Now if only we could do that in the modern day, with support from the IOC, and turn them into something positive. For example turn them into schools, homeless shelters, libraries, something along those lines.
Even better, hold the Olympics in places where there are already facilities that can temporarily be re-purposed for the Olympics, and then go back to their normal purpose.
That's what happened for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. For housing the athletes they used student housing at the University of Southern California. If Los Angeles gets the 2024 Summer Olympics they plan to use student housing at UCLA for athletes and coaches, and student housing at USC for media housing.
For athletic venues, only two needed to be built. They built a velodrome and a swim center. For the rest they were able to use facilities already present: LA Memorial Coliseum, LA Memorial Sports Arena, Dodger Stadium, The Forum, Long Beach Convention Center, Rose Bowl, Long Beach Arena, Anaheim Convention Center, along with the athletic facilities at several colleges and universities (UCLA, Cal State LA, USC, Loyola Marymount, Cal State Fullerton, East LA College, Pepperdine).
The combination of low construction costs from being able to use so much existing infrastructure, and the use of corporate sponsorship to pay for the things that did need to be built (it was the McDonald's swim stadium and the 7-Eleven velodrome) resulting in the 1984 Olympics running a profit of more than $200 million.
I was living in Pasadena at the time. I had expected the Olympics to be a pain in the ass due to increased traffic...but it turned out to have no negative effect that I could see.
In retrospect, that should not have been too surprising. There are times of the year where the pro baseball, basketball, American football, and hockey seasons overlap, along with various college sports seasons. One could easily have a day with several team sporting events going on that will each draw a large crowd. On top of that you could have a major concert or two going on.
In other words, Los Angeles already can handle many simultaneous major events. The Olympics is bigger than that, but not by anywhere near as big a factor as it would be in cities that do not have so many popular pro and college team sports and so many world class concert venues.
The city installed red light cameras, and there is a bribery scandal going on regarding that deal. The city leased the parking meters for a billion dollars, but the contract is almost an object lesson in what not to do as a city. Rates for parking more than doubled, and now Chicago has the highest parking rates in the nation. The city is forced to pay whenever a spot is unavailable or is removed, for the entire duration it is unavailable. If the city wants to put in a bike lane, they have to pay something like $26k per parking spot vacated. If they want to close a street for a festival, they have to pay as if the parking spots were at 100% occupancy for the entire duration of the festival. The city gave up a massive amount of city planning ability as a result of that deal. [3] (added as an edit)
Furthermore, both Illinois and Chicago failed to pay into the pension plans they have promised their workers, leading to a massive budget crisis. Chicago and Illinois are basically forced to pay for pensions as they come up rather than paying with money that had been gaining interest over the length of the employees tenure. On top of that, Illinois is one of the few states that do not tax retirement income, compounding the problem. (Which makes sense, cause retirees vote, but I digress)
On top of that, Chicago has the third-highest number of police per-capita in the nation, after Baltimore and Washington DC. Our police have routinely been caught lying under oath. Our former States Attorney, Anita Alverez, (who is actually the mother of a friend, unfortunately) was a joke, who refused to charge police officers for lying under oath. She otherwise took a tough-on-crime policy, and pursued harsh sentences and supported the policies that basically set the police at odds with minority communities in the city. She would bend over backwards to defend convictions that had been overturned, once suggesting that a man cleared of rape may have been engaging in necrophilia. Policies like these led to Chicago being titled "The False Confession Capital"[2].
And while you could probably hide as many people in Chicago as in LA, the transit situation would be a nightmare, because all transit is centered around being able to go to the loop. So you'd have everyone trying to go through the same area, unlike the more distributed system that exists in LA.
All of this is a real shame. Chicago is a great city, one which I'd sincerely like to share with the world. The centerpiece of the Olympics would have been in an area of the city that is undervalued and under-visited. The plan also did a great job of spreading the competitions around and using the existing infrastructure. For instance, the kayaking competition was going to be held 90 miles away in South Bend Indiana, where a whitewater kayaking course already exists.
