On an especially nasty Sunday in September, as ash from fires up north covered our cars, coated our lungs, and brought the AQI to triple digits up and down the west coast, NOlympics LA and Lennox-Inglewood Tenants Union (LITU) stood against the depressing backdrop to make our message clear: SoFi is a Death and Displacement Machine.
The LA Rams NFL season kickoff was “opening day” for SoFi Stadium (the most expensive stadium in human history), which had been pushed back several times already because of Covid. Coincidentally, the date happened to fall on the third anniversary of the announcement of the bid deal for LA28. The LA Olympic bid and SoFi Stadium were developed in tandem; the building of the stadium was always tethered to the bid for the alleged “No-Build” Olympics, one in a series of increasingly evident LA28 lies.
Several of us were dressed in hazmat suits to remind onlookers of all the toxicities SoFi has brought and will continue to bring: dozens of its “essential” construction workers have been diagnosed with Covid; two died within the span of six weeks this summer because of unsafe working conditions, and a dead body was found on the stadium grounds two weeks later; and tens of thousands of longtime, working-class residents face displacement and dangerous living conditions because of the gentrification that SoFi’s private funders are so eagerly banking on.
https://youtu.be/yZMROasLATI
Few people should have been outside that day; the conditions weren’t safe. Despite this, the stadium was surrounded by additional hired security, traffic cops, and even some committed fans. Inside, the stadium was filled exclusively with press, athletes, and, presumably, toxic amounts of ash wreaking havoc on players already struggling to catch their breath. Of course, worker safety is always an afterthought in both football and stadium construction. Given the environmental conditions of that afternoon, we limited participation in our in-person action and focused mainly on a Twitter storm targeting SoFi and LA28. (#AbolishTheOlympics and #HomesNotGames.)
We started our protest at Kareem Court, so named because of the proximity to The Forum, where MVP Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played with the Lakers before the construction of the billion-dollar Staples Center fueled gentrification, displacement, and increase in police presence in the then-working-class DTLA. The story of that neighborhood should serve as an warning for those same disastrous effects that we can expect—and that are already happening—with SoFi’s unwelcome arrival in the historically Black and brown city of Inglewood. What’s worse: the plans to build a new Clippers arena across the street from SoFi have now been rubberstamped.
We marched down Pincay and then south on Prairie. After stopping at one of the stadium driveways, a LITU member took to the mic and related his experience as a tenant living in the city, of his frustration with gentrification and the absurd, unmanageable cost of rent. He shared his first-hand account working for the Inglewood Public School System, a system so broken that it was taken over by the state of California in 2012 due to dire mismanagement.
https://youtu.be/vwjw1J9R2o4
When he asked the crowd how much they were paying in rent each month, the numbers were both depressing and unsurprising.
To finish off the action, we marched back to our starting point at Kareem Court. By that time, the game had started, and a small crowd of Rams fans gathered to cheer on their team from afar. Despite what we’ve learned about the challenges of engaging with sports fans on these issues, a couple members from LITU and NOlympics took to the mic and gave it a try anyway.
With these development projects, Inglewood, like so many other cities, is once again putting the interests of real-estate, tourists, and the wealthy before its working-class residents. But the process of gentrification and displacement is neither complete nor inevitable. As we are now less than eight years away from 2028, we will continue to stand in solidarity with tenants—and against SoFi, the proposed Clippers stadium, the Olympics, and all other displacement projects—as waves of evictions loom and elected officials refuse to acknowledge we exist.
