My first thought: This is the worst idea since Napoleon invaded Russia. This overcrowded New England village would be crushed by the weight of the event. We’d have to build a new venue, which would then sit vacant for years while we fought over how to use it.
My second thought: Maybe we can get something out of this, like improvements to the T, much better street cleaning (if it’s the Winter Olympics), and who knows what else?
Any thoughts?
Please share widely!
shillelaghlaw says
An Olympic Village will have to be constructed to house the athletes, officials, and support staff. If constructed smartly, it could be converted into middle class, mixed-income, or affordable housing after the Games are over.
Just don’t let Joseph Rakes anywhere near the American flag during the opening ceremony. (Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)
petr says
… But I didn’t want to leave the impression that I agree with your suggestion to ban Joseph Rakes. I believe Ted Landsmark (an extraordinary individual and a Boston treasure) has long since forgiven him and so we should leave that at that.
But if you wanted my suggestion for whom it is who should bring the flag in, should the Olympics come to Boston, Ted Landsmark is my vote.
shillelaghlaw says
If the Olympics ever do come to Boston, and he’s still alive, Bill Russell would be the best choice. He’s also a gold medal winner.
ryepower12 says
We could just build a similarly large, mixed use projects in the city. As evidenced in the Globe recently, the city’s fund for affordable housing has tens of millions to get such a project rolling that the hacks in charge of it aren’t spending.
sabutai says
This is akin to asking the benefits of building the aliens’ embassy in Boston.
There are maybe 50 cities with the infrastructure to host the modern summer Olympics in the world. The United States will get the next summer Olympics that are rewarded, but the American bid city will not be Boston. Imagine trying to get everyone in and out of Terminal E, then across the “silver line” into the city. Taking the Green Line to team handball.
Impossible.
Christopher says
Speculation has long been that Lowell could get in on the action if Boston hosts. We have to have a can-do attitude about, rather than think of all the things that could go wrong, however.
kirth says
I live near Lowell, and having the mass idiocy that is an Olympics here would ruin my life. As far as I can tell, it has never been a net benefit for residents of any US city. I most certainly do not want my tax money subsidizing the profits of a TV network or a conglomerate of “sports” corporations.
ryepower12 says
May handicap our ability to fund construction projects longer-term, given that the construction projects for an Olympics aren’t all going to be the major priorities statewide in most cases.
It may sound sexy to see all that construction all at once, but to worse results in the years and decades ahead.
So I don’t really buy into any real upsides to hosting an Olympics – or even the expensive effort to even put out an almost certainly fruitless bid.
JimC says
I think London pulled it off by separating things, which was inconvenient for people with universal access (like reporters), but not necessarily inconvenient for the athletes.
ryepower12 says
by all measures of ratings and attendance, it was a pretty large success.
By any other form of measurement? Not so much. It cost 3.3x than it was supposed to, it was a massive inconvenience and/or disaster to communities and the projected bumps to tourism don’t pan out.
Not only are they an extreme inconvienance to communities, but they’re dicks about it, too. The IOC will basically sue local bakeries in a region getting the Olympics for making Olympic themed cookies during the games or even long-term, pre-existing businesses in the area that have the word Olympic in their name.
But, really, it all has to come down to the dollars and cents. The London Olympics cost 14 billion bucks to put on. It was by most measures a fairly conservative cost for an Olympics, significantly less than what China spent and probably less than what Greece spent about a decade before when accounting for inflation.
14 billion bucks is roughly half our annual budget. We cannot afford this. I repeat: We cannot afford this.
Christopher says
There must be a reason the bidding is so competitive, and I have to imagine it is quite the shot to the local economy. Olympic stadia are used for many years thereafter and become part of the local infrastructure and economy. As for lawsuits there is no international civil court so they would have to be filed locally. Can’t judges just decide to summarily throw out the kind of suits you refer to? That would definitely be my inclination if I were a Boston-based judge sitting on either the state or federal bench.
ryepower12 says
The IOC creates a terrifying situation for local businesses, making it nearly impossible for them to create any kind of advertising efforts for the Olympics and creating so, so, so many road/security obstructions and closures as to make it literally impossible for huge swaths of businesses to do business. Businesses ran out of business because of the London Olympics, as noted in the first link I made.