[1] “If [Illinois] isn’t the most corrupt state in the United States,” he said, “it is certainly one hell of a competitor.”
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/December-2010/Why...
[2] From 60 Minutes - Alverez suggest necrophilia as a possible reason who
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50136707n
[3] http://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2015/02/19/may...
Mind you, from 1996 to 2006, they put Georgia State students in the dorms and bussed them to and from Georgia State, which didn't make a lick of sense, but I give Atlanta's government a lot of credit for very nearly doing something right.
- London (http://www.eastvillagelondon.co.uk): "Welcome to London's newest neighborhood, former athletes' village."
- Beijing (http://www.china.org.cn/2008-03/05/content_11646502.htm): "Once the Paralympic Games are concluded, the Olympic Village will be taken over by a private development company, which will remodel the apartments into residential buildings"
- Athens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Village#List_of_Olympi...): "The Athens Olympic Village also became a residential area following the Games. Today, the village with a capacity of approximately 10,000 people is in use."
- Sydney (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newington,_New_South_Wales): "The Athlete's Village was converted to residential apartments after the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games."
That's not schools or libraries, but if you build apartment buildings for 10,000 sportsmen, using them as apartments afterwards simply is the best fit.
Of course, the fact it's in a very expensive city where leaving land unused would be commercial suicide helps a bit too.
People still keep downplaying just how isolated Lake Placid as compared to both where people are and where people want to be.
Honestly, as bad as Atlanta's Olympics look at the time (with commercialism and the bombing, for example), I really think they deserve a lot of credit for using it as an excuse to provide the city with renovations people could use. Hopefully LA can do the same.
They also utilized existing venues for nearly everything, only having to actually build two new venues (a swim center and a velodrome).
Honestly this seems like the perfect use case. Theres not enough demand at lake placid to use them as apartments.
While not technically an Olympic development, the idea was always to build a village that could then serve as a new residential area, and goes to show that the olympics can very much be the necessary catalyst in getting major developments off the ground. If IOC wanted to, they could absolutely push for all sorts of change by forming host requirements thereafter. They may want to claim they're non-political, but I don't think that's even possible on the kind of scale they operate.
"Minor Criminals" as that term might commonly be understood typically don't go to prison, they go to jail. The very nature of prison entails a felony charge, now I know you can make an argument there are a few drug possession crimes that are felonies that shouldn't be, but that is not really applicable to the prison from this article, as this is a Federal prison.
In Sydney, the Sydney Olympic Park is still standing and is used for lots of events all year round. The athletes villages were converted into apartments.
London's has been championed as one of the most sustainable, with it being used to rejuvenate a dead industrial area. Some facilities were built to be temporary, whereas other are being developed further.
Create a flexible building with temporary partition walls so you can convert to 80-100 apartments. It's not rocket science how to make a building serve two purposes.
You just made the case that large (and probably wealthy) cities should host the Olympics instead of remote areas. They are more financially capable of absorbing the cost of hosting events. And have the population density that new buildings should relatively easily repurposed (see Stockholm anecdote in sibling comment).
[1]: http://www.atlantaga.gov/index.aspx?page=201
[2]: http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/01/us/as-olympics-approach-ho...
I'm not opposed to downsizing the amount of incarcerated people, for sure, but the void isn't being filled, and many of the communities up here are taking a turn for the worse.
It's probably the most rural and isolated area on the east coast other than northern Maine. I87 had almost zero phone service north of Lake George due to cell tower siting regulations. That only changed because a Orthodox Jewish couple traveling from Montreal senselessly died of exposure after a minor car accident. That incident triggered a big uproar in the community in NYC and elsewhere and led to a change in the rules.
All of Northern New York is a "park", and it's impossible to do anything. The State is mostly exempt from its own rules, so prisons are pretty much the only thing that you can build. As a another commenter said, it's a rural ghetto.
