The Olympic rings represent the five continents that participate in the biennial, theoretically amateur sporting event. Debuting at the 1920 Antwerp Games, the interlocking rings were conceived as a symbol of international unity. If there were a sixth ring, though, it would not represent a place, but rather the opposite – displacement.
The bond between sport and displacement is longstanding, and it is arguably no better illustrated than by the Olympic Games. The most visible example of sports used as a justification for intentional displacement in recent Olympic history was during the 2016 Rio Games, in which over 77,000 people were removed from their homes to ostensibly clear way for projects driven by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and corporate interests, including transportation projects, sporting facilities, and parking lots, and more broadly serve the larger plans of Rio’s ruling class. This displacement achieved the dual-pronged goals of cleansing the city of its poorest residents and making a sizeable profit for a small group of people in the global real estate market. In this instance, the sixth ring had a population the size of Mountain View, CA.
Today, the city of Los Angeles – no stranger to hosting the Olympics (having previously hosted in 1932 and 1984) or building major sports-entertainment projects – grapples with the possibility of another major displacement. Much like the community devastation seen in preparation for the Rio Games, many families in Los Angeles are already being displaced because of the spectre of another Olympics looming on the horizon. It’s already happening in South L.A. and Inglewood, and is sure to follow in other areas of the 700 square miles of Olympic activated zones. And Angelenos are no strangers to sportswashing. Look no further than Dodger Stadium and Dodgertown, the sports complex that erased the working class neighborhood formerly known as Chavez Ravine a half century ago.
Spanning back to the 1880s, Chavez Ravine was home to families of Mexican or Spanish descent, many of whom identified as American or Californios. Its three distinct barrios – Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bishop – included roads, schools, churches, and bungalow-style homes, most of which were built and maintained by the communities that lived in them.
In 1949, under President Truman’s National Housing Act, the L.A. City Council and Mayor Fletcher Bowron approved $110 million worth of public housing projects throughout the city, including 3,364 new homes for 17,000 people (including residents displaced by other modernist projects) to replace 1,145 pre-existing dwellings for 3,800 residents in Chavez Ravine.
The area was recognized by the City Housing Authority (CHA) as a highly-functioning and vibrant community, with half the homes classified as substandard (having no toilets, baths or running water, similar in levels to urban housing in many American cities of the time). The design commission was given by the CHA to trendy architect Richard J. Neutra, who described the Chavez barrios as having “a certain human warmth and pleasantness, a certain contact with nature which cannot be found in Harlem, N.Y., or along South Halsted Street, Chicago. The trees of the lovely mountain park have grown high around the strangest ‘blightlocked’ area that can be found in any city of America.”
Initially wary, the majority of residents were swayed in favor of modern public housing by continuous outreach from the CHA, and the promise of first choice of new housing. The City Planning Commission warned that private redevelopment programs “will likely arouse not only the desperate hostility of the site occupants, but the disapproval of the public at large.”
Yet a coalition of Council members, property owners, the L.A. Times, non-local private developers, and realtors formed to fight the CHA development and more importantly the very idea of large scale public housing in Chavez Ravine and Los Angeles at large. During initial meetings, local opponents carried signs with slogans such as “What are our boys fighting for [in the Korean War], their homes or the housing projects?’” and “MacArthur is out, are we next?” G. C. Baumann, an attorney for one of the homeowners, stated that he would not “want the creeping cancer of socialism right next to property I own.”
Public housing became the center of the Red Scare witch hunt, with screeds by the Times drawing the state version of the Un-American Activities committee into launching an investigation into the CHA. A backtracking City Council voted to stop the project and break the CHA by supporting a public Proposition, which won but was later declared null by the State Supreme Court. Mayor Bowron was painted as weak on communism and was defeated by anti-public housing candidate Norris Poulson who declared the project dead in 1953, purchasing the land from the Federal government, with visions of golf courses and a major league baseball stadium.
For over a decade, the remaining residents of Chavez Ravine resisted efforts by the city to remove them from their homes, eventually labeled squatters by the city. Some eventually took buyouts (cash for keys, essentially), which were later reported to have been worth half of their actual values, while others, most notably the Arechiga family (Manual and Abrana, along with their daughter Aurora Vargas), held off until they were violently dragged away by police as bulldozers prepared to level their homes.
