Researchers estimate close to 6,000 unsheltered people live within a mile of Olympic venues

Researchers estimate that close to 6,000 unhoused people live within a mile of Olympic and Paralympic venues in Los Angeles County, and could be affected by security plans for the 2028 Summer Games.

That figure, published this week by a team of academics at USC and UCLA that study homelessness, is more than three times an estimate the L.A. County Department of Housing and Homelessness gave LAist earlier this year.

Carter Hewgley, that department’s chief strategy officer, told LAist in July that his office had been told to plan for security perimeters as wide as 1 mile for the Olympics, and that around 1,600 unsheltered people could be affected.

“That just seemed obviously low,” said Randall Kuhn, a UCLA professor and demographer who co-runs a monthly survey of unhoused people in L.A. In total, there are around 49,000 unsheltered people countywide, according to the 2026 point-in-time homeless count.

Kuhn and his colleagues came up with their higher estimate using numbers from that count, which estimates the number of unhoused people by census tract. They then adjusted those figures based on how much each tract overlapped with a potential Olympic security perimeter and the length of walkable and major streets where unhoused people were likely to be located.

The researchers acknowledged recent reports questioning potential errors in the recent point-in-time count, but said it still provides the best estimate available.

The result — an estimate of 5,975 unsheltered people within 1 mile of Olympic venues — excludes Pasadena and Long Beach, which do their own homeless counts, meaning the number is likely even higher.

The researchers published their findings on a website called Home 2028, where they plan to post studies and discussions related to the upcoming L.A. Olympics. They say they want to emphasize the potential magnitude of the challenge the region faces hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games in areas where homelessness is prevalent, like downtown Los Angeles.

“ We do want to highlight how the number of people who could be affected could be quite high,” said Jessie Chien, a research data analyst with UCLA’s California Center for Population Research, who put together the estimates.

Carter Hewgley with L.A. County responded to the report, saying his department was reviewing the methodology to understand how it compared to the county’s, and that he welcomed the additional analysis.

In a statement, Hewgley noted that the county’s 1,600 estimate was attached to an application with the state for $93 million in funding to address homelessness ahead of the Olympic Games.

“Importantly, our application was designed to address needs far beyond our initial 1,600 count,” Hewgley said, adding that the funds would go to more than 4,000 unhoused people in the county. Whether the county will receive that money is unclear.

Local officials have said they expect security plans will require unhoused people to vacate areas around competition venues ahead of and during the Olympics. That’s because the Secret Service will establish security perimeters around competition spaces where access will be restricted, and if unhoused people are within those perimeters they may be forced to move.

Those boundaries are not yet set. Less than two years out, there is also still not a concrete plan for how local officials will address homelessness in security perimeters or who will pay for those efforts.

Officials with the city and county say they want to focus on offering people in these areas shelter. But the researchers behind Home 2028 say they’re worried people will simply end up forced out of Olympic zones and into other neighborhoods.

“ I don't know what sort of capacity there is to actually do all that work,” said Benjamin Henwood, a USC professor and the director of university’s Homelessness Policy Research Institute. “And so at some point, you are concerned that more brute force criminalization might be at play.”

Henwood pointed to other work he and the same group of academics have done looking at the negative effects of encampment sweeps.

“ Because we're doing the research, we want that to be relevant to the conversation,” he said.

The report indicates that tighter perimeters could reduce the number of unhoused people caught up in the Olympics security apparatus. According to the researchers’ numbers, around 2,200 unhoused people live within a half-mile of venues.

Still, even that smaller number makes up 5% of the county’s unsheltered population.