelessness in Los Angeles and his proposed “Life Rebuilding Center: “I’ve been in L.A. for over 50 years, and I’ve seen homeless here that long...It’s time for it to be corrected once and for all.”

Undoubtedly, LA28 President Casey Wasserman lives a world away from Skid Row. No one will be running over his belongings with a vehicle, but just how far will the Olympic planners go to put a face on Los Angeles for prestigious visitors? The sight of the unhoused is something that has long been a troubling issue for the city, even as it’s home to long-established media and fashion industries that are, in essence, anodyne, inoffensive. Seeing may be believing, but not always in Los Angeles!

The Olympic Motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (“Faster, Higher, Stronger”) was augmented in 2021 to “Citius, Altius, Fortius – Communiter.” (“Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together.”) But the Olympics are not bid on or decided together. It is an, obligation forced upon us that has consequences experienced by the most vulnerable among us. If the unhoused are the canaries in the coalmine of the City of LA, what does it mean when they are unsafe to exist in public without fear of arrest? We don’t have to accept LA28, that is wholly indifferent to those it will displace.

Asked for comment on the Games position toward the unhoused, a representative for LA28 did not respond. Nor did representatives of Council President Paul Krekorian or Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, both of whom traveled to Paris for the games, but after all, it’s just another long, hot week in August in Los Angeles. LA28 is scheduled to host it’s Opening Ceremony on “July 14, 2028, with the Games running through July 30, 2028, and the LA28 Paralympic Games will kick off August 15, 2028, and close August 27, 2028.” In the group press release announcing the dates, CEO Casey Wasserman said: “LA is an ambitious city of endless possibilities and the Games will reflect our community.” Moreover, with pride, “Los Angeles will provide the perfect backdrop to host the biggest cultural, sporting and entertainment event in the world."

Link: How New York City Won the Olympics

Link: Casey Wasserman, 50 - the married LA 2028 Olympics chief and music mogul behind Billie Eilish and Coldplay - is a 'serial cheater' who slept with a string of female staff

Link: Billie Eilish Dumps Casey Wasserman After Scandal Over Extramarital Affairs

Link: Sale of massive Skid Row homeless housing portfolio approved by judge

Link: More Housing and Services in Skid Row

Link: Empire on the Seine: Surveillance, Citizenship, and North African Migrants in Paris (1925–1975)

Link: Dreams Don't Die by Izek Shomof

Link: Kevin de León faces a tough reelection bid. But campaign money isn’t a problem so far

Link: Swig finds new bottom with DTLA office sale at $94 a sf

Link: Column: Can a giant, empty Sears building help solve homelessness in Los Angeles?

Link: French police arrest ultra-left activist over pre-Olympics railway sabotage as new incident hits phone lines

Link: Homeless people will face fines, possible arrest in Long Beach crackdown, city official says