Finally, in 1957, Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley – who was looking to relocate his team – was introduced to Chavez Ravine and Elysian Park. To his eye, the region appeared as prime, undeveloped real estate. A blank, white canvas. He had no context for the community that had been razed from the site just years prior. O’Malley made a hard push for the land, eventually acquiring the 315 acres and breaking ground for the new Dodger Stadium by 1959. In the end, an estimated 1,200 families were displaced, and the construction of Dodger Stadium was heralded as “…the first time in Los Angeles that this town pulled together for something.” The death of the social housing project meant that none of the families were to return. An entire community had been cleared, first with the vision and promise of new housing, then with the force of a prestige national team that was said to provide binding economic stimulus that would paper over the problems of race and class in Los Angeles. Today we see evolved versions of gentrifying language like this everywhere from Rio’s favelas to L.A.’s “Promise Zones” whenever wealthy developer interests want to “cleanse” a neighborhood or an entire city of its poor for a specific vision of a good that others don’t share.
The Battle of Chavez Ravine, as it was dubbed, was waged by the sports industrial complex, developers, and politicians, and its victims were the displaced. Adding insult to injury, local officials renamed the neighborhood “Dodgertown” in 2009, further erasing the history of the Chavez Ravine barrios.
The story of Chavez Ravine paints a grim picture of what can happen with the land acquisition and construction of one single sports stadium. While boosters sell the notion of L.A. as a great location to host the Olympic Games because of its many existing sports arenas, we know this is a canard. First, there are new sports arenas recently completed and being built from South L.A. to Inglewood, and they’ll be heavily utilized for the Olympics, and likely other mega-events in the interim from the Super Bowl to the World Cup. While not being built for the explicit purpose of L.A. 2028, these stadiums are displacing people with astronomical rent increases, details of which have been conveniently left out of the 2028 bid book. Subsidized luxury hotel projects like The Fig are already displacing tenants of rent-stabilized housing in South L.A. and, compounding things, removing precious rent stabilized units from the market.
We’ve also seen L.A. 2028 being a force in delaying the development of transit along the highly used Vermont corridor in favor of the Purple Line extension in order to service Olympic tourists, despite the fact that the Vermont corridor is considered the highest priority for L.A.’s low-income residents. Other projects include proposed helicopters to Uber people to downtown from LAX, and AEG’s plans to expand the convention center and hotel infrastructure downtown to meet the demands of what one city council member recently referred to as “a hotel shortage crisis.” The most absurd of these proposed ideas (and while not specifically part of the direct Olympic plan) is the cartoonishly wasteful gondola from downtown to “Dodgertown,” a three-mile drive that usually takes less than fifteen minutes. While these infrastructure projects won’t be the classic Olympic empty stadiums, they’ll instead deliver death by a thousand cuts in a city where developers have had the upper hand for ages.
The war over communities in Los Angeles – from Echo Park to Boyle Heights to South L.A. and beyond – has been raging for decades. Over 50 families were displaced during the construction of the Staples Center and L.A. Live (which not-so-ironically sits on Olympic Boulevard, a major east-west thoroughfare that was renamed prior to the 1932 Games – not even the streets are safe when the Olympics come to your town). And right now, with the current construction of the new Los Angeles Stadium and Entertainment Complex (which will permanently host the L.A. Rams and Chargers, but will also be used for the 2028 Games), working class people of color in Inglewood are facing displacement by way of huge rent hikes in a cruel one-two punch following the City of Inglewood throwing out half of the petitions to get rent control on the 2018 ballot.
The sixth ring flattens dynamic communities into parking lots and hotels. It displaces families for a new track-and-field stadium or an Olympic village. It is violent. It is most certainly intentional. And while it is linked to the other five rings – supposed symbols of unity and peace – it is not connected with them. No one can live in the sixth ring, and as far as the corporate interests behind the Olympic Games are concerned, there’s no room in the other five, either.