Two years out from the Games, the cameras are coming — and the pressure to move unhoused people out of frame is already here. Today we're asking who actually has the power to do it. This is LA Mayor 2026. Newsom just stood up a whole new state housing agency, a Metro rider's just trying to get to class — and an Olympic deadline is about to test all of it. Let's start with the Games. From Libby Rainey at LAist:
At a Tuesday L.A. City Council committee meeting on the coming Olympics, a city-appointed civil rights expert skewered LA28's plans for protecting human rights, and some questioned the city's preparedness for how the Games might displace hundreds or potentially thousands of unhoused people.
So this is the story I've been circling all week, and now it's on the record. A city-appointed civil rights expert showed up at Tuesday's council committee and skewered LA28's human rights plan — a plan submitted at the end of last year that then sat unpublished for months. Hundreds, potentially thousands of unhoused people displaced two years out, with international cameras arriving. Let me just say it plainly: clearing visible homelessness for a broadcast audience doesn't house anyone. It just dresses the set. And the timeline gives it away, Sarah. That strategy was finished at the end of last year, then hidden until months later — you don't sit on a human rights plan for months if you're proud of what's in it. Here's what I keep coming back to: the money. This is exactly the stress test for ULA — that $544 million was supposed to build and preserve housing, not fund a pre-Games sweep operation dressed up as compassion. Right, and neither Bass nor Raman has said what they'd actually demand here. The Games are the first outside deadline in this whole crisis — you can't ribbon-cut your way past a fixed date the whole world is watching. Okay, so the Olympics are two years out, and there's already talk of clearing encampments near venues. But honestly, who has the legal authority to do that? Is it one person, one agency, or a whole chain of people making those calls? Yeah, and there's no single lever here. It's a mess of overlapping jurisdictions, which is its own policy problem. The city of L.A. — meaning the mayor and City Council — controls encampment clearings on city property. But many Olympic venues, like the Coliseum, sit in unincorporated county territory, so the county has separate authority there. Per LAist's reporting, the county was actively considering plans as recently as January to remove unhoused people around those Olympic venue areas. Then there's LAHSA — the L.A. Homeless Services Authority — which is supposed to coordinate the outreach and shelter placements that are meant to come with any clearing. But LAHSA has been in institutional freefall: city leaders described a “crisis” at the agency earlier this year and were talking about pulling city funding, and the City Council's homelessness committee has since recommended moving some programs away from LAHSA entirely. So any Olympic-era clearing runs through at least four power centers — the mayor's office, the council, the county board of supervisors, and LAHSA — with LA28 planners layered on top as political pressure, even though they don't have direct legal enforcement power of their own. So if LAHSA is the agency that's supposed to make clearings humane by connecting people to shelter — and LAHSA is in crisis — what are the 2026 mayoral candidates actually proposing to put in its place? That's what voters should be pressing them on. Councilmember Nithya Raman, who's running for mayor, has put out a specific plan that would scale back Mayor Bass's Inside Safe program and shift oversight away from LAHSA toward other city-run structures — that's a real structural proposal, per LAist's coverage. More broadly, LAist asked several candidates in May what the next mayor should actually do on homelessness, so there's a record to compare. Voters should look for candidates who can name which agency holds which authority, how they'd reorganize it, and what the shelter-bed pipeline looks like before any clearing order goes out — not just promise the streets will look better by opening ceremony. Here's Dean C. Logan at County of Los Angeles:
The ruling affirms California’s existing ballot receipt deadline and requires no changes to how elections are conducted in L.A. County — now or in future elections. The decision leaves California’s existing ballot-receipt framework intact.
So Watson v. RNC came down, and the practical takeaway for us is nothing changes. Dean Logan's office says California's receipt deadline stands, and November runs under the existing rules. That's the good outcome, but let's be clear about what almost happened — the Court could've forced states to toss ballots that were cast on time but arrived a day late. That's a real disenfranchisement risk, and it landed on the right side. Right, and for this race specifically, it means the Bass-Raman runoff rules are locked in — no relitigation path, no last-minute scramble in a mayoral race that's already set. And honestly, the boring answer is the healthy one here. Nobody has to relearn how to vote. Ballots postmarked by Election Day still count. That stability is worth something in a year this contested. From Governor of California:
What you need to know: As part of California’s strategy to combat homelessness and expand housing, Governor Gavin Newsom is announcing the appointment of Tomiquia Moss as the incoming secretary of the new California Housing and Homelessness Agency. The Governor has also signed a historic housing package and budget funding the agency and groundbreaking reforms to help increase homeownership and affordable housing statewide.
So Newsom swears in Tomiquia Moss to run this brand-new Housing and Homelessness Agency, and — buried in the same announcement — there's a Veterans and Affordable Housing Bond Act of 2026. That bond is the part nobody's reading, and it's exactly the kind of thing that tells you whether Sacramento actually understands how construction gets paid for. Right, a whole new consolidated agency sitting between Sacramento and LA's chaos. And here's what gets me — neither Bass nor Raman has said one word about what they'd demand from Moss on day one. Is she a resource, or one more layer to route around? That's revealing. A mayor who can't tell you what they want from a state secretary with a fresh bond checkbook has no theory of how the money flows. And after the Olympics piece we just hit — the pressure to clear people for cameras — Moss's agency is now a third actor stacked on top of LAHSA's funding fight. Three actors, one shelter bill, nobody saying who pays. LAist writes:
For many Los Angeles college students, public transit is often the cheapest and sometimes the only way to get to campus as gas and other costs rise. But using buses and trains can come with a price beyond the fare.
Victoria Imo rides the E Line to USC — and she's reading paperbacks instead of pulling out her iPad because she's calculating who might grab it. That's the transit experience for the people already riding, right now, today. And Metro's answer here is a press line about recent declines in incidents. Okay — declines from what, over what window? That's exactly the kind of number nobody in this race has been asked to defend. This is what sticks with me. Metro gives free passes to K-12 and community college students, universities offer discounts — the fare's basically solved. The problem is a grad student leaving hours early because she can't trust the train to show up and feel safe. You don't fix that with a ribbon-cutting. Right, the affordability piece is only part of it; the day-to-day operations are the problem. The E Line exists. The station's built. Whether it runs frequently enough and safely enough for Victoria to open her laptop — that's the next mayor's whole job, and nobody's laid out a plan for it. We're two years from the Games, and the transit conversation is all about moving Olympic visitors around. Meanwhile, the student commuting to USC today is the constituency that never makes the flyover map. If you’re finding LA Mayor 2026 useful, take a moment to subscribe and leave a review wherever you’re listening. It really helps other Angelenos find the show and stay plugged in.
We’ve put links to every story from today’s briefing in the show notes, so if something caught your ear, you can follow it back to the source there. That’s LA Mayor 2026 for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.