Paris’ Olympics headache is a wake-up call for Los Angeles mayor

PARIS — Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass got a bracing reality check about preparing for the Olympics from her Parisian counterpart, who warned her that 2028 is sooner than it appears.

During a recent trip to see Paris’ preparations for this summer’s Olympic Games, Mayor Anne Hidalgo advised Bass to gear up now for last-minute snags that will inevitably crop up in pulling off the immense logistical feat.

“It definitely put some fire under our feet,” Bass told reporters last week after meeting with Hidalgo and other French officials overseeing the games, calling their discussion “eye-opening.”

The Paris and Los Angeles Olympics have been uniquely entwined ever since the two cities were jointly awarded the 2024 and 2028 games in an unusual double announcement in 2017. Now, less than five months to go before the Paris Summer Games commence on July 26 with a four-mile boat parade along the Seine River, the French city offers both inspiration and a cautionary tale to its California successor.

The stakes are equally high in Los Angeles, where the success of the Games will depend heavily on how much the city can tackle some of its most vexing challenges, starting with its stubborn homelessness crisis.

Paris’ preparations show the potential of the Games to jumpstart sweeping changes, such as Hidalgo efforts to restrict cars by cutting driving lanes and parking spaces and replacing them with bike lanes in a bid to remake the city into a green haven. But security concerns, political squabbles and strained infrastructure have already dampened enthusiasm in the run-up to the Olympics and threaten to embarrass the city on a global stage.

The decision by Bass and her six-person delegation to visit Paris now, before the pageantry of the opening ceremonies or the afterglow following the Games, was deliberate. It offered the visiting Angelenos a real-time — and candid — glimpse into the minefield of preparing for such an event. That urgency made an impression.

“One message that has resonated through all our meetings: ‘Start early, start early, start early,’” Los Angeles City Council President Paul Krekorian told POLITICO when asked about the French acknowledgment of challenges and mistakes made along the way.

Gloomy outlook in Paris

Hosting the Games has been a trying experience for Paris, and three months out, little enthusiasm can be felt in the city’s streets. A recent poll showed that 44 percent of the region’s population think hosting the Games was a bad idea, and more than half plan to leave town during the event.

Parisians list transportation and security as their top concerns, the poll showed, and worry about the city’s level of preparedness. One recent development did not inspire confidence: The outdoor opening ceremony, initially expected to welcome 600,000 spectators and be open to the public, is now going to be half that size and invitation-only, largely because of security concerns.

Hidalgo herself said in November that the Parisian transportation system, which already struggles with overcapacity issues daily, “won’t be ready” in time for the Olympics. Hidalgo’s pessimism also holds political significance, as the Paris metro and bus systems are handled at the regional level — presided over by Valérie Pécresse, a member of the conservative Les Républicains party and a political rival to the center-left Hidalgo.

Still, Hidalgo has used the Olympics to accelerate her vision for Paris. In addition to securing local approval for new bike lanes, she received funding from the French government for infrastructure projects needed to make the Seine River swimmable for the first time in a century.

“What excites me most about these Games and the opportunities they present for Los Angeles is really how they’ve served as a catalyst for Paris to implement sustainability goals in a really big, bold way,” Los Angeles Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky said during a meeting with French private sector representatives.

Before welcoming athletes from around the world in 2028, Los Angeles has a run-up of marquee sporting events, including the 2026 NBA All-Star Game, eight matches during the 2026 men’s soccer World Cup and the 2027 Super Bowl — all posing their own tests on the city’s preparedness before the Summer Games.

France offers a lesson in the stakes of such events.

In May 2022, tens of thousands of fans came from around the world to the outskirts of Paris to see the matchup between Spain’s Real Madrid and England’s Liverpool FC at the UEFA Champions League, Europe’s equivalent to the Super Bowl.

However, security failed to set up proper crowd control procedures, leading to confusion and chaos with police spraying tear gas at the crowd. Things went from bad to worse as the French sports and interior ministers tried to pin the incidents of the night on the English fans’ behavior, leading to a diplomatic spat between London and Paris.

Not the same homelessness situation

Bass and members of her delegation often pointed to the common challenges Los Angeles and Paris face in preparing for the games. Upon landing, Bass listed homelessness as one example — but after a day in the French capital, she seemed to acknowledge that the situation in LA was far more dire.

“The biggest thing that’s different is that they have a much stronger social safety net, so they have more resources to provide to people,” Bass, who has made addressing homelessness her main focus, told reporters after visiting a shelter in Paris. “The numbers are nowhere near where our numbers are.”

There are roughly 30,000 unsheltered homeless people in the city of Los Angeles, according to 2023 data, compared to a little over 3,500 in Paris, which has a population of roughly 2.1 million compared to LA's 3.8 million.

Paris has focused on relocating homeless people away from the future Olympic sites, including near the Seine River in central Paris, but that approach won’t work for Los Angeles, Bass stressed.

“For us, just moving people around is not going to be the solution. We know that very well. We need to continue to get people housed,” she told reporters. “Fortunately, we have four years, so we really need to address our population because we could never just have our games with the numbers of people that we have on our streets.”

Still, the Olympics has worsened the housing crisis in France and in Paris in particular as many landlords opted for short-term rental services like Airbnb, rather than tenants, with the hope of making an extra profit during the Games. Online rental platform SeLoger (owned by Axel Springer, POLITICO's parent company) has reported a 74 percent drop in the number of listings in Paris over the past three years, a trend attributed in part to the Olympics.

Questions loom in Los Angeles

Los Angeles has had an uncommonly long runway, having won its bid in 2017 after initially competing with Paris to host the Games in 2024.

Some in the Los Angeles delegation expressed relief at being Paris’ runner-up, as they toured the preparations for this summer’s festivities.

“We're kind of glad [Paris] got 2024. It gave us four more years to be able to plan and to learn — most importantly, to learn and observe,” said Priscilla Cheng, senior vice president for governmental relations at LA28, the private non-profit that serves as the organizing body for the city’s Olympic and Paralympic Games.

A major selling point for Los Angeles was its pledge to rely entirely on existing and temporary venues to host the summer games, requiring no new permanent structures to be built.

But the pressure is on for major transit and other infrastructure projects to be completed in time.

There is already a subway and light-rail building spree underway by the county’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, largely funded by voter-approved taxes. The construction blitz is independent from the Games, but officials want to go even further, compiling a wishlist of 15 projects that could help handle the influx of athletes, tourists and media, including a people-mover in Inglewood — the site of major venues like SoFi Stadium — and a vast new network of bike lanes.

Bass announced on Tuesday the Los Angeles region had secured nearly $900 million in federal funds for infrastructure and rail expansion in advance of the 2028 Games.

Krekorian said there will be no parking places at any of the Games venues, an almost unimaginable proposition in car-centric Los Angeles. That puts a heavy burden on public transit, which is still under-utilized in the city. Organizers for the games say they plan to procure or borrow 5,000 buses to ferry fans across town, but key details — including how to cover the costs and whether those vehicles will be zero-emission — remain hazy.

“We’re going to have to acquire buses, rent buses and drivers and everything from probably all over the country to be able to do that,” Krekorian said. “We hope to get the federal government to pay for this.”

The Los Angeles Games are expected to cost roughly $6.9 billion, an estimate that has already been revised upward twice since its initial bid because of inflation. LA28 says it will cover all the costs through corporate sponsorships, ticket sales and other sources — but taxpayers will be on the hook if there are overruns.

Casey Wasserman, the chair of LA28, said on the Bill Simmons Show podcast, that four years out, they have already contracted more revenue today than what Paris will generate in total this summer.