Angels Knoll has earned its own place as a landmark within the bustling landscape of downtown Los Angeles. For many, it has represented a green spot in the middle of the growing L.A. skyline. Named due to its proximity to the Angels Flight railway and situated right in front of Grand Central Market, it has become a part of the cultural landscape of the Bunker Hill neighborhood in DTLA.

It will soon be transformed into Angels Landing, a “luxury development” consisting of two high-rise towers, with condominiums, hotels and an open-air plaza with shopping and dining options. The project has been in the works for a long time, but was approved earlier this year by the city. It is estimated that the project will be ready before 2028, just in time for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

Angels Landing is only one of such projects being built in DTLA. There are more than 50 projects in DTLA currently under construction and more than 100 sites that have been approved for future projects, according to the Downtown Center Business Improvement District.

DTLA and the surrounding neighborhood will be home to the Downtown Sports Park, one of the main venues for the 2028 L.A. Olympics. In anticipation for the millions of people who will travel to the city to participate in and watch the games, L.A. has sped up construction on many projects in the area that will become future hotels, rental homes, shopping and dining areas, and other tourist spots.

While this will bring in revenue for the city, the costs of total development far exceed the purported $7 billion and counteract the promise of a “no-build” Olympics. This makes the L.A. 2028 games unsustainable given the huge amount of carbon emissions associated with the games and the construction. But it also increases living costs, driving out the lower income population and transforming the culture of the city.

Olympics usher in development

When cities host the Olympics, they usually lose money. when they host the games. In 2016, Rio de Janiero lost $2 billion after spending $11.6 billion of taxpayer money on the games.

It all changed in 1984 when Peter Ueberroth, then the Chairman of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, used public-private partnerships, advertising funds and private donations to fund the Olympics.

“Folks on the City Council said we're gonna spend five million on the Olympics and zero dollars more,” said Eric Sheehan, an organizer for NOlympics LA. “That's the only reason that L.A. ‘84 turned to profit.”

Instead of losing money, the city ended up with a profit of $225 million from the games, making the 1984 games the first truly profitable Olympics games. The L.A. ‘84 Olympics are also the most profitable Olympics of all time.

Since then, Los Angeles has seen the Olympics as a way to make money. Sheehan said that in recent years, very few cities have wanted to host the Olympics because of the huge amounts of taxpayer money required to fund it.

“A couple of years ago, [the International Olympic Committee] said that they are not going to bring the Olympics to any city without doing a referendum,” Sheehan said. The referendum he refers to would gauge the interest of citizens in hosting an Olympics event in their city.

“They realized that no one votes positively for Olympics and referendums, so that just went out the window,” Sheehan said. “Now they secretly figure out which city it's going to be, and drop news articles to see which place they're going to get the least resistance from.”

When Los Angeles put its bid in 2017 for hosting the games, it originally bid for the 2024 games but was awarded the bid for the 2028 games. “No one bid for 2028, not even us,” Sheehan said. “We only host the Olympics when no one else wants it. L.A. is always asking for it because it benefits the politicians and it benefits the business people.”

The Olympic games bring in revenue through advertising and tourism, which is only possible when the host city is branded as a safe, modern city that is appealing to visitors.

“I think the Olympics tend to clean up the communities, you know. Everybody puts a good effort into making the face of things look better,” said Gregg Brandow, a structural engineering professor at USC. “It does have a big, positive impact and improves infrastructure, buildings and sports facilities.”

Brandow said that during the last Olympics, the city reused existing facilities and utilized universities and public buildings as part of the Olympic venues. Mayor Eric Garcetti has stated that he plans to do the same during the 2028 games and declared that it will be a “no-build” event. This means that no new facilities will be built and current facilities will be upgraded to prepare for the event.

The budget proposed for the 2028 games is $6.8 billion and according to Garcetti, the city will see at least $1 billion in profits. But these costs do not account for the billions of dollars spent in the construction of stadiums, hotels and retail spaces that are currently being constructed around the city.

While SoFi Stadium and Intuit Dome were built for the NFL games and the Los Angeles Clippers respectively, they are a bigger investment by the Los Angeles Sports and Entertainment Commission into making Los Angeles the sports capital of the world, according to Sheehan.

Sheehan said that the city has also approved multiple projects that claimed to build hotels and retail spaces for tourists. One of those projects is Exposition Point (originally called The Fig) that will be built at the junction of Figueroa Street and Exposition Boulevard, right next to USC. Construction is expected to be completed in 2024 and is proposed to cost $450 million.

