For the residents of Los Angeles, the uprising that began on April 29, 1992 was a long time coming. When a majority-white jury acquitted four cops of using excessive force on Black motorist Rodney King, the subsequent uprising began to awaken many who were watching the police for the first time. However, Black and brown communities in Los Angeles had already been defending their lives against a steep spike in housing precarity, cost of living, police, and surveillance since the city began to prepare for the 1984 Summer Olympics. When the thousands of tourists retreated from LA after the two week fanfare, the city’s poor and working class were left behind to fight for housing and labor in an increasingly expensive city.
Let the rallying cries in LA history serve as a harbinger for today. Our city officials – once again – are using the 2028 Olympics as a beacon of pride for Los Angeles and are recycling the same vaporous promises used to sell the 1984 Games to the people: a “no build” Games, robust “community programs” to reinvigorate the city, and an increase in jobs. To make sense of these dubious pledges, it’s imperative to look at how the alleged successes of the ’84 Olympics created the pretext for the LA 2024/2028 bid.
THE KEY PLAYERS, THE BID
LA leadership has a knack for foisting spectacles onto a city that never asked for them. The pattern started through their self-boosterism and blind zeal when they won the bid to host the 1932 Olympics. The mastermind behind the ’32 bid was William May Garland, a wealthy real estate magnate who saw the Games as an opportunity to bring a “modern,” urbane aesthetic to a city that he’d been simultaneously developing as a playground for wealthy and opportunistic families. One of his biggest projects was the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which he had planned with the prospect of holding the Olympics in 1924. With his friends in the oil and newspaper businesses, Garland sold Los Angeles to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as an idyllic host city lush with paradisiacal sights for tourists and athletes alike. Upon award of the bid, Garland and friends had the excuse to expand upon their plans and build the first luxury hotel in Los Angeles, a new 32-story City Hall, and other privately controlled infrastructure that would eventually put immense pressure on the city to recoup during the Great Depression. Local government also worked alongside Garland to implement large beautification programs, such as a $100,000 budget to plant over 25,000 non-native palm trees throughout the city. When no one else in the world wants the bid, Los Angeles has always been eager to secure it for the aesthetic.
Garland and fellow Olympics boosters were quick to claim that the ‘32 Olympics put Los Angeles on the map and turned a profit; in reality, the surplus went back to paying off government debt. Nonetheless, this was the narrative that compelled LA’s power players to host again in 1984.
Los Angeles was one of the only cities that put together a bid for the ‘84 Olympics. At the time, the United States was looking at a severe economic downturn under the Reagan administration, and the Olympics were already historically unpopular, regarded as a mega-event that took attention away from international disasters and human rights violations and left cities drowning in debt. In the wake of the Vietnam War, the United States was further mired in great geopolitical tensions with the Soviet Union and their allies thereafter. Nevertheless, Los Angeles saw this as an opportunity to become the symbol for unity and peace through sports and, for a second time, to put itself “on the map.”
Being one of the very few interested in hosting the Games gave LA the leverage to negotiate on its own terms. The city made a case that its underlying economy, composed of a profitable entertainment industry and a growing private sector, made it a formidable candidate. LA was a practical shoo-in under the condition that it would have a plan on how to assume financial responsibility. It helped that the only other candidate, Tehran, had to pull its bid as Iran descended into revolution.
The bid passed amongst elected public officials by posing as a “for profit” Olympics, the first of its kind. City Councilmember Bob Ronka helmed a charter amendment to put to a citywide vote that said that the games would not be financed with public money. Mayor Tom Bradley allied with noted business executive and sports enthusiast Peter Ueberroth to secure private financing, corporate sponsorships, licensee agreements, media rights, and ticket sales. Thus, the first “Capitalist Games” was born.
The “success” of ‘84 is the rehashed, overdone proposition that helped today’s boosters and grifters in public office and private corporations secure the 2028 bid. LA entered the 2024 bidding process as an underdog. Even just on the national level, it lost out to Boston as the United State Olympics Committee’s pick. Boston, Budapest, Hamburg, Rome, and Paris all appeared to have stronger bids until their residents started rapidly rejecting those bids. LA swooped up Boston’s dropped bid, and by early 2017 only Paris and LA were left. Fearing no one would enter the 2028 bidding cycle, the IOC decided to rewrite its own arcane rules and award two summer Olympics at once, making it the third time LA Olympic boosters won a bid when no one else in the world wanted the Olympics.
