"Los Angeles is burning again, and it is not the Olympic flame. After riots in 1965, 1992 and 2020, Angelenos are bearing witness once more to a rash of violent unrest...
It is understandable if the world feels less than enthused about flocking to LA for the Olympic Games in 2028 – or the World Cup in 2026. Yet come they will...
Unless vast sums are spent on a Potemkin-like makeover, the world will also witness what many of us residents have long suspected – that the city is slipping into an inexorable decline.
Things were very different in 1932, when LA first hosted the Olympics. With a population of 1.2million – a third of today’s population – LA was still fledgling. But the 1932 games served as a wake-up call to the world that LA was on its way to becoming one of the planet’s great cities...
Numerous studies show that hosting an Olympics offers, at best, fleeting economic benefits – and often leaves enormous burdens. It can provide an opportunity to make a statement, heralding the rise of cities such as Berlin under the Nazis in 1936 or Beijing under the CCP in 2008. But staging an Olympics in a city plainly in decline seems a fool’s errand.
Rather than a model for the future, Los Angeles today offers a masterclass in urban dysfunction. Drive through the streets of the South Side or along Central Avenue – historically black LA’s main thoroughfare, now predominantly Hispanic – and the ambience increasingly resembles that of Mexico City or Mumbai: cracked pavements, dilapidated buildings, outdoor swap-meet markets and food stalls serving customers, much as one would see in the developing world.
Homeless encampments are scattered throughout the city. In a friend of my wife’s neighbourhood, close to where we once lived, homeless people loiter in supermarkets and eat in the aisles. Others harass shop owners and tap directly into the city’s power grid. Many workers, particularly immigrants (both legal and undocumented), earn very little.
Once a middle-class haven with a broad industrial base, LA now has the highest poverty rate in California – and among the worst nationwide. Failing schools, dilapidated parks and an exodus of residents and firms suggest the city’s long-term prospects could be bleak.
Once known as ‘the city that grew’, LA has lost population since the early 2010s. By 2060, according to the state’s finance department, Los Angeles County will experience no growth – and could shed well over a million residents. The young – the lifeblood of any growing city – are already leaving, some 750,000 in the past decade alone. People may still come temporarily, but few stay to raise children. LA now has the second-lowest birth rate among the 53 largest US metropolitan areas, according to the American Community Survey. Younger Angelenos, according to one UCLA poll, are even more disillusioned than their elders.
The 1984 Olympics was led brilliantly by Peter Ueberroth, himself a successful businessman who managed not only to deliver an incident-free games, but also to turn a profit. Though the city was run by a Democrat, Tom Bradley, he was also a former police officer and was not about to allow criminal elements (always a force in LA) to disrupt the games. Organised labour also backed Bradley, as well as the corporate elites, for whom many union members worked.
Today, the contrast is stark. Few corporate leaders possess the cojones to address the reasons for LA’s precipitous economic decline. This is most apparent downtown, an area that has ‘benefited’ from vast transit developments, tax incentives and a new convention centre. Yet, despite billions spent, it remains strewn with encampments and sometimes fire-damaged buildings. The empty, never completed luxury high-rises there have become renowned among tourists for their elaborate graffiti.
It’s no surprise, then, that jobs in the entertainment industry are being lost to both technological developments and more generous incentives elsewhere. Some entertainment executives now even suggest that LA could become ‘another Detroit’.
Michael Kelly, director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont McKenna College, notes that nearly every basic industry – from manufacturing to finance and business services – has shed jobs or at best stagnated since 2019. Only education and healthcare, both heavily subsidised by government, have grown meaningfully during the same period. Had LA matched the national pace of job growth, Kelly estimates it would have added 300,000 more jobs.
This decline has taken place in a city that once boasted a strong, dominant business class. Today’s business leaders – increasingly inheritors of wealth and middlemen – seem uninterested in reversing decline. Many, Kelly argues, prefer to chase prestige projects, like the massively successful Dodgers or the Lakers, rather than focus on improving economic and educational opportunities for young Angelenos, or keeping public parks safe. ‘They don’t care about fixing MacArthur Park or helping the South Side’, Kelly concludes. ‘All they care about is the Olympics.’
The business elites, the high-priced lawyers and the many fixers, can nurture their LA idyll, living in secure, ultra-pricey places like Brentwood (home to Kamala Harris), the Hollywood Hills or out further in Malibu or Palm Springs. They have stood by as the city’s political culture has nurtured a criminal class, strengthened by unrestricted immigration and often feeble law enforcement.
Once obsessed with growth, even to the detriment of the city’s natural environment, LA’s political establishment is now dominated by people who barely, if at all, support capitalism. While cities such as San Francisco, Houston and even New York shift back towards the political centre ground, Los Angeles in 2022 elected Mayor Karen Bass, a lifelong leftist who travelled to Castro’s Cuba as part of the Venceremos brigade. In 2016, upon Fidel’s death, she issued a praise-filled obituary to ‘El Comandante’. Her Castroite bona fides may have hurt her when she was briefly considered for Biden’s running mate – a position that went to Kamala Harris.
As the progressives have gained close to total control of LA, a wave of Chicago-style corruption has followed, with multiple city councillors and commissioners arrested. Bass impressed few during last year’s devastating wildfires, and the city’s rebuilding effort has been abysmal at best.
Under pressure from militant public-sector unions, Bass has kept business at bay with permit costs – high even by Californian standards. The last LA Olympics turned a profit, but if this one does not, the city may be forced to shoulder expenses it can scarcely afford. This year alone, Bass’s administration announced a budget deficit of over $1 billion – driven largely by surging public-sector wages.
With just three years until the Olympic Games open, the city’s progressive leaders seem to lack the will to protect their own constituents. Bass and California governor Gavin Newsom, along with Harris, have opposed the deployment of the National Guard, arguing, against all evidence, that the riots had been mostly ‘peaceful’ .
It may yet worsen. Bass faces mounting pressure not from business, but from radicals to her left – notably the fast-rising Democratic Socialists of America, a hard-left, anti-business, anti-Israel faction with four seats on the 15-member city council.
Those disappointed by Bass’s weakness on security may not have seen anything yet. The new wave is embodied by Isabel Jurado, a DSA activist who not only seeks to defund the police, but dreams of its abolition. Even more troubling is the rise of pro-Hamas agitators – visible in the current anti-ICE protests – and a radical fringe that is well-funded, well-organised and increasingly influential.