None of these projects were accounted for in the city’s budget for the 2028 Olympic games. Can the Olympics truly be called “no-build” when they fuel so much construction around the city?

Are modern buildings sustainable?

Being a city with almost four million people and an exacerbating housing crisis, Los Angeles faces a major dilemma. How do we provide enough hotels and housing if we do not build skyscrapers?

Historically, Los Angeles has had restrictions on skyscrapers due to earthquake safety standards. But after progress was made in structural engineering methods that allowed safer structures to be built, DTLA became one of the few regions permitted to build skyscrapers and high-rises in limited numbers. Over the years, these regulations have relaxed but one restriction still remains: the California Coastal Act of 1976 made it extremely difficult to build skyscrapers close to the coast line.

DTLA has continued to expand as a high-rise dense neighborhood in the past few decades. “You buy what's called an ‘air right’ from other pieces of property,” Brandow said. “So buildings like the Los Angeles Library, which is only a couple of stories tall, sell their air rights to buildings across the street, so they can build a seventy-story building.”

Skyscraper complexes and city centers are touted by developers as a sustainable option that increases urban density and provides transit-free, walkable options to residents that ultimately reduce carbon footprint. However, skyscraper complexes are far from being sustainable.

These tall buildings are generally constructed out of concrete, steel and glass. Concrete is not a sustainable material and during production, consumes lots of water and releases a huge amount of carbon dioxide. While skyscrapers can house many people, these buildings are generally higher consumers of electricity and are responsible for 150% more greenhouse gas emissions in their lifetime than an equivalent number of low rise buildings.

Since the outer surfaces of most high rises and modern buildings are made of glass, they trap radiation and become tall greenhouses that require a lot of air conditioning to keep cool. A complex of skyscrapers, made of concrete and steel and glass, can exacerbate this effect and create an urban heat island. This is a phenomenon where urban environments trap more heat than natural landscapes because they are constructed out of radiation-trapping materials.

The owners of the Angels Landing Project, MacFarlane Partners and Peebles Corporation, have both stated in public statements that they promote sustainability through their projects.

Both developers and the architects, Handel Architects, were contacted about the sustainability aspects of the project. They declined to be interviewed. “There currently is not enough information regarding the sustainability aspect of the project itself since the timeline of the project is so far out,” said a representative for Angels Landing in an email.

All building projects are required to state their environmental impacts before they can be approved. In the Environmental Inspection Report (EIR) for Angels Landing, many organizations such as the Los Angeles Unified School District highlighted the potential negative impacts of the project, such as air and noise pollution, increase in traffic, and pedestrian safety.

The owner of La Cita, a historic bar across the street from Angels Knoll, also sent a letter to the L.A. Department of City Planning. He stated that the structural integrity of the bar, a historic 122-year old building, could be endangered by the vibrations from construction.

Effects on the community

Many new skyscraper projects are adding energy retrofits to reduce electric consumption and reduce emissions, and are seen as more sustainable options than traditional skyscrapers. Cities like Hong Kong are rapidly developing green skyscrapers that work to reduce energy costs and conserve water.

The city is ushering in more of these modern buildings to rebrand itself with a clean and sustainable image before the Olympics and give itself an economic boost. But it is unclear how many of these developments will be affordable for the people currently living in the city.

NOlympics LA, where Sheehan is an organizer, was formed in 2017 to stop the L.A. 2028 Olympics because of the effects that the games have on cities.

“Developers are using the Olympics as an excuse to do development they were already going to do,” Sheehan said. “That's going to harm people. It's going to change the nature of the neighborhood by removing the people who make the neighborhood. This is going to change the culture of the city in extremely detrimental ways.”

But what even is the culture of Los Angeles? Reyner Banham described Los Angeles as having four ecologies––the beach, the hills, the valleys and the cars in his book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. “In some ways, that captures the traditional notion of the city. But as you live longer in Los Angeles, you discover actually there is quite a bit of diversity,” said Tridib Banerjee, an urban design professor at USC.

He also said the culture of the American downtown is newer to L.A. than it is to many other cities and that “going downtown” is not a very common activity among Angelenos. “But increasingly, we see people going to downtown, particularly as it is becoming more of a cultural hub,” said Banerjee.

“Nobody lived in downtown but that's changing gradually,” Banerjee said. “We’re seeing a major kind of growth in residential apartment towers and things like that.”

Banerjee said that a lot of this new development is concentrated on the Figueroa Corridor, which lies centrally within the Downtown Sports Park complex as seen in this map from the LA28 Committee. Many of the Olympics venues are focused around DTLA and the surrounding neighborhoods.