Add that to the fact that over the course of many, many Olympics we have seen that there’s no real boon to tourism oven over the medium term, it’s just bad business. Even Sydney and London, two of the most successful Summer Olympics over the past 20 years, did not have any great boon to their tourism industry (my first link gets to that, but here’s another).
And another.
Economists are more and more coming to agree that there’s no net tourism benefits to the Olympics. There may (or may not — given the Heathrow numbers) be some very temporary boost during the games, but that temporary boost helps a very tiny sum of businesses a ton… and creates everything ranging from no noticeable differences to devastating closures/inconveniences to others.
In areas with heavy tourism already (like Boston), the Olympics have been found to keep as many people (or more) away as they attract. Normal visitors won’t want to deal with all the crap that comes with the Olympics — and these normal people are as easily dissuaded from going to the region in the months/years before the Olympics as they are during it, because of all the construction/security/etc. issues that arise.
Then there’s all the regular folks going to Boston everyday — and the businesses who cater to them — who get screwed because of those closures/security concerns.
Hosting the Olympics is like posting a giant sign in any city to stay the frack away if you’re not interested in the games. The only reason to go to the city becomes the games — and with all due respect to the games, everyday workers and normal tourists are more important to the local economy no matter how you slice it.
Until the IOC drastically changes the way it does business, it’s simply not worth the costs to host an Olympics. The IOC gets all the rewards and benefits of hosting, while the city takes on all the costs. The IOC does quite well during the Olympics, but cities and regions that host get hosed.
Our state is simply too small and has too many other far more important issues to commit the kind of $$$ we’d need to host the Olympics. Hosting the Olympics would be the kind of god awful decision that would make Rhode Island’s investment in 38 studios seem like a genius — but instead of being on the hook for $75 million, we’d be on the hook for $10+ billion.
Our unemployment rate is almost 7% and our infrastructure is straight out of the 60s. We can’t afford this boondoggle. If politicians think they can put together this kind of money together, they ought to do it for projects that will directly benefit the Commonwealth — and not the corrupt and city-bankrupting IOC.
kirth says
Absolutely. The Olympics are a Roman-style circus that benefits a very tiny minority, almost none of them citizens of the host city, at the very significant expense of those citizens. Let some other place delude themselves into thinking it’s a good idea.
petr says
… that Winter Olympics, in general, do better than Summer Olympics and that this is because most Winter Olympic sites are already tourist destination sites. Sochi, the upcoming site, for example is already a resort town that favors, heavily, winter sports like skiing, skating, etc… Frankly, I never heard of Lake Placid until 1979 when they began preparation for hosting the 1980 games and I have not heard much about it the 33 years since the games were completed. It was obscure, it hosted, and then it went back to obscurity. But the reason it hosted, I’m guessing, is due to the nature of the resort as mostly just a destination.
If this is true then Boston does have a similar advantage for the summer games in that it already hosts a worldwide sporting event, the yearly marathon. We have experience with being a destination for a large sporting event. And if we do that well, and indeed continue to plan to do it into the foreseeable future, then I don’t see how we we can automatically say no to the Olympics. It seems a difference in scale only, not really in type. If the marathon is a good thing for Boston than I don’t see how the Olympics can’t be similarly good.
It’s, also, not like we don’t have a lot of stadia already: between all the college stadiums, fenway park and the Garden, Boston is already a sports town in a way that London, Athens, Rio and Atlanta just are not. I don’t see massive infrastructure spending like Greece has done, or Rio is doing…
I think, too, that between Logan for commercial flights and Hanscom for special flights, state sponsored teams and flights requiring greater security, etc… We might be in the sweet spot in a way that other cities are not.
What you say about the aggressive policies of the IOC is of concern, though… and ought to be addressed. I can’t imagine the city not having any sway over that, however.
ryepower12 says
If so, that’s real bad news for us, given that we’re far, far, far behind them — no matter how you slice it. They completely outclass us in transportation, hotel rooms, air capacity and so on and so forth.
Logan is the 19th busiest airport in the US. Heathrow is the 3rd busiest in the world. You think it could handle the Olympics; I have my doubts.
It’s also dubious that we’d have the requisite hotel space for the IOC to select us.
I’m not sure why you think being a “sport town” is all that important (I doubt the IOC cares), but even there, we fall dramatically behind.
