L.A. Mayor Karen Bass on Hot-Button Olympics Issues: “We Have to Eliminate Street Homelessness”

Karen Bass traveled to and from Paris for both the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and the Los Angeles mayor walked away from the experience feeling impressed.

“I thought they did a beautiful job,” Bass told moderator Andrew Ross Sorkin on Tuesday during a CNBC x Boardroom: Game Plan panel at Fairmont Miramar Hotel and Bungalows in Santa Monica. The session, titled We Got Next: LA 2028, featured Bass seated alongside LA28 president and chairperson Casey Wasserman, LA28 board of directors member Jessica Alba and Team USA managing director Grant Hill. “What I love the most was the way they involved the entire city. Whether you attended the games or not, there was some way for you to be connected,” she added.

Bass then turned her attention to another question Sorkin lobbed her way about the Olympics: What makes her anxious about the games coming to Los Angeles in four years? “All that we need to do in our city to prepare,” she answered. Obviously, that involves heavy lifting in terms of logistics, budgeting and preparation though the issues that are top of mind for many Angelenos are how the city will handle traffic and the homelessness crisis. Bass addressed those as well during Tuesday’s panel.

Of the former, Bass took time to clarify statements she made about the “no car rule,” something that generated a fair amount of attention when it came up a month ago. “Let me be clear, what we hope to do is for no cars to the venues to the games. Public transportation to the games,” she said. “Life goes on in the city. But, again, for those folks who were here in ’84, everybody was terrified that it was going to be terrible. They worked it out. Mayor [Tom Bradley] worked it out. There was none of the technology that we have today.”

Bass continued by saying that the COVID-19 pandemic introduced new protocols and routines of remote work, something she suggested could be implemented more widely among Angelenos as a way to curb traffic during the games. “I think we can stagger work schedules,” she noted. Another lesson learned from the 1984 Summer Olympics involved rescheduling semi-truck deliveries from daytime to nighttime.

“I think there is a way that we can organize the region so that traffic will be less and manageable and that people that go to the games will go to the games via public transportation to the games, life goes on in the city,” the mayor continued. “But again, for those folks who were here in ’84, everybody was terrified that it was going to be terrible. They worked it out. Mayor Bradley worked it out. There was none of the technology that we have today. And so we all collectively went through Covid and learned about remote work and learned about staying home.”

Bass explained that in order to transport people to and from the venues, they will need “3,000 buses, 3,000 bus drivers and 3,000 parking spaces. In order to do that, we’re going to need support from essentially cities from around the state as well as other states.”

In contextualizing the latter question about homelessness, Sorkin noted how “remarkable” it was to see the streets cleared during the games. “It disappeared overnight,” he said before asking what Bass would have to do to make that work in Los Angeles.

“Well, number one, we have to do whatever we can to eliminate street homelessness. We’ve been able to, for the first time in many, many years, have a 10 percent reduction in street homelessness,” she said. “We need to build large-scale shelters that are regionally based. We have been moving forward with that. We need to do an awful lot more.”

She cited 18,000 units “coming online” in the next couple of years, a figure that is far behind the total number of homeless individuals in the city at 70,000, per Bass. “It’s going to take a collective effort.”