Is it Worth it for Your City to Host the Olympics?

The New York Pavilion sits empty and is slowly decomposing. It will need tens of millions of dollars of restoration before it is safe enough to be used by the public. The New York parks department would rather it be torn down, but the residents of Queens who have made the building their borough's symbol refuse to allow that to happen. And after all, it is one of the world's most recognizable structures having been used in several Hollywood movies including The Wiz and Men in Black. The New York Pavilion is just another reminder about the broken promises made that a world class event, in this case a World's Fair, will bring a city prosperity and structures that will be used for centuries to come. Two World's Fairs have been held in Flushing, and yet the town that hosted both has remained in decline. Even Willets Point, the neighborhood directly adjacent to the fairgrounds, has remained just as run-down and poor as it was described in the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. Both of New York's World's Fairs, held in 1939 and 1964, were supposed to bring into the city billions of dollars.

The reasoning for both was to raise the money needed to turn an unseemly swamp into Flushing Meadows Park. But both fairs ended up losing billions and to this day the park remains unfinished and still half a swamp. One of the promises politicians made when pushing for New York to host the World's Fair was that many of it's pavilions would be used for the public. This was hardly the case. Two pavilions remained from the first World's Fair, The Queens Pavilion which was used as an indoor ice skating rink and is now a museum, and the Aquatheater which was misused as a swimming pool until being abandoned in the 70's and torn down in the 80's. As for the second World's Fair, the Hall of Science remains an empty shell, it's exhibits housed in it's basement and adjoining building as the money was never raised to turn the inside of the pavilion itself into a museum. Both the United States pavilion and the New York Pavilion remained unused, the former being torn down in the 70's when vandals set fire to it one too many times. Just about the only pavilion to get fair use is one that was designed to be a heliport but has since been used as a fancy rooftop restaurant with a fantastic view.

Ironically, the pavilions and the rest of the unfinished park were threatened in the early 2000s, when it was proposed to extend the flushing river South so that rowing events for the 2012 Olympics could be held there. The Hudson and East rivers were just too big and currents were too dangerous to be used for the Olympics, not to mention years of pollution that was too extensive to clean up. The Flushing River was smaller, easier to clean up, and if extended South could easily host rowing and marathon swimming events. The problem was ripping out most of the fair grounds as well as any road that crossed the park. This would mean millions turning the Long Island Expressway into a tunnel as it crossed the park and eliminating the Van Wyck and other expressways and widening the Grand Central to handle the runoff traffic. So why would a city want to go through all of this trouble just to host the Olympics? For the same reason both World's Fairs were held in the same area, because they are suppose to bring in billions of dollars in revenue. But the truth is that most Olympics, much like the World's Fairs, end up doing the opposite. When cities compete to host the Olympics each sweetens their bids by promising huge expensive arenas and infrastructures which they must make good on if selected. They further spend hundreds of millions on the production of the opening and closing ceremonies, not to mention the money spent on security. It could end up costing a city billions to host an Olympics, far more than they could possibly recover through ticket sales and tourism.

What really drives a mayor to want the Olympics to be held in his city is the prestige it is suppose to bring for those two weeks. They further ask for studies to show the benefits of hosting an Olympics with the usual results of billions in generated revenue. The problem with those studies is that they are based on best case scenarios. If I did a study about the benefits of playing blackjack I could show results that I would make million dollars. But that is a best case scenario where I won every hand and the house did not close down the table the second my winning streak went past a quarter million. In all likelihood if I payed blackjack I would end up losing all the money I bet. In truth most is that most host cities for the Olympics spend decades paying off the costs. But mayors are so convinced that something good will come from hosting the games that they convince themselves that their would be huge benefits. Those benefits could only possibly happen if more tourists showed up than had tickets for events, and continued to show up long after the Olympics closed. Not much of a good argument for cities like New York that gets millions of tourists anyway.

But it is not just costs that the host cities have to deal with. Not only would New York have had to turn Flushing Meadows Park into a river, but would have had to tear down the famous Cyclone and Wonder Wheel at Coney Island along with all it's amusement parks for one of the Olympics venues, build new roads and highway infrastructures to deal with the traffic going to and from the West Side Olympics stadium, and uproot an entire neighborhood with eminent domain so that a secure Olympics village could be built. Not to mention all the places that would be locked down and off limits to local residents for security reasons and the mass traffic tie-ups that will keep people late for work for at least a month. There is also the matter of spiffing up neighborhoods so they do not embarrass the city while the rest of the world is watching. Poor neighborhoods within eye-shot of the Olympics events will be redeveloped. Unfortunately the only way for this to happen in that short of a time frame would need the city to take property through eminent domain and turn it over to private developers to build brand new buildings, most likely high priced luxury housing. This would displace the poor, most likely resulting in many ending up homeless. This has been the sad case with many other host cities, tearing down the slums and replacing them with buildings the poor and working class could not possibly afford to move into. With such a hassle it is likely that New York and Chicago dodged bullets when they were both turned down by the Olympics committees.