Can Los Angeles Handle Thousands of Visitors for the 2028 Olympics?

Some Angelenos are openly questioning whether their city is truly ready to host the biggest spectacle in sports.

“The short answer is no. I feel like things like the writers strike and the actors strike and the overall economic situation we’re in right now has taken a toll on Los Angeles,” said Eddie Navarrette, executive director of the Independent Hospitality Coalition. “Things have never been more difficult to develop and open up a hotel or restaurant.”

City leaders and LA28, the region’s Olympic planning committee, have insisted that, unlike other recent host cities, Los Angeles’ Olympic and Paralympic Games would be “no-build.” In other words, L.A. is already filled with both new and iconic stadiums and arenas, so no new athletic venues need to be constructed, a factor that will keep costs under control. (LA28’s current budget for the Games is about $6.9 billion.) 

Instead, the Olympic committee has sought to match each Summer Games sporting event to existing venues throughout Southern California and beyond. 

“We’re truly not building anything new, not a single housing unit or hotel. Even the transit work is not really specific to the Olympics that’s really happening anyway,” one L.A. Olympic official told Commercial Observer. “To use existing venues wherever they are, and Southern California has an abundance of venues, is unlike anyplace else in the world.”

Once the Paris Olympics are over, L.A. will quickly fall under the spotlight, although four years might not be enough time.

“Paris is ready to hit the TVs, and pretty soon we’ll be through with Paris and they’ll be passing the torch to L.A. So what are they doing and how’s the work coming along?” asked David Ebeling, owner of Ebeling Communications, which works with commercial real estate companies. “The hotel situation is worrisome and people are trying to get ready for that.”

Where are the Games?
Many marquee events for the Games have already been placed in the city’s iconic stadiums, most of which sit near freeways and public transit lines. 

The University of Southern California’s multipurpose Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum will host the contest’s opening ceremonies, as well as track and field competitions. Crypto.com Arena, home to three professional sports teams, received gymnastics. Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium will be retrofitted to welcome swimming competitions, while nearby Intuit Dome, the Clippers’ new arena currently under construction, will anchor basketball. 

But several competitions will take place in L.A.’s sprawling suburbs, some of which are only 25 minutes away from the city’s downtown but can take hours to reach during the city’s morning and evening traffic snarls. Skateboarding, archery and BMX racing will be held in the San Fernando Valley, equestrian events will occur in Temecula, and golf will take place at the Riviera Country Club near Santa Monica. Meanwhile tennis, rugby, field hockey and cycling-track events will be spread across a sports complex that’s home to the L.A. Galaxy in the city of Carson in L.A.’s South Bay. And Long Beach will welcome a variety of water sports including rowing, sailing, water polo and marathon swimming.

“The venues in these cities are world-class, and provide the ideal conditions for athletes and fans, and we look forward to welcoming them in 2028,” LA28 Chief Athlete Officer Janet Evans said in a statement.  

Spreading events across a large metropolitan area will create other challenges. The athlete and media villages will take over the UCLA and USC campuses, but LA28 will be counting on Southern California’s existing infrastructure of hotels, highways and mass transit to house and move millions of people across the region during the six weeks when the Olympics and Paralympics will occur.  

“This is the impetus [for making changes],” said Sonnet Hui, vice president and general manager for the L.A. region for Project Management Advisors. “Now everyone has a reason to deal with a lot of the issues that we haven’t dealt with or haven’t had to deal with.”

Where visitors will stay
When Los Angeles made its original bid for the Summer Olympics in 2017, it had to guarantee there would be a minimum of 40,000 hotel rooms available for the Games.

Los Angeles County can more than meet that threshold. There are 103,960 hotel rooms available in the county as of the first quarter of this year, according to an estimate provided by CBRE. The real estate company estimates that could tick upwards to 104,974 rooms by the end of next year and 106,061 rooms by 2026. 

Beyond L.A., there are another 60,634 rooms available in Orange County. CBRE estimates that number could rise to 61,373 rooms by 2026.

But the demand to attend the first Olympic Games in the United States since 2002, and the first in Los Angeles since 1984, could be staggering. Rio de Janeiro welcomed 1.2 million visitors, including 410,000 foreigners, during the 2016 Summer Olympics. (Rio doubled the number of its hotel rooms in anticipation.) Paris is expecting 11.3 million tourists for this year’s Games but only 1.5 million are coming from other countries, according to the city’s tourism board. Hotels have been struggling to fill rooms since many visitors are Parisian locals who are taking the train or driving into town instead of staying overnight.

A similar situation could play out in California if hotel prices scare off revelers. But in order to accommodate the needs of U.S. and international visitors, LA28 may have to utilize tens of thousands of rooms well beyond L.A. and Orange counties as well as temporary arrangements, such as Airbnb and other short-term rentals.

“People will stay in areas throughout Southern California, especially since many Olympic events are spread out throughout the region, but also because attendees visiting L.A. for the Olympics will take the opportunity to sightsee and visit other attractions while they are here,” Doane Liu, Los Angeles chief tourism officer, said. 