You've just humanized the police unions' "tough against crime" motivation and lobbying for me (only by a bit, I still find it despicable). Is it really a zero-sum game where one community (urban inner city) has to suffer so another one (correctional) doesn't? What is the exchange rate between job losses vs. number of people incarcerated?
Then, after growing older, going off to college, and meeting and becoming friends with people of color, I gained some perspective, and I have trouble accepting it as the cool, safe job it once appeared to be. But what are these prison guard friends I grew up with supposed to do? Fight against the system that puts food on their table so they can get laid off when the prison closes and have no other marketable skills?
In the end, I have to fall on the side of what's right; better laws on crime should force the prisons to be downsized or closed. More families suffer because of the incarcerations than would due to the potential jobs lost. I just wish our elected officials would/could do more to spur job growth in other industries.
Much of central and western new york has a similarly depressed economy without quite that level of regulatory burden. So there's plenty more of upstate to choose from.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
A more sensible approach would be temporary housing, akin more to trailers and inexpensive pop up temporaries rather than plush living. These athletes don't need to be treated like royalty. Heck, most of them are used to competing out of cars and cheap motels when on the road because they make so little money. (emphasis on most, not all). Basically something like a FEMA response with a little more class and forethought put into it.
Instead we have cities trying to show how grand and massive these buildings will be, rather than how practical and well put on the event can be. I was honestly thrilled when Chicago lost the bid for 2016 to Rio. That chaos the rest of the world is talking about now would be in my back yard, and potentially even worse given the density of our city, and the poor strength of our government.
Of course we all wish the war on drugs would stop, that sentences would be reduced, etc. But until that happens we can't just ignore the problem. Overcrowded prisons are awful and seriously harm the quality of life for the prisoners. Additionally, even with normal population growth, you would eventually need to build new prisons. And significantly reducing the prison population is actually really difficult, as demonstrated by this interactive: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/03/04/how-to-cut-the...
Surely this new prison would have been built anyway. And if they had built it someplace else no one would have noticed or cared. Using it to reduce the cost of the Olympics was a very practical solution that didn't change anything.
Other countries are shutting down prisons...
http://qz.com/644914/the-netherlands-keeps-having-to-close-i...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/11/sweden-closes-...
It could have been a homeless village. But no we would rather expand space to continue to be the worlds largest incarcerator of non violent offenders.
Disgusting!
As controversy peaked in 1979, Ramsey Clark, the former Attorney General under President Lyndon B. Johnson, testified that the controversy about the Lake Placid project wasn’t just about Lake Placid, or the symbolism of the Olympics—this would be a litmus test for the future of incarceration in America. “We are going to be masters of our destiny or the victim,” he told Congress. “It’s precisely the psychology of the prison, that once it is built you believe you have to fill them up.”
The people in opposition were right on this one.
But here is my favorite "Prison Project" story.
Kaiser Steel started a mining project in California in 1942 or so called "Eagle Mountain". A town was built for the workers (around 4k) and it was a very busy town until 1980s. Environment regulation killed the mining business and Kaiser left the place in ruins.
State of California then spend millions of dollars to convert the ghost town into a correctional facility in 1988. State could not budget it properly and one insane prison riot that got few people killed the prison was closed. This prison was privately operated and not sure how many people benefited by the whole scam.
CA then decided to convert the abandoned mine into a giant landfill (the mining was problematic for environment but somehow the landfill was not!) and after spending few more millions of our money the project of abandoned too or perhaps it is still being planned on paper.
The best part is however today the entire ghost town is closed and there are some people appointed just to make sure no one trace-passes over a town that no one wants to live into.
I am not even sure who owns the land, the buildings and who is spending the money to keep it fenced etc.
Kasita is an attempt at this: https://kasita.com/
But even conventional mobile home manufacturers seem to have taken a hint from the Tiny House movement and are making trailer homes for hipsters: http://www.championhomes.com/park-model-rv
I applaud, even the USSR did not built GULAG camps in Olympic villages. What an exciting time we are living in. Democracy, freedom, you know the drill.
