The Dark Secrets Olympic Host Cities Desperately Hide

David Goldblatt, a British sports writer, broadcaster, and academic, highlights the ambitious mission statement of the Paris 2024 Olympics, which claims that sports can have a transformative impact on education, health, and social inclusion. However, the power of sports seems to neglect the pressing issues of housing and homelessness.

David Goldblatt

In September, Parisian officials and the police have been actively dismantling homeless encampments and relocating individuals without housing away from the French capital. Simultaneously, the first high-end apartments in the Olympic Village have already been put up for sale.

The government housing department claims that the relocation plan intends to alleviate the burden in the urban area and provide better support for the homeless in the provinces. Both the department and Paris 2024 organizers assert that this plan is unrelated to the forthcoming Games.

However, when considering the historical context, it seems that Paris is following a familiar pattern of clearing out undesirable elements from urban spaces before the games, with a focus on providing housing to those who are already well-off.

In the end, the Olympic Games serve as a televised event that host cities utilize to promote themselves and justify urban redevelopment programs, despite the discourse surrounding social responsibility. The former necessitates a curated urban setting that obscures any visible signs of social inequality and dysfunction. As for the latter, it predominantly relies on private developers for implementation, prioritizing profit over adequately addressing housing requirements.

The dark past of purging urban areas

Prior to hosting the 1936 games, Berlin subjected its Roma community to arrests, internment, and forced relocation to a prison camp located in the distant suburb of Berlin-Marzahn.

In preparation for Tokyo 1964, law enforcement apprehended numerous recognized pickpockets, relocated homeless individuals from the parks, and requested that notorious yakuza groups dispatch their most conspicuous members on an extended vacation elsewhere.

A Japanese policeman checks the signs to be used during the opening parade at the Olympic Games in Tokyo, 1964.

Douglas Miller/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The organisers of the 1980 Moscow games made a commitment to "rid Moscow of persistent alcoholics and drug addicts," resulting in many of them being relocated far outside the city's perimeter.

During the 1984 games in Los Angeles, the LAPD used the event as an opportunity to replenish its weapons inventory and subsequently engaged in relentless and aggressive crackdowns on Black and Latino youth as well as the homeless population in the vicinity of Olympic venues. Similar patterns are emerging for LA 2028, as the LAPD has already begun targeting homeless encampments in the city through sweeps.

Atlanta's Shame:

However, it was during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta when a more aggressive approach was taken towards addressing the issue of homelessness. In an attempt to remove the homeless population, public funds were used to transport them on buses with one-way tickets to their respective places of origin.

Local laws were modified to make it illegal to recline in public, to be present in a parking lot without possessing a car, and to linger in any location. This ensured that the authorities could evacuate the substantial number of homeless individuals from the city center.

Police officers stand guard at the rowing and kayak competitions venue at Lake Lanier near Gainesville, Georgia, ahead of the 1996 Olympic Games.

Charles Platiau/Reuters

Residents were relocated, often multiple times,

The gargantuan urban redevelopment programs that accompanied the Seoul 1988 and Beijing 2008 Olympics required the displacement of approximately 720,000 and over 1.25 million people respectively. These individuals were mostly from the poorest and oldest parts of the cities, as estimated by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE).

Since then, no other event has quite reached this scale. However, Rio de Janeiro, which hosted the Pan American Games, the 2014 World Cup, and the 2016 Olympics, displaced more than 75,000 people between 2009 and 2016. Data from Rio de Janeiro's City Council reveals that these displacements often came with inadequate compensation and subpar offers of social housing, which were usually located far from their original homes.

Rio de Janeiro's mostly abandoned Olympic aquatics stadium, pictured in the year following the 2016 games in Brazil.

Tokyo 2020 caused the relocation of numerous households. However, what is particularly cruel is that the reconstruction of the national stadium forced several elderly individuals, who had already been displaced for the 1964 games, to be moved once again over fifty years later.

Fast forward to the preparations for the 2024 Olympics, and Paris has made minimal additions to its infrastructure, resulting in limited relocations. Nevertheless, the construction of the new media centre necessitated the removal of a valuable portion of urban woodland, while the development of the new aquatics centre resulted in the unfortunate elimination of cherished community gardens.

And there are cities that executed these endeavors more effectively.

The Olympics can proudly assert that the construction of an Olympic Village contributes to the host city's housing inventory, and a few have managed to leave a favorable lasting impact. Helsinki, for instance, constructed the inaugural permanent Olympic Village in 1952, thereby establishing a thriving and architecturally renowned community of affordable housing. Similarly, following the conclusion of the 1956 games, Melbourne generously allocated the majority of its residential units to families with low incomes.

The Japan delegation attend the athlete village entering ceremony ahead of the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games in Australia.

The Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images

The gentrification game

The poor and homeless have not benefited significantly from these developments. Mexico City's residential towers were primarily given to middle-class civil servants in 1968. Similarly, Barcelona's 1992 Olympic Village became the focal point of beachfront gentrification and exorbitantly high housing prices. Rio had intended for the same outcome with the Olympic park, but it remains virtually deserted today.

The London 2012 Olympic Village had a limited impact on social housing, and there has been a lack of accessible properties in the surrounding post-Olympic developments. Despite promises from organizers that half of the planned 9,000 new homes in the Olympic Park would be affordable, only a small number of units have actually been offered at affordable rents, as reported by the BBC. These failures have resulted in marginalized voices being disproportionately affected.

After the 2004 games, Athens made the decision to assign approximately 90% of its flats to households in dire poverty or with significant health and disability challenges through a lottery system. By 2015, the Olympic Village that had been repurposed experienced a staggering 60% unemployment rate. Additionally, it had almost no public transportation connections, a shopping center that had practically ceased operations, and a few of the limited schools and nurseries where the children of the residents attended classes in Portakabins.

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Unhoused people camp in Paris' City Hall Square to assert their right to housing, in November 2022.

Urman Lionel/ABACA/Shutterstock

Paris is taking action to improve by choosing the run-down yet accessible location of St-Denis, constructing a new metro station, and committing to socially allocated infrastructure. However, London had also made similar promises in the past.

Why is it that the Olympic Games consistently struggle with these issues? Surprisingly, the official history of the International Olympic Committees (IOCs) fails to address these concerns.

The power and influence of marginal groups, the unhoused, and their allies in the anti-Olympic movements that have emerged in recent decades are simply unable to match the combined forces of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), national and city governments, media corporations, and real estate capital who orchestrate the spectacle. As long as this dynamic remains unchanged, future Olympic Games will likely continue to unfold in a similar fashion.