Listen now
Episode transcript
PROTESTORS
Fight! Fight! Fight! Housing is a human right. Fight Fight Fight! Housing is a human right. Fight! Fight! Fight!
INES ALCAZAR [translated from Spanish]
They’re gentrifying the area and they’re gonna kick everyone out if we don’t fight.
HOST (ANDIE CROSSAN)
Ines Alcazar is a powerful presence.
INES [translated from Spanish]
We’re here to stay. We’re not going anywhere, my friends. [clapping and cheering]
HOST
She’s small in stature… but a big influence here.
On this day, she’s revving up the crowd. This is a march against rent hikes, and she represents a local tenants association in Los Angeles.
Their goal is to protect homes, specifically the homes on a street called Flower Drive.
Flower Drive is wedged between a highway, multiple stadiums, and a sprawling university campus.
It’s a hub for sports in the city.
And a prime target for development ahead of the 2028 LA Olympic Games.
PROTESTORS
No Olympics here, no Olympics anywhere! [clapping and cheering]
HOST
In this episode, we’re going to flip our calendar four years into the future.
And take a look at changes already happening in the host city for the next Summer Games.
This is State of Play, the podcast where we investigate the ways international mega-events impact big cities.
This season we’re looking at the Olympic Games.
I’m Andie Crossan.
[Car door shutting]
Ines Alcazar spends a lot of time going back and forth to these protests.
She’s been in the trenches fighting against rent hikes and evictions in her neighbourhood for around three years now.
She lives on a rent-controlled block with dozens of other tenants.
INES
Flower Drive is here to stay. So we’re not going to be evicted. We’re, we’re not going to permit, you know, people to come and evict us from our apartments.
We’ve been living there for a long time and so we are not leaving those.
HOST
Flower Drive is a sun-soaked street lined with mid-century multiplexes capped with Spanish-style clay tiles.
Each week, Ines meets with neighbours in the parking lot outside of her building.
And they talk about the multi-billion dollar development plan that would alter the neighbourhood forever.
[People talking]
The plan is to demolish the homes that are there and build upscale student housing for the University of Southern California, as well as retail and commercial space.
For Ines, it would mean losing the apartment that she’s lived in for over forty years.
SHARON NADEEM
Gracias. Hola.
INES
Come in.
SHARON
Thank you.
INES
I’m sorry, I’m cooking something so it’s—
SHARON
Oh, it smells really — is it rice?
INES
No [laughs].
SHARON
What are you making?
INES
Menudo.
SHARON
Hi!
ELIJAH
Earphones.
INES
Yeah.
SHARON
Earphones, yeah!
INES
Say, “my name is Elijah.”
ELIJAH
My name Elijah.
SHARON
Elijah? Elijah, I’m Sharon.
INES
Okay, say “Hi Sharon.”
SHARON
Hi, do you wanna talk to it?
HOST
That’s producer Sharon Nadeem. She spent an afternoon visiting with Ines and her family.
Ines lives with her husband, two daughters, and her grandson, Elijah.
Her unit is one of four in this multiplex which is on the 3800 block of Flower Drive.
Ines moved in, in 1972, shortly after she arrived here from Oaxaca, Mexico.
She remembers the way the neighbourhood looked back then.
INES
Uh, when we first moved across the street right there on 39th, there was this in the corner, and it was so beautiful here. It was gorgeous because the freeway wasn’t really that wide.
All this street, this side was full of palm trees, and all the grass are green, were green and very neat kept. So it was beautiful. It was beautiful. It was so quiet. It was no cars in the streets. It was just like a little island in the whole city, yeah.
SHARON
What was it like being a teenager in this area?
INES
Oh, it was nice. It was so peaceful. It was like, I felt like I was living in the high class area because like I say, it was so nice, you know?
HOST
And a lot has happened over the years. Multiple freeway expansions, earthquakes — like the one that shook the facade off the front of her building.
And she was living here the last time the Olympics came to town, back in 1984.
NEWSREADER
The picture is live, the moment is now. 6 o’clock on a summer Friday evening in Los Angeles. But a Friday like none other in the history of Southern California, because the picture is of the Olympic torch being carried through the streets…
RONALD REAGAN
I declare open the Olympic games of Los Angeles.
AD VOICEOVER
When the U.S. wins a medal in the event on your game card, you win a Big Mac!
HOST
You have to remember what LA was like back then.
NEWSREADER
But just a few blocks from the Olympic sites and the tourist hotels, the glamor quickly gives way to the grubby world of gangland.
Los Angeles has the worst gang problem in the States.
Down in the Rampart division, sandwiched between Sunset Boulevard and the athletic stadium, the police patrol the toughest area in town.
