In Paris, the French government They packed homeless people and immigrants into buses and drove them out of the city. As the Summer Olympics approach, in 2016 More than 70,000 people were evacuated from Rio de Janeiro's favelas. For the event, the Los Angeles Police Department deployed nearly 30 mounted patrol vehicles to disperse homeless people to less visible parts of downtown.

Now, ahead of the 2028 Olympics, Mayor Karen Bass has pledged not to resort to draconian measures that would evict tens of thousands of residents who remain without a place to live.

“No matter how our strategy evolves, housing people first will always be a priority,” Bass said in an interview Thursday. “We're never going to put people on buses and send them away.”

Four years later, the world's attention will be on Los Angeles, and likely the humanitarian crisis of homelessness. If Los Angeles is to tackle the problem differently than other host cities and its predecessors, Bass and local, state and national leaders will need to implement other strategies to accelerate housing and stem the rise of homelessness.

After receiving the Olympic flag from Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo at the closing ceremony this week, Bass said he was already wrestling with that reality.

“The goal is to significantly reduce street homelessness and significantly increase transitional homelessness removals. [housing] Forever,” she said.

Bass did not offer a specific number for the goal, saying any number would be artificial four years before the Olympics. When Los Angeles was awarded the 2017 Olympics, Bass' predecessor, Eric Garcetti, said: He promised to reduce homelessness on the streets. Cut it in half within five years and end it by 2028. Today, it's up 16%. At night, people without shelter According to the annual homeless population survey, the total number of homeless people has increased by about 30,000 compared to 2017.

At the center of Bass's efforts is Inside Safe, an encampment removal program in which residents receive beds in hotels, motels, and other temporary housing. Since it began in December 2022, Inside Safe had moved more than 2,900 people indoors as of July 31. (About 28% of those people have returned to homelessness, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.)

On Thursday, Inside Safe evacuated more than 30 more people from their longtime encampment along Hollywood Boulevard and moved them to temporary shelters.

The program faces many challenges, primarily a shortage of transitional and permanent housing, limiting people's ability to enter the system and move from temporary hotel stays to stable housing. Many of the encampments cleared by Inside Safe have simply been repopulated, forcing outreach workers to make repeated visits.

But the mayor and others credit the program with helping turn the city around. This year, the homeless population fell for the first time since 2018, notably by a 10% annual drop in unhoused homeless people. If cuts continue at a similar pace, the number of unhoused homeless people will be fewer than 16,000 by the time of the Olympics, just over half the current number.

A homeless couple, left, talks with a worker from Mayor Karen Bass' Inside Safe program at a homeless camp on Gower Street in Hollywood.

(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)

Los Angeles isn't the only city under scrutiny because Olympic venues are spread across the region, including SoFi Stadium and the Intuit Dome in Inglewood. Hosting high-profile swimming and basketball eventsSeven sports will be held in Long Beach and four at Dignity Health Sports Park in Carson.The unsheltered population countywide last year was 55,000, down 5% from the year before.

A surge in tourism will bring its own challenges.

Gary Blasi, professor emeritus at the UCLA School of Law, predicts motel owners will be reluctant to contract with public agencies for the rooms currently used by Inside Safe and related programs because they would have much greater profits to make from the guests. In 1984, The Times reported that Olympic guests were forcing motel dwellers as far away as Orange County onto the streets.

“It's inconceivable that a motel owner would charge $105 a room from the city when they have guests from all over the world,” said Blasi, who represented homeless and Skid Row residents as a legal aid lawyer in the 1980s.

He said the scale of the homeless problem required a dramatic change in how communities approached it, including increasing welfare and basic income payments and providing quickly build modular housing.

“I believe that continuing to do what we're doing now for the next four years will only lead to more misery for the very poor and the homeless and a historic embarrassment for Los Angeles,” Blasi said.

Bass also said he is concerned that hotel and motel owners will stop renting to the city during the Olympics, and that he is seeing a shift in how the city tackles homelessness. He would like to see the city work more closely with the private sector to rent larger apartments. He also expects the supply of affordable apartments to increase in the coming years as part of a strategy to streamline approvals for affordable housing.

Following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling this summer giving local governments the power to remove encampments even if there is no available shelter space, Bass said she worries other communities could push homeless people into L.A. She is preparing to announce a locally focused strategy to stop that from happening.

“What I'm trying to prevent is turnover of people,” Bass said.

She hopes the state and federal governments will continue to provide funding for local homelessness issues ahead of the Olympics.

Gigi Dorosch, an organizer with NOlympics LA, a coalition of left-leaning and tenant groups formed in opposition to the city's bid, said history shows the Olympics will not only accelerate the eviction of homeless people in Los Angeles, but also divert funds from needed housing programs to police and other safety measures. She said the city's current efforts to remove encampments show Los Angeles is heading in the same direction.

Cleanup crews assigned to Mayor Karen Bass' Inside Safe initiative cleaned up a homeless encampment on Hollywood Boulevard on Thursday.

(Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times)

“The same thing happens every time the Olympics,” Dorosch said. “Los Angeles is not unique, and it's proven that it isn't.”

Kevin Murray, president and CEO of the Weingart Center, one of the region's largest nonprofit landlords and homeless-service providers, said he expects the Olympics will put outside pressure on Bass to address homelessness, but he doesn't think it will prompt him to adopt a more aggressive approach.

“This mayor would never do an eviction,” Murray said. “That's not who she is.”

Of course, that's assuming she's still mayor. Bass's 2026 reelection is just one of many political and economic uncertainties that will impact Los Angeles' homelessness efforts. Funding from Washington could depend in large part on who wins the November presidential election and which party controls the House and Senate. Press conference held to clean up campsite In the San Fernando Valley, he has threatened to pull funding from local governments that didn't act with enough urgency, but his term is set to end in 2026.

L.A.'s homelessness programs are beginning to attract growing international attention.

This week, Human Rights Watch, a U.S.-based nonprofit that reports on human rights violations around the world, Slam Los Angeles for criminalizing homelessness It also criticized Inside Safe and other local programs as being too strict, saying they do not comply with the “internationally protected right” to adequate housing.

Bass responded by calling the report “cynical and dishonest” and saying its authors want to take the city back to a time when “black and brown people suffered and died on 100-degree sidewalks.”