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In a Wall Street Journal piece, architect Julie Iovine looks at the benefits of hosting an Olympics and finds the record mixed. Just about every city uses the games as a chance to direct hefty dollars toward urban infrastructure, "like subways, bridges, housing, parks and, of course, all sorts of stadiums," but after the games are gone, what's often left are hulking structures and empty shells.
Beijing's $423 million Bird's Nest stadium has been used only once since last summer's Olympics, for a Jackie Chan concert. The direct subway line to the stadium is largely empty, its state-of-the-art televisions blaring at no one. The five-year plan is to turn the stadium into a shopping and entertainment mall; the same fate awaits the adjacent Blue Cube aquatics center once all the pools are ripped out.
London planners for 2012 intend to tear down more than half the venues, which critics are calling wasteful.
Atlanta, which has since had 13 years to incorporate its 1996 event, planned wisely, instantly converting its Olympic Village into dorms for Georgia State University, and turning the major sports venue into the new home for the Atlanta Braves (though half the venue was demolished to reduce capacity to usable size).
Barcelona made the best use of its Olympic infrastructure, building its venue on a decrepit industrial waterfront and then converting it into a popular esplanade lined with affordable housing, thus transforming and originally wasted space, twice.
Barcelona's Port Vell
And they're not done in Barcelona. The next step is to turn it into "a new knowledge-industry hub for young creative talents in media, design and information technology." That's forward thinking you rarely see anywhere, let alone in American urban centers (like Baltimore's Inner Harbor and the more recent High Line Park in lower Manhattan).
And cost overruns can be brutal. It's hard to pin down numbers but Iovine points out one certainty:
The price of hosting is increasing as steeply as a luge run. Montreal made headlines in 2006 when it paid off the $1.5 billion mortgage on its Olympic stadium, after 30 years. Annual maintenance costs for the sparsely used Beijing stadium are estimated at $10 million. For the 2012 London Games, it is guessed that the city is already $20 billion in the hole with no obvious future revenue stream to pay off the debt if venues are taken down.With numbers like that flying around, it is no wonder that groups like No Games Chicago and Chicagoans for Rio have gained traction with lively Web sites featuring slides of derelict Athens venues and even a game to match cities to their budget overruns: If it's $1.5 billion, this must be Sydney 2000.
So in the end, instead of pigheaded partisans cheering what they think is Obama's loss, Obama and, more to the point, Chicago, might be getting the last laugh. It might be nice to brag that you're the host city for an Olympic games, but not if a) you can't afford it, and b) you don't plan for what to do with all of it after the games are gone.
Comments
Bruce - You are absolutely right. How it went from being a Country/City bid to a City bid is beyond me. I have been following the Olympics for years and this one was the worse bunch of nonsense I have ever seen. In a way we are lucky because the security alone would have killed the budget alone. I just cannot figure our President out any longer. When has a president made such a move, and on top of it all add Oprah who is the joke of jokes in this farse. Come on, did you see their film? Talk about shoving diversity down your throat and I loved the people playing basketball in the berkas. It was such a phoney attempt to again show that famous Washington call for more US Humility. How can a city with so much sports history miss the marketing mark so badly? Lets see you have potential spokespeople such as Michael Jordan, Dick Butkus, Maybe Phil Knight could have jumped in on behalf of Nike, but what the heck were they thinking. Talk about an ego push of arrogance from the top down
Mitch -- Iovine is an editor for the the Architect's Newspaper (I still keep up). You'll always find articles in the architectural and engineering trade publications about what's being built at the Olympics because everyone is always trying to create some unique design, like Beijing's "bird" arena. I didn't have a problem with Obama doing a sales pitch --critics made a mountain out of a molehill because they're just looking for excuses to bash the guy. He was in a no-win situation. If he hadn't done it, the right would've bagged on him for not pitching the U-S. Every head of state goes to bat for their country. I think Obama might be the first president in office from a city that was actually on the short list. I figured Rio would get it just because South America never had one --I'd prefer Buenos Aires, a much nicer city. I don't know if there are as many topless but there's less crime and it's a great place for steak!
Bruce - Shoot me a note at vegassuite@aol.com. I am glad to say you haven't changed a bit.
Mitchell
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