In LA, Mayor Eric Garcetti and boosters used one poll conducted by Loyola Marymount University and the elitist institution’s StudyLA program to gauge the public’s interest in hosting the 2024 Olympics. Propped up by a compliant press corps, the survey’s resulting 88% approval numbers served as proof that LA wanted the bid. Further inquiry into the puppet masters behind the poll reveals that StudyLA’s director Fernando Guerra was a registered lobbyist for a real estate developer that had no less than five LA 2028 projects in the works in 2017 when LA’s City Council rubber-stamped the bid. The public did not want the 2028 Olympics; the casual corrupted efforts of local boosters worked a local media ecosystem to present the narrative that LA wanted the Games.
Despite whatever leverage Garcetti had in moving the bid forward, at no point did he stop and push for a charter amendment in order to take the financial burden off the public. Therefore, unlike our ‘84 Games, we are on the hook for overruns. By conservative figures, LA 2028 will most likely result in Angelenos being responsible for $3.2 billion dollars in budgetary overages. This monstrous liability is on us to recoup through sales taxes and further cuts to transit infrastructure and city services housing and homeless services. As taxpayers, we are in a worse position today with Garcetti organizing the mega-event than we were with Bradley.
For what it’s worth, Bradley in 1977 had much in common with Garcetti. They both place an illogical belief in sports as a remedy for current worldly ills. Bradley believed that “sports are a positive force in the world, and for that reason the Olympics are a worthwhile global institution,” according to his Olympic liaison Anton Calleia. In speaking to the City Council, Calleia added that “the Mayor believes that […] the Games offer a good showcase for business, industry and culture, which would enhance our competitive posture in world trade and tourism.” It sounds familiar to how Garcetti speaks about 2028 with foolish, misguided exuberance. “The Olympics have been an amazing part of Los Angeles’ history,” Garcetti told The Associated Press in 2018. “We want to do what a lot of cities hope to do, but are never able to, which is to leave behind a human legacy — not just a few buildings which may or may not be used.” Meanwhile, his very city comes under scrutiny for its negligence and ineptitude in taking care of residents; if “human legacy” means destruction of hundreds of thousands of people’s lives, we are careening right towards it under Garcetti’s myopic push for the Games.
Time after time again, our public officials have pulled whatever strings necessary to make hosting the Olympics about image and legacy. We didn’t need an image boost in 1984; we especially do not need one today.
MILITARIZATION/POLICE
Following the awarding of the ‘84 Games, Los Angeles promptly took action to ready its facade. This involved beefing up one of the largest line items in the Olympics budget: security. The City took great liberties to accelerate a militarized police force to conduct sweeps in working class neighborhoods near the stadiums. Much of the security budget went towards more personnel and weapons that would go on to normalize extreme, violent practices and the idea of a fully militarized police department as the new reality.
In his book Policing Los Angeles, Max Felker-Kantor charts Bradley’s straightforward path to providing a high level of city funding to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). In 1974, the department’s total operating cost was $198.5 million, accounting for 35.5% of the city’s budget. By 1982 – just two years out from the Olympics – LAPD’s total operating cost increased to $525 million. Though at this time the percentage of the city budget declined slightly to 34.9%, the department continued to receive nearly half of its undedicated budget while Bradley and his council “supported tax measures and budget appropriations that would increase the number of officers on the beat.” During his tenure as Mayor, Bradley kept his promise to law enforcement by aiding increases where he could.
Much of the security budget went towards more personnel and weapons that would go on to normalize extreme, violent practices and the idea of a fully militarized police department as the new reality.
We can attribute LAPD’s notoriety as one of the most murderous forces in the nation to Daryl Gates, who was chief of the department from 1978 to 1992. During his long-running tenure, Gates was known for his violent, paramilitary methods to take the city’s gang members into custody, orders that were granted under Mayor Bradley’s advisement. By the 1984 Olympics, the police force was widely known for their practice of excessive force, such as a chokehold on suspects to cut off their flow of oxygen. Under Gates’ orders, many of South Los Angeles’ Black and Latino youth were wrongfully targeted and put into jail before and during the Games. Much of these sweeping practices continued well past the conclusion of the Olympics. One notorious example is Operation Hammer; in 1987, LAPD targeted young Black and brown men to combat gang violence. During this time, 24,684 Black youths were arrested. At the height of the operation, 1,453 people were arrested in a single weekend. These continued practices set the stage for the forceful, violent arrest and beating of Rodney King five years later.
