Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on Olympic Planning, Homelessness and Traffic

Karen Bass traveled to and from Paris for both the Olympics and Paralympics, and the mayor of Los Angeles came home from the experience feeling very touched.

“I thought they did a great job,” Bass told moderator Andrew Ross Sorkin on Tuesday during a CNBC x Boardroom: Game Plan panel at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel and Bungalows in Santa Monica. The session, titled We Got Next: LA 2028, featured Bass sitting alongside LA28 chairman and president Casey Wasserman, LA28 board member Jessica Alba and Team USA general manager Grant Hill. “What I love most about it was how they engaged the entire city. Whether you were at the games or not, there was a way to connect,” she added.

Bass then turned her attention to another question Sorkin had about the Olympics: What makes her anxious about the games coming to Los Angeles in four years? “Everything we have to do in our city to prepare,” she said. Of course, that involves a lot of hard work in terms of logistics, budgets and preparation, though the issues that are at the forefront of many Angelenos’ minds are how the city will handle traffic and the homelessness crisis. Bass addressed those as well during Tuesday’s panel.

Of the first, Bass took time to clarify statements she made about the “no car rule,” something that generated a fair amount of attention when it was raised a month ago. “I want to be clear, what we hope to do is have no cars to go to the games. Public transportation to go to the games,” she said. “Life goes on in the city. But again, for those people who were here in '84, everyone was terrified that it was going to be terrible. They came up with a solution. The mayor [Tom Bradley] solved it. There was none of the technology we have today.”

Bass went on to say that the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new protocols and routines for working remotely, something he suggested could be implemented more widely among Angelenos as a way to curb traffic during the games. “I think we can stagger work schedules,” he noted. Another lesson learned from the 1984 Summer Olympics involved rescheduling semi-truck deliveries from day to night.

“I think there’s a way to organize the region so that traffic is less and manageable and people who go to games take public transportation, life continues in the city,” the mayor continued. “But again, for those people who were here in ’84, everyone was terrified that it was going to be terrible. They thought about it. Mayor Bradley thought about it. There was none of the technology that we have today. And so we all went through COVID together and learned to work remotely and stay home.”

Bass explained that to get people to and from the venues, they will need “3,000 buses, 3,000 drivers, and 3,000 parking spaces. To do that, we will need the support of cities from essentially all over the state, as well as other states.”

In context to the final question about homelessness, Sorkin noted how “remarkable” it was to see the streets cleared during the games. “It disappeared overnight,” he said, before asking what Bass would have to do to make it work in Los Angeles.

“Well, number one, we have to do everything we can to eliminate street homelessness. We've been able to, for the first time in many, many years, reduce street homelessness by 10 percent,” he said. “We have to build large-scale shelters that are regionally based. We're moving forward with that. We have to do much more.”

He cited 18,000 units “going live” in the next two years, a figure that is far below the city’s total homeless population of 70,000, according to Bass. “It’s going to take a collective effort.”