HOST
In advance of the Games, LA vowed to make its streets safer.
The city passed a new law making it illegal to sleep on a sidewalk or a park bench.
LA police were granted sweeping new powers in an effort to clean up gang violence leading up to the games.
ERIC SHEEHAN
When I say gang sweeps, you know, we’re talking about youth that hang out in a group of five and have been labeled a gang.
HOST
Eric Sheehan is an organizer with NOlympics LA, a coalition of unions and associations in the city that campaign against the Games.
ERIC
And when we talk about homeless sweeps, you know, we’re talking about violently removing people who don’t have a place to sleep.
Thousands of innocent Black and brown men were rounded up and arrested and thrown in jail for no particular reason, simply to “sanitize” the streets for tourists in the lead up to these games.
NEWSREADER
The Olympic crackdown can’t guarantee safety, but these officers seem armed for anything in the patch they call the warzone.
OFFICER
And you’re ready to do battle. [Sirens]
HOST
The ’84 Olympics were a turning point for the Olympic movement. The LA Games made money — a whopping $232 million.
ERIC
All the profits from the ’84 games went to, uh, a youth sports nonprofit called the LA 84 Foundation, that, as of a couple years ago, had $22 million invested in Blackstone Group, that goes to places like South LA, buys up homes, and tries to drive tenants out.
And so the ’84 games directly fund gentrification in South LA to this day.
HOST
The city was changing. And Ines watched it all unfold from her window on Flower Drive.
She’s seen friends and neighbours come and go, and new landlords take over.
SHARON
And what is it like if you compare from now, to during this time to when it was really nice?
INES
I can say actually from a paradise to hell. [Laughs]. Yeah, it’s the totally opposite.
HOST
In 2018, a development company called Ventus Group started buying up properties in the area with the stated goal of building hotels in time for the Olympics.
The plan was scaled back and hotels scratched, largely due to Ines and her neighbours fighting tooth and nail against it.
The current plan is to build more than 400 apartments, almost exclusively for students attending the University of Southern California.
Since Ventus took over, residents on the block say they’ve faced harassment and intimidation.
The company wants them out so they can tear down the buildings.
INES
They just looking for any little reason to either evict people or tire people or harass people so people can get tired and leave… you’re going to exhaust people.
HOST
According to Ines, the company starts by trying to buy people out.
INES
They offered us cash for keys.
HOST
That means a cash settlement and a lot of pressure to leave.
INES
Early morning they call you and they say you know, “If you don’t accept this money, this and this is going to happen. If you’re not accepting it, you’re probably going to get kicked out without even giving you anything. And this is not your home, this is not your property.” Okay, we do understand all that, but we do have rights. So, yeah.
HOST
Over the years, many of Ines’ neighbours on the 3900 block of Flower Drive have accepted settlements.
Ines says some of them got as much as $50 thousand.
She offers up a tour — but it requires dodging four lanes across an offramp to get there.
INES
Watch out with the traffic. So we can just go—
SHARON
Go? [Laughing].
INES
Right now.
JESSE WINTER
Okay.
INES
Yeah, because there’s kind of slow and there’s nothing coming over here on the side…
JESSE
[Laughing] You’re way better at this than we are.
[Tires screeching]
[“Watch out, watch out.”]
SHARON
Yeah.
INES
Ah, we’re on the other side now. Okay. We’re safe.
HOST
It’s now a ghost town. The buildings sit empty. It’s evening but there aren’t any street lights on.
There’s graffiti on the walls.
And the only residents are people living in tents along the nearby highway overpass.
INES
When I first came to Los Angeles, I lived in that apartment right there. I lived there with my dad and my sister.
So all these buildings over here, they’re empty now. They used to be families living here.
And uh, it’s sad. It’s sad walking over here and not seeing everybody that we used to see. [Sighs].
Really sad because we could have organized together. This whole block could have organized with us, and they could still stay here. Like us — we’re still keeping our place — so they could have fought, you know, and they could still be here.
But like I said, some people fear, okay. When you say $50 thousand, maybe it sounds like a lot of money, but now these days it’s not. It’s not. And it’s not enough.
HOST
So Ines fought back. She joined the Los Angeles Tenants Union and together with her neighbours they formed the Flower Drive Tenants Association.
[Voices]
They’re planning another demonstration against the developer, but It’s hard to hear each other.
[Helicopter sounds]
Over this.
[Helicopter sounds increase]
That’s the sound of helicopters circling overhead.
It’s game night here, and game nights are loud.
It gets to the heart of what makes this neighbourhood particularly valuable to developers like Ventus.
It’s near both BMO Stadium and the LA Memorial Coliseum.
So on a big night here there could be as many as a hundred thousand fans in the area.
