Let me tell you something about a World Cup. The flags go up, the jerseys come out, everybody on television is smiling and talking about the beautiful game. You know who is not smiling? The woman on the third floor of a walk-up in Kansas City who just got a letter saying her landlord is converting her unit to a short-term rental for six weeks starting June fifteenth. You know who else is not smiling? The guy in the tent city two blocks from the stadium who is already hearing from outreach workers that the city wants the encampment “addressed” before the cameras arrive.
The Guardian reported this week — May 13th, 2026 — that organizers and housing advocates in FIFA host cities are sounding a full alarm. More than ten million visitors are expected across the United States this summer. That is not a tourism bump. That is a pressure event. Short-term rental listings are spiking. Landlords smell the money. And the people who were already hanging on by their fingernails in these neighborhoods — working people, fixed-income people, unhoused people — they are the ones who get squeezed out so somebody from overseas can pay four hundred dollars a night for a two-bedroom that used to house a family of four for eight hundred a month.
This is where I have to be honest with you, because my cousin Sal has been on the phone with me for three weeks about a scheme. Sal says he knows a guy who owns a small parking lot two blocks from MetLife. Says if we lease it for the tournament window, put down some gravel, charge forty dollars a car, we split it sixty-forty — sixty for Sal, naturally, because it is Sal's guy. I borrowed my brother-in-law's truck to haul the portable signage Sal found on Facebook Marketplace. We were going to be in business. I had already spent the money in my head. Twice.
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, housing advocates are calling what is happening a “displacement event dressed up as a celebration.” The people most vulnerable — renters without leases, month-to-month tenants, unhoused residents — have no legal lever to pull when the market decides a mega-event is more valuable than their lives. Cities are not building emergency housing. Cities are building watch parties.
The tournament begins in weeks. The banners are up. The sponsors are happy. And as of this morning, Sal called to tell me his guy's parking lot already got leased to an official FIFA hospitality vendor three months ago, the truck has a flat, and the signs are currently in my garage where my wife found them and has a lot of opinions. The scheme is dead. The housing crisis, unfortunately, is not.