Organizers of Los Angeles, California’s 2024 Olympic bid have projected a $161 million surplus on hosting the event, with a key city council vote coming up this week, according to USA Today.
Los Angeles appears to be the best bet for a U.S. bid in 2024 after the selected Boston bid dropped out over financial concerns.
The high cost of hosting the Olympic Games has made it difficult for bids to get past local opposition to the costs. Los Angeles hopes to stem that concern with a plan it expects to be half a billion dollars cheaper than Boston’s, based on L.A.’s already-existing infrastructure.
The surplus will come from television broadcast revenues, ticket sales and sponsorships, the bid says.
USA Today reports that the Los Angeles plan expects spending to be at about $4.1 billion. Boston’s was projected at $4.5 billion. The difference is largely in facilities, where L.A. will mostly have to upgrade and renovate instead of building entirely new facilities.
The L.A. bid plans to use the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, spending $800 million on upgrading its seating and other features, though a large portion of those costs would come from the University of Southern California, which plays its college football games in the Coliseum.
Los Angeles hosted the 1932 and 1984 Olympics, and those events are generally remembered fondly by residents, unlike recent Olympic Games that have had mixed reviews, financially speaking, for nations like Russia (the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics) and Great Britain (the 2012 London Summer Games).
Well, I think in the next decade the trend is the other way. There is a complaint about genfriction a pushed for affordable housing. Also, the city of La is pushing up wages by 2020 for low skilled jobs at 15 an hour which means that several people with lower skills will locate out of the suburbs back to La since the folks with the bucks will moved to the beach areas again and the poorer folks will moved back to LA with the affordable housing pushed by different groups and the state of California Besides the city of LA has some of the cheapest property in greater LA in South Central and East Los Angeles.
I live in L.A., and to say that I’m highly skeptical of a $161 million surplus, or maybe any surplus, is a huge understatement. While the bid may look good on paper, L.A. is already in the midst of an historic building and renovation feeding-frenzy already, where real estate tycoons are becoming billionaires by buying out and renovating old neighborhoods, and life-long residents are being priced out and relegated to distant suburbs. The Coliseum, for example, is close to some of the most neglected and poverty-stricken neighborhoods in the city; and it’s unlikely that its residents or small businesses would benefit from this, (as they did not in 1984), and more likely that some of them would be forced out… Read more »