Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is pushing for faster ways to house the city’s homeless population as President Donald Trump threatens to seize a bigger role in ensuring public order ahead of two of the world’s most-watched sporting events.
The city is eyeing municipal land to quickly set up more tiny homes and other housing before Los Angeles hosts FIFA World Cup matches starting in June and the Summer Olympics in 2028, Bass said in an interview at Bloomberg’s Los Angeles office. Such an effort would help replace some of the tarps and tents cluttering city sidewalks.
A failure to act would put Los Angeles at risk of greater federal intervention, Bass said, warning of the potential for Trump to install detention centres like those used to warehouse immigrants facing deportation. The Democratic mayor said she has reached out to private contractors who work with the US military to erect shelters in war zones and disaster areas, although the city doesn’t have any contracts for the work and hasn’t yet identified specific sites.
“The bottom line is either we do it or they do it,” she said, referring to the federal government. “I’m looking for larger plots of city-owned land so we could put up more than the numbers we are putting up now. What I’m not proposing is some draconian, you know, one structure for thousands of people.”
Trump said last week that he would use force if necessary to ensure public order ahead of the World Cup, without discussing homelessness specifically. He told reporters that New York should call him for help, then zeroed in on Los Angeles.
“Los Angeles should call and probably will,” Trump said. “We’re going to have to do something when it comes World Cup time, and we’re going to have to force ourselves upon them, which we have the right to do, because we don’t want to have any crime, we don’t want to have any problems for the Olympics and the World Cup and even for 250” – a reference to a series of events celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4.
Trump’s proposed 2027 budget, released April 3, calls for a $393 million cut to US homeless spending. It singles out the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority for “an abysmal record of reducing what is the highest number of street homeless individuals in the United States” and says an independent audit last year found the agency failed to accurately track billions of federal and local funds.
Both Los Angeles and New York will host games during the soccer tournament, which runs from June 11 through July 19 and also includes matches in nine other US locations plus Canada and Mexico. Host cities including Seattle, Houston, and Kansas City, Missouri, have also made plans for cleaning up homeless encampments ahead of the influx of international tourists.
Los Angeles has one of the biggest US populations living on the streets, with more than 40,000 homeless residents, and the city already spends almost $1 billion a year on shelters and social services for them. A focus for Bass is a 20-block area of downtown’s Skid Row district with 5,000 people in encampments.
Reducing homelessness has been a key priority for her since she was elected in 2022. The number of people sleeping on the city’s streets fell more than 17% from when she took office through February 2025, according to the latest count.
Bass, 72, is running for reelection this year, promising progress on housing and the local economy at a time when the city’s signature entertainment industry is shrinking, Southern California is still reeling from devastating wildfires in early 2025 and Los Angeles home prices rank among the highest in the US.
Roughly half of Los Angeles voters are dissatisfied with the mayor’s job performance but she still leads a pack of lesser-known challengers, according to polls in March by Emerson College and the University of California at Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies. Other candidates include City Council member Nithya Raman, reality TV star Spencer Pratt, housing activist Rae Huang and entrepreneur Adam Miller.
Standing up to Trump has been another selling point for Bass. The president last year ordered the National Guard and US Marines into Los Angeles to support his mass deportation campaign, striking fear through immigrant communities and provoking protests that in some cases turned violent. Trump called the city “a trash heap.”
In addressing homelessness, Bass has focused largely on targeted cleanup projects through her Inside Safe program, clearing encampments of a few dozen people at a time and offering them hotel rooms or other shelters. But those efforts are seen as costly and they seldom provide long-term solutions.
Now Los Angeles needs to take bolder steps to address the problems or risk another foray by Trump, she told Bloomberg. In particular, Bass said she worries the model used to house migrants at some detention centres could become a blueprint for holding the homeless.
As an example, she cited a Florida facility dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, which consists of a massive tent complex at an old airfield surrounded by the Everglades. The centre has been the target of numerous lawsuits, with human rights groups and immigrant advocates alleging inhumane conditions.
“My fear - maybe of the World Cup, but certainly of the Olympics - is Alligator Alcatraz,” Bass said. “I want to prevent that.”
- Bloomberg