Boston has 3 major sports teams in it, London has 6 Premiere League teams alone. London also has Wimbledon and two cricket ‘stadiums’ that seat roughly 25k each. It has arenas, pools and god knows what else that we don’t have. Even projecting out to Foxborough, it couldn’t be used for track and field: we’d have to build an entirely new stadium for that.
Cities dumbly race for the bottom and bend over backwards to get the Olympics. We would not have any sway over that whatsoever — and if we tried to take a hard lined stance on it, the IOC would just choose somewhere else. These practices would absolutely continue.
petr says
I don’t know where you’ve been… BC has Alumni Stadium, which seats 44K and Harvard has a stadium that seats over 30K. We have the Charles river for sculls and we have the bay for sailing. We have colleges that do track and field. Harvard and MIT have tennis courts out the wazoo. We have a lot of what is needed. Maybe not everything, but I don’t see the knee-jerk antipathy to this. And we have the greater NE area. London 2012 events actually began in Cardiff, Wales, so we could make use of Yale University and Stadia in Worcester, in addition to Foxboro…
Did I mention that we already do a pretty big marathon…? Every year.
I remain unconvinced. The IOC is not unified and is, in fact, made up of people from all over the world…. and it is constantly changing, following trends rather than leading them. It was the wholesale commercialization of the 1984 Olympics, led by Pete Ueberroth, that led to the IOC getting on board the money train… but then later (and much more recent) allegations of bribery have tempered their ardor… shall we say? I think that sort of thing is still in flux. It is, IMHO, neither as nefarious nor as insidious as you make it out to be.
Christopher says
…especially if you don’t take “Boston” as literally confined to the city limits. Gillette also comes to mind. I don’t know what the IOC would think of this, but maybe in the future host bids should be made by jurisdictions larger than cities, such as counties or in our part of the country states. Most other countries also have political subdivisions between the city and national levels.
ryepower12 says
they won’t be used, because they aren’t designed for Olympic track and field and aren’t going to be turned into a stadium that could handle it.
Foxboro can’t be used for track and field either; it wasn’t designed with it in mind.
We’d need to build an entirely new 80-100k seat stadium for this one event, which would promptly be torn down or at best would have to be redesigned into soccer stadium that won’t ever be the designed-exclusively-for-soccer stadium that soccer fans in Boston have been craving for.
(Like Atlanta re: Turner Field, we’ll have fans demanding a new stadium 20 years later.)
You also completely dismissed the even more important points that we don’t have the transportation infrastructure, hotel space or airport necessary to handle the Olympics.
And investing the $$$ to change that would be flushing it down the toilet, since it’s a one-off event that doesn’t jive with our long term interests.
kregan67 says
The Olympic stadium was built with private money and after the Games, became the soccer-specific arena that the Kraft family has long sought for the Revolution. A shiny new urban venue for the fastest-growing game–seems like a long-term win to me. It could be in Somerville, Medford–somewhere accessible by T but also with some parking.
Also: how is improving infrastructure ever flushing money down the toilet? This state has deferred that kind of investment for decades and it’s why we all spend so much time in our cars and on–I mean, waiting for–the T. Wouldn’t expanding our capacity to handle and move people benefit us all — and the local economy–for decades to come?
HR's Kevin says
It is not going to happen. There is not yet a big enough market for soccer, and there may never be.
Hosting the Olympics will require building venues that will have no practical use after the events are over. And a lot of the infrastructure required would not be top of our priority list in any case.
So yes, indeed, much of the money could just as well be flushed down the toilet.
mike_cote says
n/t for the obvious reasons.
JimC says
What’s obvious, exactly?
Peter Porcupine says
We can’t even host a political convention properly, let alone an Olympics.
shillelaghlaw says
I don’t recall any police brutality, mass protests, or terror attacks in 2004. Halftime Pizza got upset about delegates not eating there and cried to the Herald. Only in the Calvinistic mind of a Bay Stater would the 2004 convention be considered a failure.
jconway says
As a volunteer to the Boston DNC I will echo Shillelaghlaw’s sentiments as my own on that one. But the Olympics is 100x that, and we barely got away with a good DNC which largely choked the city for it’s residents for the duration. I think the New England region could handle and someday should handle a Winter Games. Particularly as Vancouver approached it regionally, I think we can do so as well and it’s a smaller event and more fitting for our area. The summer games are out though. As a Mayoral staff member during the 2016 bid, I can say a big reason we lost was due to neighborhoods banding together to defeat the Olympics at the grassroots level. Too many people were unconvinced it would benefit the average Chicagoan and were convinced it would displace people at the expense of big business.