For developers, that makes DTLA a prime spot for building new homes and hotels. But high rises and modern development generally tend to drive prices up. “From the developer standpoint, it is a difficult thing,” Brandow said. “If you put in a lot of effort into making the old parts of town look nice, then they are no longer affordable housing.”

Gentrification in downtown neighborhoods like South Park and Arts District has already hiked the housing prices. Even if these developments are sustainable, they will still have higher costs and lead to what is known as “environmental gentrification”. Environmental gentrification is a process where “urban sustainability is used to drive up property values and displace low income residents,” according to Critical Sustainabilities, an initiative by the University of California: Santa Cruz.

Most new developments with residential spaces are required to mark off a certain percentage of units as affordable housing––for most developments, at least 5–10% of the total units need to be affordably priced. But even if rent is affordable, the neighborhood itself will have high tax rates, and expensive grocery and dining options.

There is a lot of affordable housing down in [the historic district] area because of the old buildings. But then the property gets so valuable,” Brandow said. “Either you turn the old buildings into nicer housing or you tear them down and build something new. The economics of it makes it impossible to have affordable housing.”

The report of the Chief Legislative Analyst for Angels Landing states that the Angels Landing Project “are committed to providing five percent or approximately 20 units of affordable rental housing units, reserved for individuals earning between 80 to 120 percent of the area median income.” In 2019, the median income in Bunker Hill was almost $60,000, while the median rent was $1,887.

Once the project is built and starts running, Los Angeles County would see an input of more than $100 million from the project annually, through direct and indirect means. But who does this money truly benefit?

As the neighborhood becomes more developed and prices become higher, the median income of the residents will increase, effectively displacing lower income families and erasing entire communities who used to live there.

“The Chinatown neighborhood where I used to live five years ago had a very thriving arts scene,” said Samantha Litzsinger, an art dealer at the Last Bookstore. “Now when I go back to the neighborhood, there is not as much of an arts scene. There is a lot of big corporate moving into those empty spaces where a lot of people did lose their businesses.”

Litzsinger said that apartments in Chinatown have become overpriced and that the neighborhood has changed demographically.

“The toy district, historic district and Skid Row are now becoming the major target of future development,” Banerjee said.

“If you look at a map of downtown,” Banerjee said, “you can see that gradually, it is at the outskirts where a lot of this new development is taking place.”

While the Olympics don’t cause problems such as gentrification and homelessness in the host cities, they tend to accelerate these changes. The games come with increased pressure for the city to “look its best” and that involves cleansing the streets, increasing security and modernizing construction. But if the city keeps approving future hotels before affordable housing and forces the unhoused population off the streets before the games, where are they supposed to go?

“Is it worth a profit if what it takes is sanitizing the city?” Sheehan said. “People are being gentrified out of the places they were raised. We're seeing the black population decline in the city massively.”

Sheehan said that the Games Cabinet created by Garcetti also supported the construction of the Metro railway to increase connectivity to the stadiums and other sports venues, but that it was being marketed as routine expansion of the transit system. Although the Cabinet publicly stated that the transit service will transport viewers to sports venues during the games, they admitted that expansion of the Metro to the stadiums will not be enough to fulfill the transit demands in a private conversation with Sheehan.

“It's not gonna prioritize the actual needs of working people. If they really cared about the working needs of people, they would just add buses and add bus lines. That's a really easy thing to do,” Sheehan said.

When we hear about the Olympics, most of us think of the glory and pride it brings to countries. And it does. The Olympics bring people together by celebrating achievements in sport and are one of the events that encourage international connections.

“People who benefit from society are excited about the Olympics, and a lot of people who are crushed by the Olympics are also excited about the Olympics, because they just don't know how bad it could be,” Sheehan said.

Aside from the negative societal effects of the Olympics, a study led by researchers Martin Müller and Sven Daniel Wolfe found the sustainability of Olympics has been decreasing over time. Luckily, the changes they suggest to make the games sustainable also reduce some of the societal impacts caused by them.

In order to reduce the impact of the games, they suggest “greatly reducing the size of the event; rotating the Olympics among the same cities; and enforcing independent sustainability standards.”

Brandow and Sheehan hope changes in the city’s leadership can reduce the impact of the L.A. 2028 Olympics. As long as the City Council keeps putting big corporations ahead of local communities, large projects like Angels Landing will continue to be built and will change the landscape of the city.

For Sheehan, the only right answer is eliminating the Olympics altogether.