Rising to the occasion

Hours after the fires began, California's governor got an offer to help from LA28 chair Casey Wasserman. "He was quite literally one of the first calls I received," Gavin Newsom said this week. The two got to work that very night. By the weekend, Newsom had appeared on Meet the Press to say he was putting together a "Marshall Plan" for rebuilding, timed around the Olympics. Two days after that, Wasserman was dispatched to Mar-a-Lago to secure buy-in from Donald Trump, who name-checked Wasserman in his victory rally and promised LA more than just Olympics support. "Together," Trump said, "we will rebuild Los Angeles better, more beautiful than ever before." And on Tuesday, exactly three weeks after the fires sparked, Newsom named Wasserman as one of three billionaires heading up LA Rises, a new private nonprofit to "help communities build back faster and stronger."

"It's really about how do you use these events to change the city forever," Wasserman said, standing in the asphalt expanse of the Dodger Stadium parking lot on Tuesday, the towers of downtown behind him. "We'll be here for 30 days in the summer of 2028, but our legacy is going to be changing the course of LA for a long time."

For anyone who has been closely following LA's megaevent planning — or, as Torched readers will know, lack thereof — Wasserman's statement was a record scratch. Many of us have wondered aloud what, exactly, the legacy of the 2028 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games is supposed to be. In October, an entire academic conference was convened to discuss the issue. There's growing uncertainty about where the money will come from just to orchestrate the "car-free" games, let alone make permanent improvements. Councilmembers have started to raise doubts. Even LA Mayor Karen Bass has acknowledged that plans are "running a little bit behind."

Less than four years out, the citywide vision we're supposed to be rallying behind has yet to be revealed by LA28. And now LA's recovery has become inextricably bound to the 2028 deadline that we're all haphazardly hurtling towards without a plan.

Wasserman wasn't the only LA sports figure being bro hugged in by Newsom. LA Rises is also being led by Lakers legend Magic Johnson, who followed Wasserman at the podium, and Dodgers owner Mark Walter, who chipped in an initial $100 million, although he didn't make it to the announcement. (His selection was symbolic as well: what unites LA more than our world-champion Dodgers, right?)

Surely Newsom considered the optics of heralding the future of the city with a bunch of old rich dudes — okay, Wasserman is only 50 — but in post-fire LA this has become a prerequisite. Over in the city of LA, Bass tapped Steve Soboroff as chief recovery officer to reassure the Palisades community towards a nostalgic, if not quite realistic, sense of normalcy. His fellow developer, unblemished mall owner Rick Caruso, has started his own nonprofit to accelerate rebuilding in the Palisades, the Wall Street Journal reported, "quietly positioning himself to be the ritzy neighborhood’s shadow power broker." Of all the appointees (or self-appointees), Johnson's role is clearly defined and most needed: he will be an advocate for Altadena, where Black households have suffered disproportionate losses compared to the greater community. Johnson, who warned greedy speculators to stay away from the neighborhood, said he will be trusted by local residents as they rebuild. "Those people may be left behind," he said, "and I want to make sure that doesn't happen."

But the big problem is that all this talk of "return" and "rebuild" willfully obscures the reality that LA actually requires a significant change in direction. Writing for Zocalo, Joe Mathews rightly points out that "the need to recover and rebuild from these fires, while massive, is hardly the most serious problem that Los Angeles faces." It's a sentiment echoed by Jessica Meaney over at Investing in Place: "These tragedies also expose and amplify a long-standing reality: the City of Los Angeles was already grappling with an infrastructure and governance crisis well before these disasters." Even LA County Assessor Jeff Prang took the time to write into the Los Angeles Times to note the city has no hope for passing post-fire resiliency policy if quality-of-life issues aren't addressed: "If the streets in your neighborhood are poorly maintained, if emergency services are slow to respond, and if parks and public spaces are dirty and unsafe, then the public won’t appreciate or support focusing on major state and national issues such as climate change."

LA's leadership void is so conspicuous that Mathews wonders if state agencies might start to intervene. But isn't Newsom swooping in like this a version of state control — and, I guess with Trump's blessing, federal control, which is terrifying — with so little visibility from city and county electeds? The officials in charge weren't even at the press conference. What happened to "One Voice?"

But in an extraordinary moment during the remarks, Newsom claimed, in his signature stream-of-consciousness-annotated-with-hand-gestures delivery that always feels like he's making everything up on the spot, that his grand plan is to fix LA's fragmentation as well. "The whole idea of this is that this is a completely revitalized region in mindset, not just infrastructure," he said. "That the relationship between the city and county and state and the federal government, we address some of these longstanding issues around jurisdiction, inability to work together across differences, to address streamlining to get serious about housing, to address these traditional barriers to revitalize the opportunities here, and create a business climate that is more enlivening, more supportive."

I mean, hey, as I have noted recently, that does sound like a good idea, particularly the part about getting serious about housing. This was originally part of LA's Olympics vision, too. In 2015, a plan to build a brand-new Olympic village with 5,000 units of housing was touted by Wasserman as a "significant legacy opportunity for our city." Not only was the plan scrapped, just a few years later, Wasserman said it was not LA28's job to fix LA's housing problems. "We're not responsible for solving homelessness," he told KPCC's Larry Mantle in 2021. "We’re responsible for delivering the Olympic Games as a private enterprise in 2028." As I told Rosecrans Baldwin for his Bloomberg essay, if anyone was serious about LA recovering by 2028, what they'd focus on is building homes: "And that's homes for people who didn't have homes before this disaster visited us, and it also means the homes for the people who have been displaced."

Unfortunately I didn't hear that kind of vision amidst the grandstanding. At Tuesday's press conference, Wasserman was instead focused on describing the 2028 opening ceremonies, where the lighting of the torch would symbolize a new era for LA: "a flame of rebirth and re-imagination." I can see the montage that NBC's already assembling — a city, united in the face of unprecedented adversity — because a comeback is the most Olympian narrative of all. LA28 hasn't revealed its mascot yet, but you better bet it's being retooled at this very moment. Sam the Eagle II, rising from the ashes. Rest assured that whatever happens, the story will be that Olympics saved LA!

But the good news is that a large cohort of civic leaders had already decided they didn't need to wait for the megaevent organizers to imagine a better city. A groundswell of change was already happening, as I noted in my end-of-2024 post: "All this public introspection into why LA can't get it together is spurring its own movement: new coalitions, new demands, calls for new ways to solve our problems." These are the voices that all the old rich dudes charged with "rebuilding" should really be listening to right now. But the question is whether they can stop talking to each other long enough to hear them. 🔥