I still think the big could’ve been planned and handled better, but the sad thing is that long term transit and infrastructure was put in place in the first place on the Southside for the 1893 World’s Fair and hasn’t been improved since. The private sector and federal investment is key, American cities are the exception to the rule that the bid host loses money, and it could really spur growth. But it has to be done in a smart way, and the modern IOC really forces people to conform to it’s rubric and structure bids around it’s concerns rather than what a host city stands to benefit 10-20 years down the line.
ryepower12 says
In what way has Atlanta proved an “exception to the rule that the bid host loses money?”
Atlanta is tearing down a huge swath of its Olympic construction right now because it simply didn’t work. It’s not a tourist destination because of the Olympics 17 years ago. Far from it.
It’s the only Summer Olympics recent enough to seem relevant, given the changing nature of the IOC, but I think you’d have a hard time proving NYC, LA or other previous American summer host cities have benefited from having the Olympics, or that having the Olympics there ‘spurred growth.’
I suppose there can be valid reasons to want to host the Olympics, but they aren’t economic. That isn’t going to change until cities and regions start doing the math and tell the IOC to shove it. Then maybe the IOC will put an emphasis on cities reusing existing facilities and sharing in the costs of hosting, instead of just reaping the gains.
marcus-graly says
Unless you’re thinking of Lake Placid.
Montreal is an interesting case. The 1976 games were a financial disaster for the city, but the Olympic facilities *are* a successful tourist attraction, despite being far from the city center.
I attribute this to:
– Montreal has significant tourist business already.
– The Botanical Gardens, which are some of the best in the world, are right next to the facilities. They turned one of their stadiums into a “biodome” which houses four different ecosystems, to play to the naturalist element.
– The Olympic stadium has an observation tower. (This in itself was part of the huge cost overrun and not completed until after the games were over.)
– It’s on public transit.
jconway says
Their Olympic stadium was way too big for MLB contributing to blackouts and the like. That said, I got a lot of friends who are Nationals fans that wouldn’t be if they stayed.
dasox1 says
I think the Convention was a success for Boston, but there were issues, including the police strike/picket line. In terms of the Olympics, we need to have an honest conversation about whether or not we have the infrastructure to host the games, and the financial power to raise capital to build the necessary infrastructure that we don’t have. We have the ability in this city to get mired in stupid parochial political battles that lose sight of the big picture. We also have a lot of political and business brain power that could pull off an Olympics if properly tasked.
HR's Kevin says
It is absolutely guaranteed to cost state and local governments tons of money and will bring little benefit to most of us. I see this as a way for the sponsors to bring themselves personal glory.
Note to politicians: if you attempt to bring the Olympics here I will not vote for you ever again.
Christopher says
Sure there are plenty of factors to consider and obstacles that may need to be overcome, but I certainly thought SOMETHING could be said for a little more hometown pride:(
JimC says
I’m not convinced the Olympics are a good idea, but there must be successful models, or enough smart people in this town to invent a successful model.
Winter Olympics are easier to place, perhaps. Not as many residents to worry about.
ryepower12 says
is having the best schools, public transportation, spaces and employment rates in the country.
Not having a game that will cause major grief and very likely bankrupt our ability to fund the above.
$14 billion is what it would cost, about half our annual budget. Where is the money going to come from, Christopher? What of the above list are you willing to take an ax to so we can put on a set of games over the course of a few weeks?
Christopher says
…though getting the Olympics would certainly be one way to motivate us to get our infrastructure up to where it needs to be. Other cities have figured it out – have they cut everything else? I don’t see these as at all mutually exclusive.
Christopher says
…is let’s see what we can do to get it to work rather than give up before we really even try. It is that attitude which is most bothersome to me.
HR's Kevin says
I don’t really see any upside.
Do you see this as a way to trick the legislature into funding infrastructure improvements?
Christopher says
…but it shouldn’t take the Olympics to get us to do that anyway.
HR's Kevin says
because it would cost *many* times more than it would to simply build the infrastructure for its own sake.
stomv says
Sometimes it takes a major event to be the “push” to get done the things that should have already gotten done.
ryepower12 says
we are getting things done. Slower than we’d like, I’m sure, but they are getting done.
