Professor Jules Boykoff hammers the idea of hosting an Olympics in a stinging Op-Ed in today’s NYT:
THE Olympic movement is descending into a slow-motion crisis. Fewer and fewer cities are game for the Games.
Bidder enthusiasm for the 2022 Winter Olympics has fizzled, with voters in Krakow, Munich, Stockholm and Switzerland overwhelmingly rejecting the Games. Unrest in Ukraine forced Lviv to abandon its bid, leaving just Oslo, where public support is thin, together with Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan — neither a bastion of democracy.
Prospects for the Summer Games are hardly rosier. In the four American cities shortlisted for the 2024 Olympics — Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington — interest is tepid. More than 30 others, including New York and Philadelphia, passed on the opportunity.
In sum, he says the games run billions over budget and often leave host cities with useless white elephants. However, I do not think he is correct that “interest is tepid” in the four shortlisted US cities: some in Boston certainly support the games.
Boykoff is an associate professor of political science at Pacific University and the author, most recently, of “Activism and the Olympics: Dissent at the Games in Vancouver and London.”
bostonshepherd says
Boston and the Commonwealth should put aside any naive notion that they could successfully host the 2024 Summer Olympics.
Why? Because in terms of the lead time required in Massachusetts to build out large, ambitious real estate development projects, it’s already too late.
Unless the state and its 351 towns and cities wish to repeal or suspend 50 years of land use law and regulation, it would be unlikely that 10 years is sufficient lead time to plan, design, approve, and construct the many venues along with their supporting private and public infrastructure.
I can point to many simple projects which take 36 months or more to wind their way through the myriad zoning, environmental, and political processes which, over time, were either designed to slow or prevent development, or burden projects with additional costs to fund social goals (think affordable housing) or render projects uneconomic.
And some progressives wonder why housing is so expensive in the Commonwealth.
What other states and cities do in mere months takes years here in the Commonwealth. This applies to getting a suburban residential subdivision approved, permitting a small industrial building, or building a 2-story brick office building.
As for large-scale projects, there’s no predicting what can happen. I can point to the Assembly Square redevelopment which took, essentially, 15 or 20 years (depending upon where you want to start the clock) thanks to our state’s insane “Ten Taxpayers” law. Or the New Boston Garden. Or the Big Dig. Or the Route 3 expansion. Or Terminal A at Logan.
God forbid if the feds are involved. How many decades will it take to get a sorely needed I-93/Route 125 interchange built? If ever?
As we developers like to say, in the next life I’m coming back as an abutter.