[Fans cheering]
CERIANNE ROBERTSON
The three stadiums that I focus most on my research all have opened, um, since 2018.
HOST
Cerianne Robertson knows Ines and the Flower Drive tenants association well.
CERIANNE
I am a PhD candidate here at USC Annenberg and I research the impacts and the role of new stadiums in Los Angeles on their surrounding communities.
All of this money is pouring into this neighbourhood. We see proposed hotel projects, we see proposed USC student housing projects.
HOST
And both BMO Stadium and LA Coliseum will serve as official venues for the 2028 Olympics.
Here’s a fun fact: LA Coliseum will be the only stadium in the world that has hosted the games three times.
Which fits with this part of the plan.
Los Angeles has promised a “no-build” Olympics, to limit disruptions to the city’s residents.
But Cerianne Robertson says it’s too narrow to only think about Olympics in terms of stadiums and purpose-built venues.
CERIANNE
What I’ve seen most is that the Olympics here are just one part of a much broader project that is transforming LA into a city ultimately tailored more towards the interests and needs of tourists.
What we’re seeing is the Olympics and these stadiums being used to basically grease the wheels for other kinds of development projects that increase the incentive for landlords to do all those things faster.
So I certainly never say the Olympics are causing gentrification. They are accelerating it.
HOST
Cerianne says the nearby USC campus plays a part in this transformation.
CERIANNE
What we’re seeing is this tension as USC expands south into the broader South Central area, this tension between its interest, and its interest in carving out more spaces for its events, for its sports, for its students to live, and the interest of the existing community who are trying to hang on to their affordable homes.
HOST
And there’s a lot of love between USC and the Olympics.
In fact, USC is an Olympic medal factory. It’s produced more Olympic medalists than any other university in the United States.
CERIANNE
USC is so proud of its history of USC student athletes winning medals at the Olympics.
The campus is going to host both athletic events and then also the media village, the main press centre, as well as some accommodations for journalists, the Coliseum will be hosting Olympic opening ceremonies and perhaps other things.
[Cars honking]
HOST
And there’s another competitive sport that happens here as well.
The battle for parking.
Imagine living in a place where thousands of people are vying for a space.
And so it shouldn’t surprise you that one way that renters are being pressured is with parking.
SHARON
Tell me your name.
ARELLY MIGUEL
Uh, Arelly Miguel.
HOST
Arelly Miguel has been fighting this fight with the owner of Flower Drive.
ARELLY [Ines translating from Spanish]
He wasn’t gonna take my rent until I resigned my right for the parking space.
HOST
That’s Ines you hear translating.
ARELLY [Ines translating from Spanish]
If not, he was going to take me to court.
HOST
Arelly says that when she started complaining, he stopped accepting her rent checks and told her to leave.
Arelly’s lived at Flower Drive for 15 years.
She complained last year when the owner leased her parking spot to a construction company.
ARELLY [Ines translating from Spanish]
I told them, “No, that that’s my parking, and I’m not gonna resign my right to use it,” and he started to threaten me and he said that, “There’s not many parking spaces for everybody.”
SHARON
How long have they been rejecting your rent?
ARELLY [Ines translating from Spanish]
Going into four months.
HOST
And Arelly isn’t alone.
Flower Drive residents who used that parking lot had their spaces chained off.
The resident’s association decided to take collective action. They cut the locks and held a sit-in on the lot.
Ines, Arelly, and a group of supporters were in front of those cars blocking them from entering.
SPEAKER 1
Back it up, back it up, back it up, back it up.
SPEAKER 2
Bro, bro you’re going to back your car into some old ladies. Yeah. You’re going to back your car into some old ladies. That’s how bad you got to park right here?
HOST
Actions like these are meant to support renters like Arelly. But in Arelly’s case, it made her a target.
And the owners of Flower Drive are not backing down. In fact, they’ve escalated the battle.
[Phone dialing]
INES
Hello?
SHARON
Hello. Hi, Ines. Sorry I missed your call.
INES
I’m sorry. It’s okay. I’m sorry I didn’t really call you right away, because I was outside on the block.
HOST
Earlier this year, producer Sharon Nadeem received an urgent call from Ines.
An eviction notice had appeared under her door that morning. And not just hers.
INES
We were, like, actually um asking around and seeing who got the letters—
SHARON
Mhm.
INES
Because it seems like not everybody got the letters.
SHARON
Oh, really?
INES
Yeah not the whole bl—yeah, not the whole block. It’s only like few buildings. One, two, three, four, five buildings only.
HOST
The eviction letters cite the Ellis Act.
A California state law that allows landlords to take rental units off the market.
It’s meant for small businesses that need to close and recover a property investment.
But it’s often used to convert rentals into condos, shops, and single-family homes.