An expense like the Olympics may have a temporary stimulating effect on getting projects done long term, but severely hamper our ability to get stuff done long term.
We’d have a few sexy projects get done and maybe some people would be excited about them, but would they be our state’s real, biggest priorities? And would we then be in a position to continue building things at the rate we are at present?
Subway expansions, silver lines, legit night time service and some big forward momentum on a South Coast rail…. these are the kinds of things that we’re already doing today and these are the kind of things that could easily get derailed for decades by huge new debts from an Olympics.
stomv says
I constantly think about how the Big Dig — Boston’s big sexy project for two decades — has resulted in terrible problems for the MBTA and other mass transit projects.
No North South Rail Link. Half arsed Silver Line. Delayed Green Line Expansion. Rail cars which are far too old, and not enough new ones in sight. On and on and on.
Doesn’t mean I oppose the Olympics off-hand, but I do think that, even in Boston, the end result would be an advancement of “car culture” in Boston over ped/bike/transit culture, and that would set our capital back decades in transit evolution.
HR's Kevin says
No one has figured out how to win an Olympic bid without substantial spending of public money, much of which is wasted. As a resident of Boston, I don’t want to put up with major inconvenience, events that are too expensive to attend, and higher taxes for a couple weeks of civic pride. It is simply not worth it.
We already have the Patriots, Red Sox, Celtics and Bruins, not to mention the Head of the Charles and Boston Marathon. We don’t need the Olympics to satisfy our need for local sports.
Any politician who supports bringing the Olympics here either has their heads in the clouds or are more concerned with personal glory than the public good.
Christopher says
The Olympics are a special, once in a lifetime chance, to host an international event on our turf. I know we have plenty of sports, and I’m not even a sports fan (I usually only watch the opening and closing ceremonies.), but the Olympics are on a whole other level and if any event does end up in Lowell as has been suggested, I’ll live with it for a couple of weeks.
HR's Kevin says
Yes, its a once in a lifetime event. That’s great if it wasn’t going to put Boston into debt. It is not even remotely worth the trouble.
I repeat, we don’t need the Olympics to build our civic pride in Boston, especially since most actual residents of Boston won’t be able to afford to go to any of the events.
ryepower12 says
about the need of spending billions for an Olympics for 2 weeks of “civic pride,” when we can’t even fund freaking First Night?
So, we can find $15 billion or more for a two week long event, but we can’t raise the $800k a year it takes to pull off one of Boston’s really cool annual civic events?
SMH.
HR's Kevin says
It is indeed sad how First Night has declined in the last several years. But you are right, if we can’t fund First Night with private funds, we sure aren’t going to fund the Olympics that way.
Tell you what: if the supporters of the Olympics come up with enforceable contracts to come up with the $15 billion from private funds in advance of the bid, I will support it. 😉
I think once the politicians that might consider bringing the Olympics remember that the public had no appetite for funding a new stadiums for their favorite teams and realize they would be ending their careers if they put the Commonwealth and local cities into massive debt to fund it, they will be running away from the idea.
sabutai says
Los Angeles did it in 1984. Which made everyone else think they could do it. Of course, that was before costs skyrocketed for security, and the programme or participants and sports became unwieldy. They had extensive private sponsorship (they type that inspired revulsion when repeated in Atlanta) and a fraction of the costs of the modern Olympics.
The modern thing is just too heavy a burden. I love Boston, and I like much about the Olympics despite what its leaders have done to them over the past 25 years. But they don’t belong together.
ryepower12 says
LA and California are considerably larger and with more resources than Boston and Massachusetts. They could more easily absorb the costs of an Olympics.
I almost feel like we could have handled an Olympics in a 1984 scope, though, but no way today, not at a cost we could reasonably afford.
The security costs of an Olympic games today cost three times (!!!) what the entire thing did in 1984. (The second link is a pdf, relevant passage on pg 10.)
That’s $550 million in total costs for LA vs. $1.67 billion in just security costs in London alone. Don’t forget that the security costs are going to be dumped on the public, too, or that we’re Boston… home of shutting the city down if someone so much as hangs a glowing Cartoon Network advertisement on a wall.
Even if the feds picked up 2/3rds of the security costs — what do people think would do more for the Commonwealth, 2 weeks of disruptive games or $500+ million in security costs? What else could that $500 million pay for?
petr says
Larger? Yes. But there is an effective divide between Northern and Southern California. More resources? No. If I were to compare LA to Boston I would say that they are both international cities: LA draws people from all over the world because of Hollywood; Boston because of our universities and our medical institutions. Advantage Boston.
