As 2028 Olympics Approach, Los Angeles Grapples With Cleaning Up America’s Open-Air Asylum

Carol Adelkoff has run a taxpayer-funded Los Angeles homeless services nonprofit for more than a decade — from a house on the Big Island of Hawaii, thousands of miles from the crisis she is paid, largely by the taxpayer, to manage.The chief executive of the 1736 Family Crisis Center collected more than $1.6 million in compensation over the past two years, including a $495,000 bonus in 2023 on top of her base pay. The nonprofit, which runs domestic violence shelters and homelessness programs across Los Angeles and Orange counties, draws 94 percent of its $15 million in annual revenue from government grants, including at least $25 million from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority since 2021. Ms. Adelkoff has maintained her primary residence in Hawaii for at least 11 years.It is a singular case study in a much larger indictment: a homelessness-industrial complex that has learned to sustain itself even as the people it exists to serve remain on the sidewalk.On almost any block in downtown Los Angeles, the evidence of a seemingly incurable epidemic is hard to miss. Tents stretch in unbroken rows along Skid Row’s 50-odd blocks, spilling onto sidewalks stained with the residue of open-air drug use. RVs sit padlocked and rusting along residential streets in Venice and Echo Park. Men and women in the grip of obvious psychosis pace the plaza outside Union Station as commuters stream past without looking up.Los Angeles, whose housed population is largely declining — the county lost nearly 54,000 residents between July 2024 and July 2025, the largest numerical decline in the nation — is electing a new mayor this fall. The contest, set for November 3, pits an incumbent, Mayor Karen Bass, on defense for her modest statistical progress against a challenger from her left, City Councilmember Nithya Raman. The race’s dynamic is shaped almost entirely by what voters see every day on the streets beneath their feet. The most recent count, updated last month, found 73,040 people experiencing homelessness across Los Angeles County, 45,194 of them in the city itself. Los Angeles did not create all of them. It inherited them — the untreated, the addicted, the deported, the discharged — drawn or deposited here by a country that generates homelessness faster than it can build properties to house them.“L.A. is the most visible example of a national failure, not a unique one. The same forces such as housing unaffordability, inadequate investment in safety nets, and policy fragmentation are driving homelessness in every major coastal city,” a professor of social policy and health at the University of Southern California, Benjamin Henwood, tells The New York Sun. “LA just has more people, more sprawl, and more cameras,” Mr. Henwood says.A Crisis Decades in the MakingLos Angeles has been losing this battle for longer than most city officials care to admit. The city suffered broad homelessness surges during the Great Depression, after World War II, and again in the 1970s — and never fully recovered after each spike. By 1976, city officials had essentially formalized the concentration by designating Skid Row an unofficial containment zone — a 50-block area where shelters and services would be tolerated and the unhoused corralled out of sight of the rest of downtown.The spending that followed has been breathtaking and so have the results. In 2016, Los Angeles voters approved Proposition HHH, a $1.2 billion bond measure promising 10,000 units of supportive housing over a decade.Since then, the crisis only worsened. The former executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, Heidi Marston who resigned in 2022 over lack of authority, systemic issues, and low pay for staffers, acknowledged the measure was “definitely oversold to voters” as a quick solution. Part of the gridlock traces to a 2018 Ninth Circuit ruling in Martin v. City of Boise, which made it nearly impossible to clear encampments by barring anti-camping bans when shelter beds were unavailable. The Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson undid that law, giving cities the green light to enforce those bans, but only after years of accumulation had left nowhere new for people to go. Ms. Bass points to two consecutive years of declining counts as evidence of progress since the high court’s decision. “The fact that homelessness is down 17.5 percent two years in a row, it is the first time we’ve seen a decline in street homelessness. Around the country, homelessness went up 18 percent,” she told KABC-TV last month. That was before the housing authority reported the figure has started crawling back up. How far it fell in the first place is disputed as well. One RAND Corporation study found the official count missed up to 7,900 people in three key neighborhoods, with the undercount growing from 26 percent in 2024 to 32 percent in 2025. Another survey, published in June, found rough sleeping — no tent, vehicle, or other shelter during sleep — rose 20 percent in the past year, with 44 percent of the unsheltered now fully exposed. Debates over methodology aside, the people living on these streets are visibly, severely ill. A Los Angeles Times examination of count questionnaires found about 76 percent of people on the streets were affected by mental illness, substance abuse, poor health, or physical disability — far above the figure officials presented to elected leaders.