The 2028 Olympics presents an opportunity for security firms and police to usher in a new era of enforcement driven by technology.
After the ensuing uprising surrounding Rodney King’s violent beating, Chief Gates resigned and the City promised police reforms to erase his history. A nonprofit initiative called Rebuild LA was launched by the City with LA ‘84 CEO Peter Ueberroth at the helm to lead the rebuilding charge – seeing as how fiscally sound he was a decade prior. Trying to rebuild a city as if it were an ailing company quickly resulted in disappointing outcomes. Much of the recommendations focused on incentives for businesses to enter stricken neighborhoods or homeownership as a primary means to stability – very little consideration was given towards welfare and community empowerment. On the policing reform side, much of the work was spent trying to reduce excessive force, banning deadly force, reducing the lifetime-term policy for chiefs to five years, and accountability systems within upper management. However, the public demands then were not for reform but rather for more investment in social programs, which largely didn’t materialize. Today we certainly know much more now about the results of said reform measures as Los Angeles would remain one of the deadliest, most militarized police forces in the country in the decades since and continues to prey on Black and brown lives. Today’s LAPD is the same LAPD of 1992 and 1984, exposing Rebuild LA as another massive civic failure.
The 2028 Olympics presents an opportunity for security firms and police to usher in a new era of enforcement driven by technology. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, former LAPD Chief Charles Beck predicted that cybersecurity would be a form of terror that justifies militarized police and law enforcement amongst “the traditional threats of explosives, guns and other deadly weapons.” He predicted a need of 11,000 or 12,000 officers so long as “the city was funded enough and had the political will to do it.” Those two conditions had never been a concern for the LAPD, who have gotten what they wanted in salary hikes and budget increases year after year.
The public has its eyes on Garcetti’s 2020 budget, which brazenly proposed dedicating 54% of the City’s unrestricted general budget to LAPD, effectively taking funds away from critical housing and community development programs. Our current movement to throw this budget out for one that focuses on service and care is escalated by one of the worst national economic disasters in American history stacked on top of a pandemic. Meanwhile, Garcetti’s loyalty to the police department is marked by his acquiescence to LAPD’s demands for a stronger, militarized force as the Olympics loom ahead. The move towards a police state is an insidious one that happens over time; though we are years out from LA 2028, we fight now against the false need for a heightened level of security.
HOMELESSNESS/DEVELOPMENT
Los Angeles became synonymous with homelessness in the ‘80s as the unhoused population swelled and neoliberalism began to gut urban areas. Rapid commercial growth in some of the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods led to a steep loss of affordable housing in areas like Skid Row. Simultaneously, the city demonstrated negligence and clear inability to provide for the vulnerable communities that were displaced as a result. According to city planning scholar and researcher Jennifer Wolch, by 1984 Los Angeles was known as “the homeless capital of the United States.”
Between 1982 and 1984, LA City Council passed new ordinances to criminalize living on the street, dwelling in a vehicle, and sleeping on public property such as bus benches.
City officials at the time responded to the crisis with haste and violence. Between 1982 and 1984, LA City Council passed new ordinances to criminalize living on the street, dwelling in a vehicle, and sleeping on public property such as bus benches. Sweeps were implemented to banish unhoused residents from their living spaces, and city councilors threatened to send them to a “drunk farm” outside the city. Police officers were deployed en masse on horse to patrol the quieting encampments of Skid Row. Most of these practices are not too different from what we witness today.
Once again, this city prepares itself to welcome thousands of tourists and private interests into the city by “cleaning up” our streets with brutal sweeps and unchanged pieces of legislation. Unhoused residents of a host city are undoubtedly the biggest target when officials use protocol to create a “clean city,” which is often code for no poverty visible to cameras and passersby.
Commercial and mixed-use buildings are being constructed at a faster rate than affordable housing. There is, in fact, a lot of construction going on in a city where Garcetti has promised a “no-build Olympics.” This term has become code for prioritizing infrastructure that will put roofs over the heads of tourists, and aligning with corporate interests that benefit real estate developers. As private companies profit by working closely with City Council for tax breaks, we once again miss out on the opportunity to house residents who are simply trying to make LA their home.
