There's like 5 people who want the Olympics in Boston and they're all getting paid.
— Fresh New England (@freshnewengland) July 1, 2015
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Tweet of the Day: Boston 2024
Reality-based commentary on politics.
There are plenty of people in the construction and real estate business who also expect to make money out of this. Still a small minority of the population at large, of course, but enough to make some noise.
just sayin’
There is no question that there are people who like the idea of the Olympics, but I suspect there are far more people who are strongly against than people who are strongly for. I would be shocked if polling ever shows the 70% support target the USOC is looking for, so I don’t really understand why they are sticking with Boston.
I thought it was going to be this tweet, in which Boston 2024 shows that it can’t do basic arithmetic: https://twitter.com/Boston2024/status/615927630383185920.
Maybe I’m being mean. They’re just #innovating new forms of math.
This reminds me as well of how at Boston 2024’s meeting in Cambridge a few months ago, when asked about what % of housing built in Widett/Columbia Point after the Games would be affordable, David Manfredi noted that they city has a 15% requirement and that it “could be that, more than that, or different.” Well, in Bid 2.0, it’s 13%. Or, as they would call it, “different.”
“15 minutes COULD save you 15% OR MORE on car insurance”, which likewise hedges and doesn’t tell you anything (though they are my car insurer because for me their rates were so much lower than anyone else I checked).
No innovation here at all. Exaggerating affordability of housing is par for the course for developers of “luxury” housing. In any case, it is hard to get awfully excited about housing that won’t be available for ten years when it could be built now if it didn’t have to be reserved for use by Olympic athletes.
If this kind of development makes sense, then let’s do it without the Olympics. That way we won’t have to give away hundreds of millions of dollars of tax revenue in order to pay for temporary Olympic facilities.
.. You’re straddling the exigencies of your own arguments: getting paid isn’t equivalent to wanting the Olympics. Maybe you should decide upon which side of your own argument you will stand… Or, at least, not try to bind the different edges of your argument with twitter tape.
What I’ve been hearing from nearly everybody, including posters in this very diary, is the notion that the Olympics would be just great just so long as “taxpayers aren’t on the hook”.
Isn’t that the problem? Very few –almost none in fact — have said outright “no Boston Olympics under any circumstances.” Maybe that’s what they really want to say and maybe that’s why they twist circumstances to make the Olympics unpalatable (“Lookout! Over there! Sochi!”) but the underlying reality is that nobody has taken a stand against the Olympics.
Most everybody, in fact, wants it. They just don’t want to pay for it.
Some of us would prefer not to see the city turned into a police state for several weeks: https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2015/01/09/olympics-boston-would-require-unprecedented-security-effort/W9I8tEcQZfX2OnvpvX9LIJ/story.html.
Or to see traffic disrupted for the sake of a bunch of aristocrats and corporate titans: http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2015/06/30/boston-2024-olympic-lanes/. Let alone the other disruptions to people’s daily lives.
Or to see the gentrification that has historically come along with the Olympics: http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/node/2086.
And some of us would prefer not to see the environmental damage of throwing more cars on the road and building unnecessary structures.
And I could go on. A privately funded Olympics would still suffer from these problems. Taking money from the public purse to do it is just adding insult to injury. But the injury itself is grounds enough for rejecting the idea.
At best you can get a slim majority to say they want the Olympics, but only if you make a bunch of bogus promises about how it won’t cost everything and everyone gets a pony. We all know those promises are empty ones, so, no, most everybody does not want the Olympics.
The tweet was obviously hyperbolic. There is not much point in applying pseudo-intellectual rhetoric against it.
Public monet is onlying one facet of my distaste, albeit the most important one.
It picked it up from the laptop
.
Boston, most people are not very informed about the pros or cons of the Olympics. Polling out here in the West has been done, but I don’t think the opinions run strongly.
Public money won’t be used to cover the costs, wink,wink. To try to get central mass on board the organizers tried to dangle that Olympic favorite sport of Handball and promise that it will be in Worcester, wow!
When Liz Warren and Howie Carr agree something shouldn’t happen in Boston, it probably ain’t gonna happen. This is one of those issues, along with mocking ISIS, that brings conservatives and liberals together. There is just no reality based reason to support this project, NONE.
Olympic insurance doesn’t cover cost overruns.
from today’s Globe, would also make a good tweet:
talk about applies to Boston 2024, not the Commonwealth.