“The pleasant weather makes outdoor living sustainable and hard to compete with, from the standpoint of shelter providers trying to persuade the unsheltered to enter a residential program,” senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Stephen Eide, tells the Sun. He adds that “lax enforcement policies have incentivized street living.”Others point to a collapse that runs far deeper than weather or enforcement. “Los Angeles is where three national failures collide: a fragmented behavioral health system, an overreliance on police and emergency rooms as frontline responders, and decades of political avoidance around basic planning for people who lose stability,” Los Angeles-based senior advisor for Disability Rights California, Vanessa Ramos, tells the Sun. “LA’s size and geography then make that failure harder to hide than anywhere else in the country.”Easier to Leave Than to Get HelpFor decades, California law made it nearly impossible to compel treatment for people deteriorating in public view. The state’s conservatorship rules had not been substantially updated since 1967. 2023’s Senate Bill 43 changed that, but only marginally.The bill, implemented in Los Angeles County on January 1, 2026, rewrites California’s Lanterman-Petris-Short Act for the first time in more than 50 years. Severe substance use disorder now meets the legal threshold for “grave disability,” meaning someone in the grip of addiction can be held involuntarily if the officer standing in front of an individual decides the episode rises to urgency.Few expect a meaningful change on the ground. “Conservatorship has historically been grossly underutilized for untreated serious mental illness. I do not expect it to be more appropriately utilized, in a way that would make a noticeable difference on the streets, for cases of straightforward addiction,” Mr. Eide says.The legal authority to detain someone is one thing. The beds, the staff, and the court time to follow through are another — and Los Angeles has never had enough of any of them.The Trouble With LAHSAThe Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is another barrier to its mission’s success. County supervisors voted 4-0 last April to yank more than $300 million from the authority after a federal judge found the agency, which funds Ms. Adelkoff’s Family Crisis Center, had lost track of billions in public funds. That was not the end of it. Earlier this summer, the Trump administration suspended its federal funding altogether. HUD called it “obvious fraud” and pointed out that the agency had collected nearly $1 billion from Washington since 2021.The frustration over spending without results has surfaced in stranger ways, too. The City Council voted 10 to three last month to lift anti-camping restrictions that had been enforced for five years at more than a dozen parks, over the objections of Councilmember Traci Park and two colleagues. Days later, a public commenter urged the council to fund taxpayer-financed “public sex huts” for homeless residents, a proposal Ms. Park rejected on the spot. “We have spent billions on homeless housing and services, and our constituents have been incredibly generous. They have every right to expect something in return,” she said. Mr. Eide traces the paralysis to something older than any single law.“There is a segment of the street population for whom the ‘60s never ended. They’re taking advantage of a permissive culture that Californians remain proud of despite its obvious downsides,” he says.Mr. Henwood, however, pushes back on framing this as a matter of culture or choice.“People aren’t choosing homelessness over treatment. They’re choosing between inadequate options,” he explains. “The federal government has all but abandoned its obligation to address affordable housing at any serious scale. HUD’s homelessness assistance budget is less than 0.06 percent of federal spending.”California has tried to fill the gap, yet homelessness spending has fallen sharply in recent years — from a peak of $6.9 billion in 2022-23 to roughly $1.5 billion in 2025-26, now less than half of one percent of the state’s general fund. No mayor, court program, or conservatorship has solved the math problem.An Olympic DeadlineA hard clock is now ticking. The next mayor will preside over preparations for the 2028 Olympic Games and the expected arrival of up to 15 million visitors. The world’s cameras will find the tents. County officials have already outlined plans to remove unhoused people from security perimeters around Olympic venues — while their own report concedes they do not have enough beds or funding to carry out the relocations.Ms. Bass has pledged the city will not copy Paris, which shipped homeless people and migrants out ahead of its games in 2024. “However our strategy evolves, it will always be housing people first. It will never be putting people on a bus and shipping them out,” she said. Ms. Raman has promised to cut street homelessness in half by 2028, though she voted to block an anti-encampment ordinance in Venice and has argued such bans only move the problem.Mr. Eide says he expects the city to manage the optics. “Blue cities possess a curious aptitude for combating street disorder effectively when and where they find it necessary to do so. There’s no vagrancy in Griffith Park. San Francisco cleaned up for Xi Jinping in 2023. So, yes, I expect L.A. to clean up for the Olympics. Why it can’t always clean up would be another question,” he says.“It is politically inevitable that visible homelessness near Olympic venues will be reduced. But the question of how, and at what cost to the people being moved, is still open,” Mr. Henwood adds. “Which version we get depends entirely on the choices our elected officials make over the next 18 months.”

As 2028 Olympics Approach, Los Angeles Grapples With Cleaning Up America’s Open-Air Asylum

As 2028 Olympics Approach, Los Angeles Grapples With Cleaning Up America’s Open-Air Asylum

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