Hosting the Olympics costs billions. What does a city get back?

It was a sunny morning in mid-June and the athletes’ village for the Summer Olympics, in Seine-Saint-Denis, just outside Paris, was still nominally under construction. Workers sweated in hard hats and yellow vests, watching over the empty site. Built in the midst of various housing developments, the village sprawls across 128 riverine acres. Several dozen new, mostly beige, timber-frame apartment blocks, pleasant but banal, spill down to a tree-lined promenade along the Seine. Luc Besson’s former film studio complex, in a converted power plant, has been partly turned into the athletes’ mess hall. Next door, another power plant, gut renovated and whitewashed, which now houses a gym, will become office space for 2,500 civil servants in France’s Ministry of the Interior after the Games are done.

Every couple of years, when another Olympics rolls around, a familiar story is recycled: The Games are a way for host cities to fast-track infrastructure and urban-redevelopment projects. But there is surprisingly little evidence to back this story up and examples galore suggesting the reverse. Athens, which splurged on white elephant arenas in 2004 for sports that few Greeks play, stirred a rush of national pride but incurred debts that helped fuel an economic meltdown with ripple effects across Europe. Rio threw itself a giant party in 2016, then had to sell off its Olympic Village at a discount.

During a different era — before the costs of staging the Olympics rose to the G.D.P. of certain medium-size nations and the dream of promoting world harmony through athletics was shattered by a string of terrorist attacks (Munich in 1972), doping scandals (pick your Games), boycotts (Moscow in 1980, Los Angeles in 1984) and bombings (Atlanta in 1996) — postwar cities like Rome (1960) and Tokyo (1964) used the event as coming-out parties for their new economies and societies. During the 1950s and early ‘60s, Japan remade Tokyo into a stylish new capital, enlisting pioneering architects such as Kenzo Tange and Yoshinobu Ashihara to devise Olympic monuments that showcased the reborn country’s cutting-edge technology and design.

But it was Barcelona, in 1992, that cemented the notion that the Olympics can accelerate wholesale urban renewal. “Legacy” became a concept promoted by Olympic officials and like-minded civic leaders anxious to sway an increasingly skeptical public about the benefits of hosting the Games. By the 1970s, fewer and fewer cities were putting up their hands to serve as hosts. Coloradans stunned the International Olympic Committee when they decided to back out of the 1976 Winter Games in Denver at more or less the 11th hour, fearing runaway costs. After the 1992 Games, Olympic advocates increasingly leaned into the urban-legacy argument, trumpeting the Barcelona Effect.

(Jeremy Harmon | Salt Lake Tribune) From left the USA's John Stockton, Chris Mullin, and Charles Barkley rejoice with their gold medals after beating Croatia, 117-85 in Olympics basketball in Barcelona Saturday, Aug. 8, 1992. The USA beat Croatia 117-85 to win the gold medal. (Jeremy Harmon/)

A declining city during the middle decades of the last century, Barcelona emerged like Cinderella at the ‘92 Olympics, unrecognizable and ravishing. Its industrial murk had been cleared away. It sported sparkling new beaches, an expanded transportation and telecommunications network, modern museums, art-filled public squares and a fashionable, open city center linked to the sea.

In truth, Barcelona’s makeover started years before the city bid on the Games. During the late ‘70s, after the death of Spain’s dictator, Gen. Francisco Franco, civic leaders devised an urban-renewal scheme for a newly democratic, independent-minded capital of Catalonia. With a potential Olympic bid in mind, they began during the ‘80s to remake Barcelona’s railway system, airport and seafront. These and other changes, accelerated by the deadline for the Games, turned the city into a wealthy European gem and tourist mecca.

But at a cost. Low-income housing gave way to luxury hotels and high-end development. It’s no coincidence that American-style suburbs began proliferating on the edges of Barcelona during the years following the Olympics, catering to families seeking more affordable homes and fleeing the mobs and mosh pits along the Ramblas and the seafront. Thousands of Barcelonians, fed up with a housing shortage, the rising cost of living and overcrowding, took to the streets this month, squirting tourists with water pistols and toting signs telling visitors: “You are not welcome.”

Cities like Barcelona, Tokyo, Paris and Rio, the kinds of cities that vie to host the Summer Olympics, are all facing similar plagues today — aging infrastructure, an educated, gentrifying work force driving up home prices and the cost of everything else and widening social and class divisions — in short, the signposts of globalization. The Games intersect with these 21st-century urban crises in various, often uncomfortable, ways. The strategy of Olympic advocates has been to frame the Games as an opportunity to mitigate these challenges. But as Barcelona demonstrates, city-building is a messy, long-horizon undertaking, and even what at first seems like progress often comes at a significant price. The question is no longer whether the Olympics benefit cities — history tells us they’re mostly good for the wealthy, if anyone — but what success might look like.

