Everything we have been told about the Olympic legacy turns out to be bunkum. The games are supposed to encourage us to play sport; they are meant to produce resounding economic benefits and help the poor. It’s all untrue. As the evictions in London begin, a new report shows that the only certain Olympic legacy is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
A paper published by the London Assembly last month found that “long-term unemployed and workless communities were largely unaffected [by better job prospects] by the staging of the games in each of the four previous host cities”.
Far more damning is a study released last week by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions. In every city it examined, the Olympic Games — accidentally or deliberately — have become a catalyst for mass evictions and impoverishment. Since the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, more than two million people have been driven from their homes to make way for the Olympics. The games have become a licence for land grabs.
The 1988 games are widely seen as a great success. But they were used by the military dictatorship to throw 720Â 000 people out of their homes; those who tried to resist were beaten by thugs and imprisoned; tenants were evicted without notice and left to freeze (some survived by digging caves into a motorway embankment); street vendors were banned; homeless people, those with mental health problems, alcoholics and beggars were rounded up and put into a prison camp. The world saw nothing of this: just a glossy new city full of glossy new people.
Barcelona’s Olympics, in 1992, though much less destructive than Seoul’s, were also used to cleanse the city. Roma communities were evicted and dispersed. The council produced a plan to “clean the streets of beggars, prostitutes, street sellers and swindlers” and “annoying passers-by”.
Between 1986 and 1992 house prices rose by 240% as the Olympic districts were gentrified, while the public housing stock fell by 76%. There was no consultation before the building began — the games were too urgent and important. About 59Â 000 people were driven out of the city by rising prices.
Even before the 1996 Olympics, Atlanta was one of the most segregated cities in the United States. But the games gave the clique of white developers who ran them an excuse to engineer a new ethnic cleansing programme. Without any democratic process, about 30Â 000 families were evicted. They issued “quality of life ordinances”, which criminalised people who begged or slept rough.
The police were given pre-printed arrest citations bearing the words “African-American, male, homeless” — they just had to fill in the name, charge and date. In the year before the Olympics they arrested 9Â 000 homeless people. Many were locked up without trial until the games were over; others were harassed until they left the city.
In Beijing, 1,25million people have already been displaced to make way for the Olympics, and another quarter of a million are due to be evicted. Like the people of Seoul, they have been threatened and beaten if they resist. Housing activists have been imprisoned, too. Beggars, vagrants and hawkers have been rounded up and sentenced to “re-education through labour”.
London is about to establish its credentials as a true Olympic city by evicting Gypsies and travellers from Clays Lane in Newham and Waterden Crescent in Hackney: 430 people will be thrown out of the Clays Lane housing co-op and a 100-year-old allotment (shared vegetable garden) will be destroyed to make way for a concrete path that will be used for four weeks. A total of 9Â 000 new homes will be built for the games, but far more will be lost to the poor through booming prices, which are rising much faster around the Olympic site than elsewhere in London. The buy-to-let vultures have already landed.
The International Olympic Committee raises no objection to any of this. It lays down rigid criteria for cities hosting the games, but these do not include housing rights. City authorities want to run the games for two reasons: to enhance their prestige and to permit them to carry out schemes that would never otherwise be approved. The Olympic bulldozer clears all objections out of the way.
None of this is an argument against the Olympic Games. It is an argument against moving them every four years. Let them stay in a city where the damage has already been done. And let it be anywhere but here. — Â