Olympics in Chicago? Please Please Please No.
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Two days before they announce the winner of the 2016 Olympics, the IOC has apparently not yet decided on a city. I know, I’m sure it’s hard; billions of dollars are at stake, after all. Years of work and whole careers are on the line. Large, powerful corporations are in the mix. And so in the off-chance any members of the committee are sitting in a Copenhagan hotel room surfing the web in an 11th-hour grab at opinions far and wide, let me add the emphatic voice of a humble young non-expert novelist to the cacophony: IOC, please don’t choose Chicago. Please, please, please, for the love of God, don’t choose Chicago.
More specificially: We don’t have enough money, our schools could probably use several billion dollars, you will necessarily bulldoze/destroy/gentrify an enormous swath of our city, the funding of the proposed village seems impossible and made up, the Tribune’s poll says that we’re totally on the fence (who wants to be in a relationship like that?), and as far as we can tell, you will end up costing far more money than you will generate for our economy.
I will be the first one to admit to a faint and difficult-to-define happiness at the initial thought of Chicago’s national and international profile continuing to swell in the wake of Obama’s victory. The Olympics would focus the world’s eyes here for the next seven years, and to me, that seems like a good thing. Property values would go up, jobs would in fact be created. I personally like swimming and watching swimming. But it takes about five minutes of thinking and reading to realize that Olympic budgets always, every time, swell far beyond what they are supposed to be. Add Mayor Daley’s pledge of taxpayer money to any shortfall, and you’ve got yourself a hot mess in the city of broad shoulders.
Two months ago, my wife began coming home from work with horror stories of what happens when public funding runs out. She’s a social worker, and because of the Illinois budget crisis over the summer, she and all the other employees at the nonprofit community center where she worked (those who weren’t laid off) were forced to turn away mentally ill clients who’d been coming for treatment and care, every day, for twenty years. I understand that state budgets and city budgets are different things, and right now it’s somewhat difficult to point to direct links of causation between this money and those services, but the point I’m making is a general one: the debates are all well and good in the abstract, but when it comes down to it–and this is how it often seems to come down–the arrival of the Olympics in Chicago will be an economic boom for some people and a Herculean gut-punch for many others. By “others,” I mean the city’s already-marginalized populations.
Why do that? Why send your giant machine to us? Or maybe I should turn my head and say it to Chicago people instead: why do this? Why ask for them to come? I just don’t get it. Professional sports are not underrepresented here; stadiums abound; despite being shamefully underrepresented in the media, hurdling is alive and well in our many local high schools. Just the other day I saw someone swimming in Lake Michigan; just the other day I saw someone do an interpretative gymnastic-dance routine on the corner of California and Diversey.
Maybe not the last thing, but still, IOC, I don’t get it. I don’t get you and what you want. This is a city, and on the streets of this city, people’s lives unfold. There are poor streets and there are rich streets, but they’re streets, and it’s a city. It’s not a playground.
via Some Chicago residents hoping Olympics bid a bust – Yahoo! News.
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I’d vote for Rio!
http://scottnolansmith.wordpress.com/2009/09/28/who-should-host-the-2016-olympics/
You know what? Why build a city on a swamp in the first place? Why bother rebuilding it after that fire? Why use the rubble to build a lakefront park? Why try making a river flow uphill? Why dig a canal from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi? Why assemble one of the world’s greatest art collections, world class museums, an aquarium, a planetarium? Why try to start one of the world’s greatest universities? Why invent social work? Why train immigrants how to care for their babies? Why die in the street fighting for the eight-hour day? Why try to build the world’s tallest building? Why bother training some of America’s finest comedians and actors? Why go out there day after day, Sunday after Sunday, and try to win a World Series or a Super Bowl? Why not trade Jordan to the Lakers? Why bother taking an aging Rust Belt city full of vacant factories and grizzled criminals and turn it into a gleaming destination metropolis again? Why not just let the South Side rot?
Why risk it? Why not just leave well enough alone? What was wrong with a swamp anyway?
Hey Jeff–yes, I agree, and in a roundabout way, you’re kind of making the same point for me. There are actually pretty good answers for almost all of those ostensibly rhetorical questions and not very many good answers to the question of bringing the Olympics to Chicago. Why not trade Jordan to the Lakers? Because he was the greatest player of all time, he was an icon, he was beloved, there was no way to match his value, and it would have made no sense at all. Why not spend several billion dollars to make slightly less than several billion dollars? Because it would be dumb.
Your last few questions–particularly the one that characterizes Chicago as an “aging Rust Belt city full of vacant factories and grizzled criminals”–are simply uninformed. (Not to mention comic.) Suggesting that the only alternative to bringing the Olympics to Chicago is to “let the South Side rot” is another good demonstration of my point, albeit in a backwards fashion again. In short: There are many, many ways to spend money on a city. The Olympics are not a good way to spend money on a city.
In response to another comment. See in context »So, I know that’s a confusing mess of questions, but they try to proceed in sort-of chronological order. And the one you refer to here…
“Your last few questions–particularly the one that characterizes Chicago as an “aging Rust Belt city full of vacant factories and grizzled criminals”–are simply uninformed. (Not to mention comic.)
… is about a time, not very long ago, when Chicago was in much worse shape than it is today. I know you may not have been here then, when State Street was full of wig shops, blight reached from the edges of the Loop out to the prairie, and folks were afraid to come in from the suburbs, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and refrain from calling you uninformed. Or comic.
The proposed Olympic sites are concentrated in a couple of the most stubbornly recalcitrant areas, lingering in ruins from what Richard Wright, who lived there, called “a war that never ends.” Infusing those areas with billions in *private funds* under the name of the Olympics might accomplish a thing or two that public funds have not. And very likely will not. But who knows? You are quite right that you and I don’t know. And why risk it? Especially if one lives on the North Side.
Cheers, Patrick.
In response to another comment. See in context »Sorry, dude–midnight upon return from Moody’s is a poor time to log on to this baby and engage in debate, and upon further review I regretted that comic thing as a cheap shot and saw a different kind of logic there in your questions, yes. (I may have fallen into my debate-with-father-in-law mode; he’s from the south-side and I’m from another land; I get riled up easily, probably b/c I don’t have that long-term perspective and have to replace it with my silly book learning.)
The funny thing about this debate (the larger debate, I mean) is that I absolutely agree with your second ‘graph and see all sorts of good things coming, too. Agreed: I don’t know. It’s just the distribution of good and bad that’s worrisome.
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] were on the outs. (There was a fair sampling on True/Slant as well: Laura Heller, Lou Carlozo, Patrick Somerville all posted paragons of the genre–fearful prognostications about parking and [...]
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