Mixed-use, mixed-income development

Paris is hoping that its targeted approach — concentrating some $1.5 billion of the Olympic budget on Seine-Saint-Denis — will jump-start urban rebirth in one of the poorest parts of France. Seine-Saint-Denis is a dense agglomeration of some 40 small cities on the northeastern periphery of France’s capital, physically separated by a ring road called the Boulevard Périphérique. In recent years, parts of Seine-Saint-Denis, like the city of St.-Ouen, which includes a slice of the Olympic Village, have started to gentrify. But Seine-Saint-Denis remains mostly synonymous with unemployment, crime and immigration, and there’s a long history of failed government programs to rescue it from its poverty and isolation dating back to the 1970s. Atop a new glass tower in the Olympic Village, I had a glimpse in June, across a highway, of the Stade de France, built for soccer’s World Cup in 1998, which will service the Games. For Parisians and others with money to buy tickets for premier events, the stadium is a palace of sport, but the knock-on benefits for surrounding residents of Seine-Saint-Denis have been disappointing.

(Dmitry Kostyukov | The New York Times) Workers install temporary bleachers at the Place de la Concorde in Paris, ahead of the Summer Olympics on April 4, 2024. (Dmitry Kostyukov/)

The idea, this time around, is that mixed-use, mixed-income development will achieve better results. The Olympic Village, the work of 40 architects following a master plan by Dominique Perrault, has been conceived to house diverse tenants, shops and businesses after the Games. “Mixity” is a word I heard repeatedly from French officials. Dormitories will convert into 2,800 apartments, more than one-third rented out by the state to lower-income residents and students, the rest privately marketed to higher-end tenants looking for housing at prices lower than can be found in central Paris. In a model that cities have come to rely on to manage the astronomical cost of hosting the Games, the village is built in part by private developers and will be jointly managed by private companies and the government. That model requires balancing the expectations of taxpayers for affordable housing and other social benefits with the demands of private investors to turn a profit. What results is often a more affluent population and rising prices.

In Seine-Saint-Denis, the prospect of gentrification has been embraced by leftist mayors, even if that’s not the word they use. Gentrification is not displacement, after all — not necessarily, anyway. “Every urban project involves gentrification,” is how Marie Barsacq, Director of Impact and Legacy for the Paris Games, put it to me. Gentrification translates into jobs, she points out. Many of the contracts awarded for Olympic construction projects in Seine-Saint-Denis have gone to local firms. One company, which employed two workers when it won a contract to design seats for the new aquatic center, Barsacq said, now has two factories and employs dozens of people. The seats, she added, are partly made from recycling plastic bottle caps collected by schoolchildren in Seine-Saint-Denis.

Preventing gentrification from morphing into displacement requires legal and other protections, which exist in France for residents of public housing, who constitute about 40 percent of the population of Seine-Saint-Denis. How strong those protections are will be tested as France, divided by anti-immigrant sentiments, faces economic stresses and other woes. In one small city I visited, Dugny (population 11,000), where the Olympic media village has been built, 77 percent of residents live in public housing, Quentin Gesell, Dugny’s mayor, told me. Gesell embraces the Olympic development. “Nobody will have to move,” he said. “We aren’t replacing our population. Displacement is not our issue. The level of poverty here is extremely high. We need jobs and opportunity.”

London’s Olympics in 2012 were conceived along similar lines, with the goal of regenerating several depressed boroughs in the city’s East End. And by various measures, the plan succeeded. The former athletes’ village is now home to a “mixity” of subsidized and market-rate residents occupying 2,800 apartments and townhouses. There’s a lush public park, Zaha Hadid’s dolphin-shaped aquatic center, an attractive velodrome and other heavily used sporting venues, along with one of Europe’s busiest shopping malls. A campus for University College London has moved into the neighborhood. The BBC Symphony Orchestra and an outpost of the Victoria & Albert Museum are on the way. When I visited a few weeks ago, bars and restaurants lining a canal that intersects the former Olympic site were bustling.

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Hosting the Olympics costs billions. What does a city get back?

Hosting the Olympics costs billions. What does a city get back?

Hosting the Olympics costs billions. What does a city get back?

Hosting the Olympics costs billions. What does a city get back?

Hosting the Olympics costs billions. What does a city get back?