WASHINGTON – Washington lost its Olympic bid, and I feel fine.
Actually, I feel much better than fine. I feel relieved of a hugely unnecessary, cumbersome, expensive burden. And so should you.
Yes, I love sports, including the Olympics. And I’m in favor of sensible projects to help fund places like the Verizon Center and the new D.C. United stadium at Buzzard Point. I think we can still find better solutions that don’t overly burden the taxpayers, but in general I support public-private financing that mutually invests both city and team in each other’s future success.
Those are projects with long-term, local tenants, ensuring usage for at least 20 or 30 years. And precisely because we are invested in them, we should be wary of spending money on one-time, pie in the sky dreams – especially ones with as horrific a track record as the Olympics.
Just look at the outcry and backlash to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh’s announcement that his city had secured the 2024 U.S. bid. That is not a city excited to host the world’s premiere sporting event.
And why would it be? Boston is a cramped, traffic-snarled, tough to navigate city even for those who have lived there for years, much less droves of aimless tourists. Sound familiar, D.C.?
Then, of course, there’s the money. Since the games of the mid ‘90s that averaged roughly $1 billion, the cost of hosting the Olympics has skyrocketed, with four of the last six coming in over $10 billion. The Summer Games are much larger (11,000 athletes in London compared to 2,800 in Sochi), but Russia managed to spend an estimated $51 billion in 2014.
That may have burst the Olympic bubble. After all, the 2012 London Games were the ones held up by D.C. organizers as the model to follow. Those cost £8.92 billion ($14.6 billion), or £142 for every man, woman and child in the country. On top of that, 70,000 volunteers worked over 8 million combined man hours without pay to help pull off the event.
One of the big selling points of the London model was the creation of affordable housing out of the Olympic Village. Now, in a trade-off to help promote economic growth, politicians have cut 1,000 of the originally promised units. And that number keeps falling. Over the past two-and-a-half years, the ratio of units being designated for affordable housing has dropped from 40 percent to 28 percent.
Of course, D.C.’s proposed model included razing the D.C. General Homeless Shelter, with the promise of low-income housing after the games. As we see London’s model falling apart, there is little to suggest the same wouldn’t happen here, in a city already overrun by commercial development.
The D.C. proposal also was estimated at a cost of $4 to $5 billion. London’s initial estimate was $4.4 billion, and ended up being more than three times as much. Let’s all take a deep breath and thank our lucky stars that we can put that money toward more important things.
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