INES
This one, it has some kind of legality [laughs]. It kind of like, yeah, intimidate me a little bit.
SHARON
Yeah, for sure. How is everybody else feeling on the Drive?
INES
Uh, that’s why we met today, because we want to like, to talk, and to calm down, and, you know, and to start thinking of the ways that we can fight this.
HOST
Here’s what you need to know about the Ellis Act.
It’s been used to clear around 29,000 rent-controlled units since 2001.
In 2023, the number of Ellis Act evictions was more than the previous three years combined.
For Ines and her neighbours, the stakes are high.
She’s lost touch with friends evicted from the neighbourhood.
She knows some folks have even ended up sleeping in tents. Like the ones she passes under the highway.
INES
Before I used to see people around here, but with all the sweeps that they have done, they’re gone. I don’t know if they’re still unhoused or they maybe already have found a house. I don’t know.
SHARON
So you’re saying that basically they got evicted from that and then they lived unhoused under the freeway?
INES
Not right away, but shortly after which it means probably because the money is gone.
HOST
Ines and the Flower Drive community have now spent months building a network with other neighbourhoods facing eviction, and they protest together.
SPEAKER [translated from Spanish]
I want to introduce you to our neighbours from Hillside Villa. Give it up for Hillside! They’re here today because their landlord wants to increase their monthly rent by $3,000.
[Booing]
They said no, so our friend is going to sing a song for us.
[Cheering, musicians playing, singing]
HOST
Around 150 people are gathered here to hear lively speeches and performances. In one skit, residents and landlords exchange dramatic blows in a make-believe boxing ring.
[Protestors chanting and cheering]
They chant, and sing, and connect with other protest movements of the past.
The mood is hopeful. They repeat: Si se puede: Yes we can.
[“Se puede! Si se puede! Se puede! Si se puede! Si se puede…”]
Months have passed since the residents received eviction letters.
And the neighbourhood is already changing.
Some of the buildings on the 3900 block have been torn down.
Others received heritage status, so those will be loaded onto truck beds and moved elsewhere.
INES
It’s depressing because nobody’s there anymore. Empty buildings. And we have all these people living in the streets.
SHARON
So if you have to leave this rent-controlled unit, what are the options for you, your husband, your daughter, your grandson?
INES
None. None. Not in Los Angeles. None. They’re just taking our lives away from us.
Actually, in a way, they’re actually killing us, because they’re taking our lives, they’re taking our neighbours, they’re taking our doctors, they’re taking our churches, they’re taking our markets.
They, they take, they’re taking everything, all our social life, and our spiritual life, and everything. It’s gonna be gone.
Yeah, it’s gonna be gone soon.
SHARON
How do you think the Olympics is connected to this?
INES
Because the Olympics is the perfect, um, excuse. Because we having people that are coming from outside. We need all the hotels and all the housing that we can, and especially close by the stadiums, or the, yeah.
And the swimming pools and everything are on the university. So they’re, um they want to use all the spaces that are available for them to, actually, to, to stay.
SHARON
What do you think they will do? Like, what, what do you think is going to happen with, with this?
INES
Yeah, if we have to leave, we have to leave. But like I said, we know we are at this moment, we decided that we’re going to stay because we’re not gonna go live in the street. We refuse. I mean, I, I refuse to do that. Unless they come and grab me and pull me and drag me all the way to the street. I don’t know what I’m gonna do, but, right now, I’m here to stay.
HOST
The LA Mayor’s Office did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. Ventus Group and Casey Wasserman, the head of the privately-funded LA 2028 Olympic Committee declined our requests for an interview.
Next time on State of Play…
RICH PERELMAN
Why don’t we tear down the arena and just build homeless shelters?
HOST
LA’s push to become a sports capital, and what that could mean for the city’s unhoused people.
RICH
Should we just tear it all down and have no sport, no enjoyment, no entertainment, nothing. The whole world has to stop and we have to shelter the homeless. Because sport is ridiculous, it’s a waste of time, it’s for the upper classes only, and therefore we cannot have it. If that is your view, then you shouldn’t have the Olympics.
HOST
State of Play is brought to you by the Global Reporting Center and PRX.
Hosted by me, Andie Crossan.
Produced by Sharon Nadeem and Katarina Sabados.
Our senior producers are Sarah Berman and Jesse Winter.
Audio post-production by Newfruit Media with sound editing and mixing by Valentina Fonseca and Daniel Rinaldi.
Digital production by Andrew Munroe.
Archive by Bea Lehmann.
Fact checking by Juliana Konrad.
Art by Will Brown.
Our executive producer is Britney Dennison.
Special thanks to Efrain Zelaya for production support and Eric Sheehan for archival footage.
–END–