It was a sunny morning in mid-June and the athletes’ village for the Summer Olympics, in Seine-Saint-Denis, just outside Paris, was still nominally under construction. Workers sweated in hard hats and yellow vests, watching over the empty site. Built in the midst of various housing developments, the village sprawls across 128 riverine acres.
Several dozen new, mostly beige, timber-frame apartment blocks, pleasant but banal, spill down to a tree-lined promenade along the Seine. Luc Besson’s former film studio complex, in a converted power plant, has been partly turned into the athletes’ mess hall . Next door, another power plant, gut renovated and whitewashed, which now houses a gym, will become office space for 2,500 civil servants in France’s Ministry of the Interior after the Games are done.
Every couple of years, when another Olympics rolls around, a familiar story is recycled: The Games are a way for host cities to fast-track infrastructure and urban-redevelopment projects. But there is surprisingly little evidence to back this story up and examples galore suggesting the reverse . Athens , which splurged on white elephant arenas in 2004 for sports that few Greeks play, stirred a rush of national pride but incurred debts that helped fuel an economic meltdown with ripple effects across Europe.
Rio threw itself a giant party in 2016, then had to sell off its Olympic Village at a discount. During a different era — before the costs of staging the Olympics rose to the.