Olympics would bring billions to Boston, study says

Studies predicting how much Boston will benefit from a 2024 Olympics are as wildly inaccurate as cost estimates of paying for the games! Let's pass on this till the problems we have now are addressed.

It's going to look like Biff Tannen's Hill Valley.

To be fair, it's actually "moving your wallet from your left pocket, taking out a few dollars, then moving it to your right pocket."

My guess is (this all, God forbid, if this train wreck actually comes to pass) they'll hold a lottery for tickets. I doubt this lottery will in any way be weighted for locals, so you'll be up against New Yorkers and Californians and others. If you're really REALLY lucky and win the lottery, you might get tickets to a preliminary javelin heat or an early-round table-tennis game between Guatemala and Uzbekistan.

USA Basketball? Gymnastics? The stuff people might want to see? Well, all these multinational corporate sponsors have a lot of friends and relatives, and they want to see that stuff too.

...just like every other city that's hosted a Paralympic Games. Can you say Sochi?

An important part of the picture is that City Communications/Notices need to be available in PlainText. In order to preserve the City Seal and the Stamp of the City Clerk many City Communications/Notices are images rather than being a searchable, usable text to speech screenreader compatible communications/notices http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_reader

Advocate!... No more excluding the part of our population using text to speech screenreaders.

An example of a bad example
http://www.cityofboston.gov/cityclerk/docs/SKMBT_42015031721460-572247.pdf

X 1,000,000

Ultimately the amount of revenue we all have access to, that we all divide up, is a function of how many reasons there are for people from *elsewhere* to come here to spend money.

Unless you greatly stretch the meaning of the phrase "come here to spend money", that's just not true. It is true that a robust economy depends on customers from outside your city/region/whatever, or we're all just taking in each other's washing. But who says they have to "come here"? If your business is financial services, or software, or most manufactured goods, your customers aren't going to "come here" -- they're going to stay there, buy your products and use your services, the revenue comes in and the customers stay where they are. That's called a normal economy. What you're talking about? That's a tourist resort.

The tourists who come for the Games will, to be sure, stay in local hotels and eat in local restaurants (notwithstanding the gargantuan McDonald's the leading IOC sponsor will make us build). All money from outside coming into the local economy, yes, but significantly more than in a typical tourist summer?

And Olympic tourists probably aren't here to spend much money at local museums, bookstores, off-the-beaten-path bistros - you know, the places that help make this city as world-class as those of us who aren't on the 2024 committee want it to be, and the places that the tourists in a normal year will hit. They're going to watch the shot put and gymnastics, go to Legal Seafood or worse, and when they get back to Chicago or Dallas or Brussels or Osaka, they won't have anything to encourage their friends to put Boston on their gotta-visit list.

My quick response:

The difference is that the balance of permanent funding resources, displacement of existing homes and businesses, and handing urban planning over to the IOC (which has final say and can change *any* plans that Boston2024 develops, even after the plans are okay'd and we're all on the hook) is, in my opinion, WAY out of sync with the proposed benefits.

Build a museum? That takes funding and disruption for a year or so, but it becomes a (hopefully) permanent part of the tourism and cultural industry and will have a continued impact on tourism $.

Host a major sports competition like Head of the Charles? Yeah, it requires road closures for a weekend and other minor headaches, but the infrastructure already exists or was provided by the private (or semi-private) interests that benefit, such as local universities and rowing clubs. It is also an annual event, so the up front costs are mitigated over decades and decades.

Host the Olympics? That will necessarily require an enormous outlay of private and public capital; use of eminent domain to take private businesses and homes away from people that work and live there; change the face of the city in some neighborhoods completely, and all for just one three-week period so that people who don't live here and will likely never return here get to have some fun.

The organizers like to make grand promises of new housing and grand urban development that will benefit Boston residents long after the games, but the actual empirical evidence from every other modern Olympic games shows the exact opposite. I have lots of civic pride, but the fact is I do not trust the MENSA group at Boston2024 to be able to do what literally no other city that has hosted the games since the '80s has been able to do. They keep citing LA in '84, but that was an aberration (too long to get into here) and should never be used as a comparison. They say that Salt Lake City was "profitable," but conveniently leave out the fact that Mitt had to beg for $1.57 billion in federal bailout to cover the losses so that the $100m in "profit" could exist.

The T requires $14 billion in investments to be truly updated and modernized for the future. Boston2024 is saying the games will cost anywhere from $4.7 billion to $11 billion or more, depending on how its estimated and who you ask. If you really think that the bulk of the available money that you refer to will go to fixing regional problems, rather than just localized issues to meet the requirements of the IOC in the immediate areas near the venues, then you are being hoodwinked.

And to put some of the numbers into perspective, if you counted one dollar bill every second, you would get to a million dollars in eleven and a half *days*. To get to a billion dollars would take you almost thirty two *years*.

So it comes down to this: We have a finite amount of resources. Where do we spend those resources so that we get the best return? Do we throw it all at one single party for one month? Or do we fix systemic issues that were exacerbated by the last boondoggle and empty promises that were made to get it passed (see: Big Dig)? Do we look at how the region will be developed with a long-term lense, a la what Somerville is doing with Assembly and Union Squares (not perfect, but worth a look)? Or do we bet the entire bank on one temporary event?

Thoughtful replies, thanks.