The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s 2020 homeless count reveals a nearly 13% increase in the county’s unhoused population. There are now 66,433 residents without a home, an infuriating statistic to process when it has been three years since the public voted to pass Measure H for services and short-term housing. The obvious immediate solution – should Garcetti and Councilmembers want to act with urgency – would be to reconsider that 2020 budget of theirs that gives $3 billion to LAPD and only $400 million to address homelessness (this includes funds to carry onwards with Measure H). Eight years out from the Olympics, LA’s leaders remain committed to funding the departments that would enable criminalizing the homeless instead of providing housing and services.
Today’s promises and reality look similar to those made ahead of 1984.
A “no build Olympics” for 2028 is a declaration similar to what Mayor Bradley also made to wary taxpayers of the ‘70s and ‘80s who expressed that their city could not afford to host the Olympics. The City eventually built two new permanent venues to support the Games: the Olympic Velodrome on the Cal State University, Dominguez Hills campus and the Olympic Swim Stadium on the University of California campus. Both venues were constructed with 7-Eleven and McDonald’s involvement as million dollar sponsors. Further construction went towards providing for visiting athletes at University of Southern California, which led to the opening of Cafe ‘84, one of the official cafeterias. Capitalistic experiments with corporate sponsors and private capital turned the City into a giant advertisement; the resulting buildings belied LA elected leaders’ declarations that the Games benefit the people. Nobody wins when private money proffers the city’s structures.
Today’s promises and reality look similar to those made ahead of 1984. In lieu of the ’80s-esque blatant sponsorships and corporate partnerships, the City Council offers tax breaks for accompanying commercial real estate and hotel developments. One of the most egregious examples of this has been their push to build The Fig near USC, a 4.4 acre mixed-use development that would bring commercial retail, dining, and office spaces into the neighborhood. It also threatens the destruction of 32 rent-stabilized (RSO) units and displacement of long-time, low-income tenants. The initial motion that passed through City Council focused on the 298 new hotel rooms to be built, describing them as “necessary” and claiming that “this community requires additional hotel rooms…to prepare the City for the growing tourism sector…at Exposition Park, as well as the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.” Much of this serves as code to gentrify a neighborhood for the just-passing-by visitors with no regard for the working class or poor families in South Central.
Unchecked hotel development will further exacerbate Los Angeles’ ongoing housing crisis. The City has given away $1B to hotel developers in subsidies and incentives over the course of a decade, and hotel occupancy is hovering around 35% currently. And yet, we know that the City is already planning on developing its way out of the current crisis. It will not stop so long as real estate developers and City Councilmembers have the Olympics and other mega-events to lean on as a tenuous reason for building anything.
JOB CREATION/WHO PROFITS?
Currently, Los Angeles is fumbling at managing its rising unemployment rate, which was an astounding 55% as of May 2020. As with any mega-events heralded for their profit, there will be further damage done to vulnerable populations that work jobs in a city where income is distributed unevenly and in favor of commercial developers, profit-seeking advertisers, and political leaders.
Ahead of the ‘84 Games, major corporate sponsors profited from the brand opportunities and ticket sales, but few of the local businesses that had participated in licensing turned a profit. The Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee (LAOOC) pioneered a new method of funding that would allow local vendors to sign up to become official suppliers to the corporate sponsors during the Olympics. Although the City made offers to sponsor minority contracting, many of those who had participated could not meet the inflated expectations. Others faced restrictions as suppliers because sponsors were allowed to contract with non-licensees if they could buy event merchandise from them for 10% cheaper than what the official licensee offered; this allowed larger businesses to undercut minority firms. By the end of the Games, almost half of the participating local vendors faced bankruptcy.
Los Angeles continues to take money from the public for its equally incompetent, self-serving oligarchs.
Job opportunities promised by Bradley and Ueberroth never materialized. Smaller Black and Latino-owned businesses got screwed when they paid their fees to vend to the general public at Olympic venues only to discover that most spectators arrived by buses that entered the gates and bypassed their booths entirely. Following the Games in 1984, twelve minority firms filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Olympics Organizing Committee for $17 million in damages for alleged contract violations and won.
