Above photo: The Olympic cauldron is lit at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum ahead of the launch of ticket registration for the 2028 Summer Olympic Games, Jan. 13, 2026, in Los Angeles. Damian Dovarganes /AP.
Residents are worried about the displacement — and the bill — the games will bring to the city.
Cerianne Robertson spent years watching a city change as it prepared to host the Olympics. While living in Rio de Janeiro and working as a journalist, Robertson says she and her team saw the displacement happen. From 2014 to 2018, she reported on evictions that helped make way for the Olympic park and related transit infrastructure.
About 77,000 people were displaced from their homes — mostly in favelas — by the city government between 2009 and 2016, the year Rio hosted the Olympics. Robertson says while not all of the displacement was directly related to stadium builds or Olympic transit, there had been very few government-led evictions before 2009. Based on the work she and her team were doing, they understood most of those evictions as part of the city’s efforts to “clean” the city ahead of the Olympics and the World Cup, which took place there in 2014.
She mainly covered Vila Autódromo, a historic working-class favela that was almost entirely displaced from the edge of the Olympic park.
According to Robertson, the city didn’t want a favela visible next to the park. The mayor and the developers who donated to his campaigns wanted to use the Olympics as an opportunity to clear valuable land next to a lagoon for the development of luxury apartments.
While Robertson was in Rio, she received a call from a group of people based in Los Angeles looking to organize against the Olympics coming to their own city. They were hoping to learn from her and other organizers.
A decade later, Robertson, assistant professor of communications at Fordham University, is an organizer with that very coalition now called NOlympics LA. The coalition formed in 2017 and is now made up of more than 40 organizations. The coalition has one demand. They’re asking city officials to protect their residents from displacement and to stop Los Angeles from hosting the 2028 Olympic Games. And it’s not without reason.
While mega events have often been framed as bringing in revenue and opportunities to their host cities, the facts paint a very different picture. The New York Times reported that every Olympics since 1960 has run over budget, at an average of 172% in inflation-adjusted terms, according to an analysis by researchers at Oxford University. After the Rio 2016 games, the city was left with a debt that began at $32 million and culminated in $113 million. Organizers in Paris, Tokyo, and Brazil have been sounding the alarm on the tremendous displacement and harm caused by the mega events that severely impacted the low-income and working-class people within their communities.
In Los Angeles, which is one of 11 U.S. cities hosting the World Cup games this month, residents are already being displaced as new short-term rental laws go into effect. Airbnb, one of the official Olympic sponsors, is offering $750 direct cash incentives for people to become short-term rental hosts for the World Cup.
An Airbnb-backed campaign pushing hard for short-term rental exemptions has nearly gone into effect in preparation for the games. Additionally, state bill AB 1953, which would impact all jurisdictions across California, was introduced in February and would affect current short-term rental regulations by restricting them for two specific scenarios. One scenario is a special event period, which, according to organizers from NOlympics LA, is very loosely defined, but includes events like the Olympics or World Cup. Ultimately, the policy would incentivize building owners to disavow lease agreements before 2028 in areas surrounding where the games will be held so that landlords can instead charge much higher rates for shorter increments of time.
The second scenario for exemptions is during a declared state of emergency, like when California endured extreme wildfires last year.
For example, landlords could charge the same rate they charge current tenants for monthly rent for just 1 to 2 nights, according to Chris Tyler, communications manager at Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE) and member of NOlympics LA.
In a city where decades-old political choices have led to a massive housing crisis and the average housing takes nearly five years to complete, it’s no wonder that Los Angeles organizers are seriously concerned.
Residents of Inglewood, a majority Black and Latino area where SoFi Stadium is located and where the Olympics and World Cup will be held, are particularly vulnerable to displacement, given that property owners are being incentivized to terminate their leases and push out long-term residents.
According to Tyler, Los Angeles quietly signed a contract with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to host the Olympics within 11 days of the contract release. The contract states Los Angeles is responsible for any Olympics-related debt that has been accounted for, which could cover a host of casualties like delays due to weather.
The contract creates a financial liability structure where the city covers the first $270 million in cost overruns, followed by the state of California covering the next $270 million, with the city liable for any amount beyond that. A February 2026 report by SAJE breaks down several major expenses the contract doesn’t account for, including city staffing and service overcharges, enhanced city resources (overtime for police, sanitation workers, etc.), increased need for sanitation, street cleanup, and trash collection, and city staff time devoted to executing the Games, which is described as an “implied agreement.”