Some hotel developers have begun modernizing their existing portfolio of hotels as tourism recovers to pre-pandemic levels. Hui’s Project Management Advisors is working with Hilton to upgrade meeting rooms and amenities of a 1,500-unit hotel near the Anaheim Convention Center.

“A lot of hotels that may be a little outdated are taking time to update their venues and enhance amenities,” Hui said. “People will anticipate the Games but there’s also Disneyland and other activities they can participate in when they’re in the city.”

Los Angeles’ most important Olympics-related infrastructure project is arguably the restoration of its convention center after several years of delays. Its 860,000-square-foot facility had been slated for a $1.4 billion expansion. (Anaheim’s convention center has 1.8 million square feet by comparison.) 

The city provided tax benefits to hotel owners to bolster development nearby. The Lightstone Group built a 37-story high-rise containing a 380-room Moxy and a 347-room AC Hotel across from the convention center with the expectation that the events space would be modernized. Both hotels opened in 2023.

On July 2, the L.A. City Council finally approved a $1.4 billion upgrade that will add 340,000 square feet. The building is now slated to host five Olympic sports — fencing, judo, table tennis, taekwondo and wrestling — and construction is expected to begin in spring 2025.

“The convention center is a chicken-and-egg situation,” Mitchell Hochberg, president of the Lightstone Group, said. “You need more hotel rooms to get business into the convention center, but you can’t fit more events in the convention center if you don’t have enough hotel rooms.”

But progress has been uneven since the pandemic. AEG, which is partnering with Plenary Group to upgrade the convention center, wanted to expand an adjacent JW Marriott hotel with a new 37-story, 861-room high-rise, yet work on the project has slowed.

Then there’s Oceanwide Plaza. The Beijing-based developer Oceanwide Holdings planned to build a $1 billion megacomplex with three 40-story residential towers, including a 184-room Park Hyatt hotel, near the Crypto.com Arena. But the company ran out of money in 2019 and only 27 stories were completed. Vandals broke into the towers and tagged them with graffiti as  Oceanwide went bankrupt. Now the site is up for sale. (See our story on Page 14.)

“The city really wants that area cleaned up and is pushing the developer to do something with it,” Hui said. “When the developer was trying to offload it, their asking price was too high. But when the price comes down enough, someone will take that opportunity.”

How they’ll get around
The biggest worry that L.A. residents have about the Olympics is its seismic effect on traffic.

With events planned in Carson, Pacific Palisades, Inglewood and other widely spread-out locales, public transportation will be essential and potentially another challenge to manage.

Los Angeles freeways are famous for their insufferable, round-the-clock rush hour. Three of its interstates, the 405, the 5, and the 101, rank as the top three most hated highways in the country, and the city’s traffic is sixth worst in the U.S. LAX, the city’s main international airport, is among the most stressful in the nation thanks to heavy crowds and limited access to transit.

Olympic committee leaders say they will encourage visitors to use public transit during the Games, and a mix of private transport and shuttles will help people get to venues. L.A. Metro is expected to run more frequent subway, bus and commuter rail service once the Games begin. 

But L.A.’s subway system has a limited reach compared with other large cities. Its Metro runs on 109 miles of track, while Philadelphia’s subway operates over 450 miles and Washington, D.C., a city roughly one-fifth of its size, has 130 miles. Its local buses have remained slow, suffer long delays and lack shade over the bus stops. This spring, several incidents of violent crime and street takeovers occurred on subways and buses, prompting Metro drivers to stage a “sick out,” which led to more delays.

Los Angeles officials know there’s more work to do.

The city received $900 million in federal funding in April to support its transit system, with most of the funding dedicated to the East San Fernando Valley Light Rail project in Van Nuys and the extension of the Purple Line, which will bring additional subway service into the city’s Westside. And last week, the Los Angeles World Airports Commissioners approved an additional $400 million to jump-start construction on a delayed Automated People Mover LAX that will carry some 30 million passengers a year. The $3.3 billion monorail is expected to be completed by the end of 2025.

Transit advocates believe the city can go even further to make the city more accessible. Some have proposed reserving highway lanes for shuttles and express buses to ensure athletes and visitors can get to competitions on time, or even closing the lanes during daytime hours. 

“We are pushing not only to have those lanes on freeways but to keep them after the Olympics leave so we have that as a resource for Angelenos,” Eli Lipmen, executive director of Move LA, said.

The city’s Metro is getting close to registering 1 million riders per day on a weekday. Transit ridership during the Olympics could easily double that number, which means  Metro will have to bring in more buses, hire more bus and train operators, and run service more frequently to meet demand.

But Lipmen believes the Olympics could change perceptions of Los Angeles as a 21st century metropolis. 

“This is L.A.’s opportunity to really change the way that the world views us, not as a car culture but as a multimodal community,” he said. “And I really think people who come here will be blown away with how much transit we do have and how great it really is.”