Nothing. Not. a. thing. If it doesn’t get spent on security costs for the Olympics then it doesn’t get spent. We’re not talking about a big pile of money waiting around to be spent and the discussion is merely whether to spend it foolishly or spend it wisely. The discussion is whether to bid for the Olympics and, if we win the bid, spend accordingly.
I think your entire argument against Boston hosting the Olympics is predicated upon previous Olympics being sold with wildly overinflated expectations. And, as far as this argument goes, it’s not wrong or off-base: there have been overly optimistic, even rosy scenarios drawn, with disastrous consequences, for past Olympics. It is, very much, something to guard against. But some instances of overinflated expectations does not mean that all expectation are overinflated.
For me, I would like to have the Olympics hosted, and hosted well, by the city I love best and most over all cities, in order to show the world the city that I love best and most over all cities: Boston. It really is as simple as that. I very much would not like to lose money on the events but I don’t particularly care to turn a profit either: I would rather see it used as a primer for infrastructure improvements, particularly public transit, to make the city even better. I think infrastructure improvements cost money. Olympics cost money. I think the combination of the two can ameliorate some of the cost, but I do not think that the two, together, make the costs, individually, that much less. But I do think that the Olympics can prime the pump in a way that other, more mundane pursuits, cannot.
kbusch says
From Wikipedia:
Los Angeles: city population 4 million, metro area 16.5 millon
Boston: city population 0.6 million, metro area 4.6 million
They’re a bit bigger. By just a tad.
petr says
… you are confused by the raw numbers. It’s a common mistake. Of the 16.5 million people in the greater LA area, a full 14.5 million are trying to break into show business. Another one million either pump gas, play for the Fakers, or sell the starlet wannabes drugs. The remaining one million are in the rehab business and thus they are the only one what could be considered ‘resources.’
Of the the 4.6 Mil in the greater Boston Metro area, 2.2 mil are Doctors, Engineers Ph.Ds or Ph.D candidates… including those who play for the Celtics. The remaining 2.4 mil people also work for a living. So, like I said, advantage Boston.
=-)
kbusch says
Michele Bachmann epistemology could be contagious.
Petr, have you been working too hard? Maybe it’s time you relaxed and got a bit of bed rest.
Take care of yourself. We’ll need you in 2014.
ryepower12 says
has more resources than LA or has even close to its resources, that’s just delusional. We are a tiny blip on LA’s radar.
I love Boston and agree that we’re a world class city, but we’re not a world class city because we have a huge swath of resources (like LA does). We’re a world class city because we stay out in front of things, not race to the bottom.
A tidbit: UCLA has 25% more in sponsored research $$ going its way than Harvard. Despite Harvard’s prestige, UCLA is a larger research university and nearly as prestigious. USC is not all that far behind, either.
LA isn’t quite Boston in this regard, but it does not suffer in research universities. Don’t kid yourself. Our edge in these areas is precarious and may not always be there if we aren’t careful — no resting on our laurels.
A second tidbit: Those two universities practically have the infrastructure to host the games themselves — UCLA hosted gymnastics in 1984, while USC hosted swimming and both are likely larger in athletic scope than BU, BC, Harvard and Northeastern combined, with more Olympic-caliber facilities and programs. These are the schools, in many cases, where Olympic-caliber athletes go to for that reason.
LA and California have the resources and existing infrastructure to efficiently put on the games, if they were ever interested in doing so. We don’t. Those are just the facts. The only way we could hope to do it would be to implement some ‘creative accounting’ like we did during the Big Dig — and look at the results of that with the MBTA today, and how much that’s hampered us in being able to improve service and expand to meet demand. Look at how many highway, bridge and road projects had to be delayed — for years — because of the Big Dig.
Then remember that at least the Big Dig could be justified as an incredibly important infrastructure project that’s grown jobs and permanently improved the city in a way an Olympic games, which would come at a similarly high cost but be ever ephemeral in nature, never could do. Then remember that we haven’t come anywhere close to paying off the Big Dig’s tab — and don’t need an Olympic-sized tab to go right on top of it.
kbusch says
that petr’s 2:49pm comment was a joke right? And my response was a joke, too?
ryepower12 says
I replied to the 2:31pm comment, which wasn’t a joke.
kbusch says
.
petr says
… somebodies going to get the idea you have an inferiority complex. Not me. But somebody will.
