Walsh sees Hub Olympics bid as city planning opportunity

Boston’s bid for the 2024 Olympics has spurred a range of reactions — vigorous debate, excitement, skepticism and opposition.

Mayor Martin Walsh is hoping for another outcome: long-range city planning.

In a roundtable meeting with journalists last week, Walsh spoke about how he hopes the push for the games, whether or not it is ultimately successful, will help spur infrastructure and development improvements that will benefit the city in the long term, as its backers claim.

“The taxpayer money that goes into an Olympic bid doesn’t go into the Olympics,” Walsh said. “It goes into infrastructure.”

Walsh pointed to the MBTA, which has struggled through years of delayed maintenance, and insisted that there evidently “hasn’t been that catalyst” to get the process moving and that the various players involved need the “urgency of a date” to get started.

In addition to the MBTA, Walsh cited a potential renovation of White Stadium in Franklin Park and modular housing units at the Olympic Athlete’s Village — which organizers say could be sited at UMass Boston — which would be moved later to different parts of the city to increase the housing stock. That would help combat rising rents that are squeezing working families across the city, Walsh said.

To support his argument, Walsh referenced New York’s experience planning for its 2012 Olympic bid, saying that while the city ultimately lost the bid, the planning process helped spur development that transformed the area at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge into a waterfront park.

Need for planning

Olympics opponents remain unconvinced by this argument. Chris Dempsey, co-chair of the volunteer organization No Boston Olympics, says that an Olympic “conversation” will not have the catalyzing effect the mayor claims on any of the three kinds of investment — private, public, or private-public partnerships.

Dempsey says private streams of capital are already flowing into the city “at an unprecedented rate” without the Olympics due to Boston’s attractiveness to investors. On the public funding side, Boston 2024 says on its website that taxpayer dollars related to the Games will “be confined to roadway, transportation and infrastructure improvements, most of which are already planned and are needed with or without the Olympics.”

Dempsey argues that this promise could mean that the games actually “lead to less investment in the long term” because boosters already have told elected officials they do not need new revenue, thus removing the main factor spurring investment in public works projects.

As for public-private partnerships, Dempsey claims that externally-imposed deadlines such as the arbitrary 2024 date “cut both ways,” sometimes causing elected officials and public agencies to make hasty decisions that do not fit within any broader planning framework.

Dempsey says that an urban planning process guided by an outside body like the International Olympic Committee “does force you to build some stuff, but not the stuff you need,” something he describes as a fundamental concern. He argues that if Boston hosted the games, the IOC would ensure that a stadium and Athlete’s Village were built but would have no reason to apply the same pressure for other projects that the city promised the public.

By contrast, Dempsey points to the resident-led process in Boston that stopped construction of the once-planned inner belt highway in 1969. Due to community action, the space eventually was converted into the Southwest Corridor Park that runs through Jamaica Plain, Roxbury and the South End. “We are not nearly so cynical as to think the IOC is needed,” Dempsey said.

James Conway, a Cambridge native who served as a Policy Fellow in the Office of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley during the summer of 2009 when that city was bidding on the 2016 Summer Olympic Games, raised similar concerns. Conway said that in his experience, “the community and the IOC have opposing goals for the event” – the IOC views it as a two-week event while the community views it as a long-term investment. As a result, Conway says, Daley “had to pull back from those community improvements to match the IOC’s strict requirements,” ultimately resulting in public backlash.

Public views

“When push comes to shove, the IOC and its priorities always win when a city is trying to get the games,” Conway concluded.

Currently, Olympics organizers propose using Franklin Park for equestrian events, the Boston Common for volleyball, and Widett Circle — the industrial area between the exit 18 on ramp on I-93 and Dorchester Avenue — for a temporary Olympic stadium.

“All these are proposed venues,” Walsh said. “One thing that’s clear – if they use any of our parks, they’ll be restored to state-of-the-art condition.”

Residents of Boston have several opportunities in the next few weeks to weigh in on the debate. Boston 2024 will have its next Community Advisory Group public meeting on March 24 at 6:30 PM at the UMass Dartmouth Main Auditorium in Dartmouth. The Mayor’s office is also holding public meetings on the Olympic bid. The next two are March 31 at 6:30 PM at Harvard Business School and April 28 at 6:30 PM at Roxbury Community College.