Features > June 25, 2007
The Olympic Hustle (cont’d)
The COHRE report on the social impact of Olympic Games lauded Vancouver for signing multiple binding commitments protecting environment, housing and civil rights. But three years before the city’s games, watchdog groups say the promises are melting away. Vancouver’s Impact on Community Coalition gave the city’s Olympic organizers a “D-” grade in a May report card, noting a rise in evictions, preference for destroying forests, and resistance to opening its books and meetings.
They make money, right?
In Chicago, 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.
Lake Forest College sports economist Robert Baade mulched a mountain of data after the Atlanta Olympics, revealing that the city and state could actually have lost jobs in the long-term, because Olympic mania captured public and private dollars that could have had more sustained economic impact. (Forty percent of Games-related jobs vanished after the two-week party left town.)
“I’m not against the games per se, but don’t try to sell it as an economic bonanza,” Baade says. “Prior to a mega-event, people tend to stay away. Prices for virtually everything are higher than they otherwise would be. And we know from research around the world that residents leave a city hosting a mega-event. They take their money and spend it elsewhere.”
And University of South Florida economist Philip Porter discovered that in Atlanta the kind of tourist income games backers always promise didn’t materialize. Hotel vacancies, retail sales, and airport use all stayed essentially the same despite the Olympics. Since the surplus rarely materializes, debt surely follows.
Olympic committees fix their budgets by deleting the costs of infrastructure projects from their balance sheets, because keeping them in makes the games look like not such a great deal. Recent host cities have woken up after the games with wretched hangovers. Athens is swimming in $9 billion of debt, Sydney took on $3.2 billion, and the vaunted Barcelona Games stuck taxpayers with a $1.4 billion tab. The 2012 London Games has already spent twice its budget, and estimates for Beijing’s bonanza come in around $40 billion.
Still, these big projects create the “legacy” used to entice otherwise reluctant groups to support Olympic bids. Bigger airports, convention centers, cultural facilities, new roads and trains are the usual mix of enticements. Best of all for developers, the International Olympic Committee’s unforgiving deadlines create an artificial rush to build, pushing social and environmental assessments to the wayside.
City leaders have promised the Olympics will bring Chicago its first new train line in two decades, a long-coveted circle line to connect the radial spokes that emanate from downtown. But the route favored by the Daley administration ignores the wide swaths of Chicago’s west and south sides without train service. Known as the “yuppie line” among transit activists, it is the buckle in the Daley administration’s belt of gentrifying neighborhoods circling downtown.
Helen Jefferson Lenskyj, a University of Toronto sociologist who has written three books on the Olympics, says games-related development projects stomp on democratic rights. “Citizens may not have wanted it right there, at that site, at that time,” she says. “They may have had different priorities but they had to pay up.”
Allowing something as important as the Olympics to come before the voters would break with Daley’s legacy of government by fiat. Five years ago, when Soldier Field, home to the Bears football franchise, was renovated at a cost of $632 million, taxpayers kicked in two- thirds of the renovation’s cost, but weren’t granted a referendum to voice their opinion on the matter.
The renovation gutted the stadium, built in 1924, landing what appears to be an alien craft atop its neoclassical colonnades. Those were left intact because tearing down the entire stadium would have required a public vote, says University of Chicago sports economist Allen Sanderson.
“The sense was, ‘If we go to a referendum we might lose,” he says, “so let’s take a half loaf instead of no loaf.’ “
But the renovation proved shortsighted. Because the new Solider Field cannot accommodate the 80,000 seats needed to host an Olympics, the city will be forced to finance a “temporary” stadium. Early official estimates have put its cost at $366 million, but that number is considered so low they’ve been forced to stipulate that the cost could rise due to inflation.
Capital, altius, fortius
The games provide the kind of grand excuse dreamed of by the interests who hold Daley close to recast the city in their image—they couldn’t be happier. The Olympics would boost business-service providers that, according to Dick Simpson, a former alderman who researches city politics at the University of Illinois-Chicago, have steadily increased their campaign contributions during Daley’s reign.
The other local winner would be developers, one of whom complained to the Chicago Sun-Times that the neighborhood, a majority African-American community with one of the city’s lowest per-capita income rates, had no “pet service providers.”
What the Olympics could do to other public services is reason enough to oppose them, says James Pfluecke, an organizer with the Coalition to Protect Public Housing. “It’s going to drain every penny from every corner,” he says.
Besides starving out other services, hosting the Olympics leaves a city with a flotilla of white elephants. Within months of the 2000 Games, one of Sydney’s privately financed stadiums needed $20 million in public money to rejuvenate the stadium area, which by virtue of its distance from central Sydney is losing out to the old stadium complex. Montreal, host to the 1976 Games, converted its velodrome—a circular track for bicycle racing—into a biosphere, not exactly residents’ first development priority. As the games grow ever larger, they demand more extensive and specialized accommodations that have little post-Game public use.
“I’ve been able to restrain the urge to go luging,” says Steve Pace, who led an Olympic watchdog group in Salt Lake City in the ’90s. “So have 99.5 percent of the state’s residents.”
The air of inevitability isn’t as thick as games boosters would have you believe. In an anti-sprawl mood, Colorado voters rejected the 1976 Denver Winter Games after it was awarded them. Local opposition in Toronto, Berlin and Nagoya, Japan, is credited with preventing the Olympics from landing on those cities.
Not that the International Olympic Committee would admit it. The IOC’s official report after being greeted by 15,000 angry Berliners declared that “whilst vocal opposition to the bid exists, this is a minority group.”
Arrogance and executive fiat aren’t gong to quell Chicago’s Olympic doubters. While the battle is just beginning, the resistance is already starting to stiffen.
“Given the power around the table,” says Ebonee Stevenson, “words mean nothing.”
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