How the Olympics Destroy Cities

[marmar]

From In These Times, via AlterNet:


How the Olympics Destroy Cities

By Mischa Gaus, In These Times. Posted July 11, 2007.



In Chicago, game boosters argue that Olympic construction, tourism and spillover business will bring relief to the city's long-suffering south side. Experience teaches a different lesson.

You could see his lip curl, the beginning of a sneer. Mayor Richard M. Daley, head of Chicago's government for 18 years, was not pleased. His parade was getting rained on.

The U.S. Olympic Committee was in town, and the March weather was not cooperating. The suits were preparing to survey Washington Park, one of the proposed sites for the 2016 Olympics, on the city's south side.

The park, closed to the public for the VIP visit, had never been cleaner. No amount of preparation, though, would keep the visitors' feet from sinking into soggy turf.

It wasn't the image Daley wanted to project to the committee to help convince them to give the 2016 Summer Olympics to Chicago, and J.R. Fleming wasn't helping. A public-housing organizer and leader in an anti-Olympic coalition, he was yelling into a megaphone three feet away from Daley, Chicago Olympics Chief Patrick Ryan and National Olympic Committee members as they sat in a city bus, waiting to embark on their visit to Washington Park.

"Is the profit that important?" he taunted. "Don't bring the Olympics to Chicago. There's too much racial tension."

Despite Fleming's warnings, on April 14 the national committee announced that Chicago had beaten out Los Angeles as its candidate to host the 2016 Summer Games. Chicago will now compete against Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, Tokyo and a handful of other cities in its quest to bring its first Olympics since 1904, when Chicago lost the games to St. Louis, which was hosting the World's Fair.

That is, unless Fleming and a growing band of doubters can convince the International Olympic Committee to take the games somewhere else. Much like the fairs of yesteryear, the Olympics has become a force unto itself, able to transform a city dramatically. The ambition to host the games fits the agenda of a city leadership enamored of gigantic, splashy projects and overweening power. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/story/56128/

[Warpy]

1. I think they stopped having World's Fairs for the same reason

because the splashy venues were eating into neighborhoods and costing the host cities fortunes that they never really recouped.

Those things did get a few permanent goodies built, though, like a couple of commuter monorails and the Seattle Space Needle.

Hosting something like the Olympics may seem like a coup for a mayor trying to make a name for himself, but it's a fiscal disaster for the host city.

[glowing]

2. I understand that the olympics are special and that cities around the

world want to host them, but wouldn't it make more sense to make two locations: one for winter, one for summer? Especially, since the infrastructure needed to host these events takes so much money, time, and resources.... I'm not sure how these two places would be decided on, but it would make more sense to make this a stationary production...