A team of academics from UCLA and USC has calculated that close to 6,000 people living without shelter are situated within one mile of venues planned for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles County.
The estimate of 5,975 individuals draws from the county’s most recent point-in-time count of roughly 49,000 unsheltered residents and adjusts for overlap with possible security perimeters, according to LAist.
Earlier this year the county’s Department of Housing and Homelessness projected that only about 1,600 unsheltered people would fall inside such zones, a number the researchers described as too low.
Carter Hewgley, the department’s chief strategy officer, said the county’s lower figure supported an application for $93 million in state funding intended to assist more than 4,000 unhoused individuals overall.
Jessie Chien, a UCLA research data analyst, noted that the team sought to illustrate the scale of the issue in areas with high homelessness concentrations such as downtown Los Angeles.
Benjamin Henwood of USC’s Homelessness Policy Research Institute expressed concern that limited shelter capacity could lead to enforcement actions that simply displace people into neighboring areas.
The researchers observed that narrower half-mile perimeters would still encompass around 2,200 unsheltered residents, or about 5 percent of the county total, and they plan to continue publishing related work on the Home 2028 site.
This report is based on coverage by LAist: https://laist.com/news/housing-homelessness/unsheltered-people-within-mile-la-olympic-venues