Los Angeles continues to take money from the public for its equally incompetent, self-serving oligarchs. The ‘80s had Peter Ueberroth; in the 2010s and 2020s, we have Casey Wasserman, the current Chairman of LA2028. Noted business magnate in the sports and entertainment industries, Wasserman is credited for leading Los Angeles towards the bid. His involvement in the Games extends back to the last time LA hosted the Olympics; his grandfather and Hollywood studio executive Lew Wasserman was a board member and friend to the first president of the LA84 Foundation, a private institution organized after the ‘84 Games to handle the $225 million surplus from the mega-event and create youth sports opportunities. As the story of bad patterns and evil money goes, nothing about this foundation is true to its missions.
After the declared profit from these Olympics, the $93 million left over for Southern California did not go back to Los Angeles. Instead, a significant amount of it was invested into equity firms like Goldman Sachs, Merit Energy, and Oaktree Capital. One of the biggest investments, at $22 million, is in Blackstone Group, the largest residential landlord in the United States that has also specialized in fighting rent control bills and displacing vulnerable populations around the world. Siding with the developers and firms that are set on exploiting then whitewashing neighborhoods allows LA84’s sitting members to get richer from their involvement. How can the foundation profess that it is at work building community programs if it cannot even be transparent about its ties to private capital?
Despite boosters’ claims, the Games historically have hurt workers by curbing economic development. There’s no reason to believe that it would be any different today, given that very similar wealthy members of the elite exploit tax laws to channel public money into investments and jobs for their interests. Today they have set up new means of gaining from hosting the 2028 Olympics. None of those gains would be accessible to the public that ceaselessly urges for an income simply to survive.
RESISTANCE
Every Olympics has a resistance movement – in some cases multiple movements within a single city and bid – and Los Angeles is no different. Even for 1932, protesters used the slogan “Groceries Not Games” to highlight the absurdity of forcing a bid through a historical economic collapse. With every Olympics that have come through to raze LA communities, people have all the more reasons to want them abolished altogether.
In the lead up to LA 84, The Federation for Progress, a coalition of left leaning social justice organizations, held statewide protests to coincide with the Olympics and the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. Since its beginning in 1982, the coalition garnered support from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Catholic Workers, and previously unaffiliated progressive groups around LA that had been focusing on immigrant and worker rights. Amongst their list of active demands during this time was for the LAOOC to distribute a portion of the Olympic Games profits to low income neighborhoods. The Federation for Progress’ ‘84 Mobilization for Peace and Justice led to one of their largest actions, Survival Fest ‘84, which gathered 10,000 people in MacArthur Park for a series of protests. Survival Day ‘84 – held during the second week of the Olympics – drew 3,500 people alone. These demonstrations successfully drew attention to how the Games destroy communities.
The Olympics are brutality; they perpetuate racism and displace vulnerable longtime residents.
Modern Olympic resistance has been increasingly vigorous, proving that nothing is a done deal with the money-greedy powers that be. In 2020, people are arming each other with knowledge and defying the elected leaders that sink Los Angeles into its dishonest, atrocious patterns. The longstanding efforts of local organizations such as Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN), Black Lives Matter, and LA Tenants Union have encouraged stronger coalition building to bring a united voice to LA’s most vulnerable populations.
The Olympics are brutality; they perpetuate racism and displace vulnerable longtime residents. In the context of their place in Los Angeles, they have continually disrupted then uprooted our most vulnerable communities; we are still picking ourselves up from the one that occurred over three decades ago. Any real investigation into LA’s past clearly shows that the city’s Olympic legacy does not reflect the tidy, profitable, and exceptional image that boosters and media project.
Fortunately, the ruthless honesty with which we recount history helps us re-imagine our collective future. The resistance gives hope that LA’s future can be re-written, starting with the everyday work of local groups and coalitions. Stopping the 2028 Olympics means fighting back against the scabrous acts conceived around ‘84, and restoring Los Angeles as a city for the people.
Acknowledgements
This analysis pulls on a few key texts. For the 1932 Olympics, all of these facts were pulled from the thorough research compiled in Barry Siegel’s Dreamers and Schemers: How an Improbable Bid for the 1932 Olympics Transformed Los Angeles from Dusty Outpost to Global Metropolis (University of California Press, 2019).
For the 1984 Olympics, we relied heavily on Caitlin Parker’s diligently researched and as-yet-to-be-published chapter The Capitalist Games and other sources as noted.
Further reading
Please visit our resource page, our videos, podcast, and blog for more research and analysis about LA 1984 and other Olympic travesties. Want to organize against LA 2028? Drop us a line.