This January, activists gathered in the center of the gymnasium at Cathedral High School in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. They stood surrounded by info placards and screens promoting the construction of a one-mile gondola that would ferry passengers from Union Station in Downtown to nearby Dodger Stadium, with a stop in Chinatown. The gondola project, a $300 million collaboration between former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt and Los Angeles Metro, is slated to open in time for the 2028 Olympics, and the gymnasium event, the project’s third public hearing, was billed as an opportunity for the community to offer input. But anyone who wanted to give public comment was instructed to do so behind a curtain in a corner of the room. Refusing to accept the premises of what amounted to a promotional event, activists took over the meeting, clearing space for residents to voice their opposition to the gondola for the next hour.

Phyllis Ling, a Chinatown resident who organizes with the group Stop the Gondola, spoke first, encapsulating protesters’ frustration with a project being forced on a community already besieged by developers that would send van-sized cabins stuffed with forty people over their homes on a daily basis in anticipation of the 2028 Games. “This project isn’t for us,” Ling said. “It’s for Frank McCourt, who’s a developer. It’s for the Olympics, which is for developers. It’s for the politicians, who are in the pockets of developers. Frank McCourt wants to build right over us, forty feet over my neighborhood.”