I think that if your argument is about overly aggressive and thoughtlessly optimistic expectations then I’ll turn that around on you and say that overly aggressive and thoughtlessly pessimistic expectations are just as bad.
I maintain that it is doable and even desirable for Boston to host the Olympics. If it primes the infrastructure spending pump, so much the better. But I will not automatically say no.
HR's Kevin says
We are talking about assuming massive debt to fund two weeks of entertainment that most local people will not be able to actually attend.
The obligation is 100% on the supporters of this proposal to prove that it is a good idea. If they cannot overcome skepticism, justified or not, then they have no right to spend our tax money foolishly.
Trickle up says
that says we have to let ourselves be exploited to be great.
JimC says
It doesn’t have to be someone’s “inferiority complex” that makes them support having the Olympics here.
HR's Kevin says
it could also be motivated by an inability to evaluate the actual cost/benefit equation.
No one doubts that there would be some cool aspects to having the Olympics here. But no one has even a vague plan for how to pay for it that would not involve taxing people who would not benefit in any way.
SomervilleTom says
I think this is just a dumb idea.
Atlanta did all this years ago. Aside from a whole lot of negative publicity about the “Atlanta Bomber”, I’m not sure the city got ANY benefits AT ALL.
sabutai says
It got some extensions on MARTA, a new stadium and a couple new facilities. I think it did have an ancillary benefit of making Atlanta better known as a city — Olympic hosts is an elite club — but I don’t see it as changing the soul of the city. One could claim that the Olympics got a lot of good to Barcelona.
jconway says
Is that the Atlanta and LA games were the only ones to turn a profit. American games are largely privately funded and don’t leave structural deficits in their wake. Most Atlantan’s were happy with the games. My old mock trial coach at CRLS went to Harvard and HLS and wrote his thesis on how the Olympics brought MARTA and revitalized the downtown core making it a far more urban city. The Braves leaving has as much to do with racism and a desire for more parking spots for its exurban fan base as it does with a “bad” stadium – which was actually designed to be broken down into an MLB stadium saving considerable costs.
SomervilleTom says
I don’t mean to be cranky, but frankly I’m reminded of Pittsburgh.
I went to school in Pittsburgh, from 1970-1974. I lived there again for a year in 1982. Ok, I grant you that the Pittsburgh of 1972 was cleaner than the Pittsburgh of 1932. It was virtually the same in 1982 as in 1972, all protestations to the contrary.
For nearly forty years, people in Pittsburgh have been saying “We’re not the Pittsburgh you used to know”. For nearly forty years, the essence of Pittsburgh IS precisely the same as the Pittsburgh I knew in the early 1970s.
I feel the same about Atlanta. I did an extended contract there shortly after the games. My takeaway was (and is) that nothing much changed. The city got a new stadium. So what? A new stadium is not even ON the list of things Boston needs today, never mind near the top.
Atlanta got a new “tourist center” — last time I checked, Atlanta was not exactly a major tourist destination. Mayor Kevin White changed the face of tourism for Boston and many other of North American cities by investing in the then-decrepit Quincy Market district. Nothing remotely similar will come out of any venture like the Olympics.
MARTA existed well before the Olympics. One previously-planned line was built — for a total of seven miles of rail service — for the Olympics. The project needed to modernize the MBTA is more like the Big Dig than anything that happened in Atlanta or LA.
To sum it up — the Olympics were, for Atlanta, lipstick on a pig.
elias-nugator says
Magadishu would be a better choice….
Because trust me, Boston and the captioned public private agencies would compete with ZEAL with one another to eff up this event beyond all recognition and avoid any and all public improvements therein required.
Elias
Mark L. Bail says
could rent our houses out for the games. Even 90 minutes away, I could be in the running. People in West Springfield let their lawns for Big E parking. I smell the sweet smell of entrepreneurship.
jconway says
I was in the East MA bubble for so long I had no idea what the Big E was until recently and I had to Wikipedia it. Seems like a fun time though.
Mark L. Bail says
I’m not a fan of crowds, lines, and parking. If you don’t mind these, I’m sure it’s a good time.
I admit am tempted by the array of deep-fried novelties like Oreos and Twinkies.