According to Tyler, the city could end up having to cover more than $6 billion in expenses and possibly even more.
So, is that cause to cancel the games? Some argue it is. And cities have canceled these types of mega events because of costs in the recent past.
After realizing the 2026 Commonwealth Games, another international multi-sport event, would cost about $4.8 billion, Victoria, Australia, decided to terminate its contract with the Commonwealth Games Federation. Other cities have previously withdrawn their bids to host the Olympics because of the expensive bill the games force onto cities.
“I think it’s possible to cancel the Olympics. The city council could theoretically turn around tomorrow and just do it…,” Robertson says, referring to a decision Victoria, Australia made in 2023 to pull out of hosting the 2026 games after realizing how much it would cost its citizens.
“The political leaders there realized that it wasn’t worth it… So there is a model. It is possible. Whether there’s political will to do so is a whole other question,” Robertson continues.
The work Robertson and others have done has already affected history, as the NOlympics LA just might be the longest-running anti-Olympics coalition among a host of transnational coalitions given its decade-long stint and continued commitment to Angelenos.
While organizing against mega events is not new, its becoming a transnational movement is, and Robertson has been there to see that evolution firsthand. NOlympics LA is a part of a growing transnational movement called NOlympics Anywhere. Robertson attributes a lot of the work done by NOlympics LA to building on the work done by organizers from previous Olympic cities.
And while they’ve all done important organizing, the movement of the games makes it difficult to build even more momentum.
“I think the challenge has been that this work has been done often on a local scale, for many years now. The problem is that because the Olympics picks up and moves to a new city, people often start from scratch, especially when the bid is happening, and there’s not a ton of transparency,” says Robertson.
Additionally, it has been widely reported that mega games lead to an increase in surveillance and policing. The federal administration’s continued attacks on immigrant communities, which made up about 35% of the population of LA County in 2021, put their residents at even higher risk of displacement.
In the midst of this reality, “the city is planning on using public dollars to host a giant corporation party,” says Tyler.
The Olympics are also expected to impact traffic.
According to Tyler from SAJE, the games were originally pitched as “car-free” Olympics and that has now become “transit-first” Olympics. And Metro CEO Stephanie Wiggins told ABC7, “Being car-free, you will not be able to drive as a spectator to any of the venues. You have to take transit, walk, bicycle or get dropped off.”
The transit-first plan relies heavily on busing and doubling the size of Los Angeles’s current bus fleet, says Tyler.
But the transit agency is still waiting on $2 billion from the Trump administration to acquire additional buses, and Uber remains the official Olympic partner for “rideshare, bikes, scooters and delivery.”
According to Tyler, lay people will not be able to approach the venues in a car, and anybody who does will most likely be scanned by the Department of Homeland Security before entering the perimeter. There is no transit plan without more policing and invasive searching — and those plans are growing more intense, says Tyler.
“What is the price we’re going to have to pay to the Trump administration to make this deal happen? It does feel like we’re being held hostage,” says Tyler.
Meanwhile, the Olympic organizers, also known as LA28, have promised a build-free, car-free, environmentally conscious plan that would be transparent and accessible. According to city council officials and the NOlympics LA, that has been far from the reality, and the consequences are already impacting residents.
And the LA City Council has voted to fast-track development for temporary structures for the 2028 games, which will include bathrooms, training facilities, media centers, fan zones, and more. And the city has built three new stadiums since it became the official host city for the 2028 Olympics.
Robertson, the mega events researcher, argues that while these stadiums, which were built in the last five years, were not directly a result of the Olympic 2028 contract, they are part of a larger goal to ensure Los Angeles is mega-event ready at the drop of a hat.
She says there’s a claim that Los Angeles didn’t need to build anything, and technically that was probably true.
“But the Olympics are always seized upon by developers as an excuse to build something… That’s kind of the point for when cities bid for these mega events,” Robertson says. “It’s not just about saying we technically have what we need. They want to shine, they want to dazzle. They want the latest technology, the latest infrastructure, and that’s what’s driving what we’re seeing.”
This story was produced through our Equitable Cities Reporting Fellow for Anti-Displacement Strategies, which is made possible with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
