Estimated cost of 2028 Los Angeles Olympics jumps to $6.9B
latimes.com
latimes.com
The budget will definitely keep multiplying until it's at least double digits. The initial budget was a fantasy.
LA has hosted the Olympics several times and there members of the last organizing committee on the 2028 committee. They know what costs to anticipate and plan for...
And why would anyone expect those on government contracts.
There are some LA Metro improvements being done but they were planned and tax introduced before the Olympic win, I believe.
However, LAX is being redone, both terminal-by-terminal, and with a connector to transit and car rentals. One place to go for a summary is: https://www.lawa.org/en/connectinglax/lamp-news -- the current round of modernization is expected to be done by 2023.
The city of LA's population was about 3 million in 1984 and now it's about 4 million. The surrounding cities (which are often hard to distinguish from LA itself) have grown too. Road and freeway expansion have not kept pace. Car traffic has become far heavier.
In 1984, the events were spread all over the place. They'll probably do something similar in 2028.
Will people be able to drive their rental cars and take their Ubers in a timely manner to the drop-off points for these dispersed events?
Will the city and county governments and the MTA add public transport in an intelligent and sufficient way to eliminate the need or desire for large amounts of private transportation? (Answer: no)
https://la.curbed.com/2017/8/4/16098474/olympics-transit-fut...
Something is really wrong with the world when a city throwing around billions of dollars for a sports competition thinks just moving homeless people out of the way is an ethical answer to the problem.
If there was anyone in the decision making process with empathy they might run "slightly overbudget" by a few hundred million to build a hospital, rehab center, and public housing development to get those homeless off the streets permanently.
That being said, LA's homeless problem is largely due to the homeless rejecting housing, rehab, drug treatment, etc. In CA, a person cannot be committed to rehab or treatment against their will. This is the single largest factor behind why CA's homeless problem is so much worse than comparable locations.
Empathy won't solve anything until you convince the homeless "advocates" that rehab and housing is more important than the "freedom" of the homeless to do drugs and wreck their lives.
You are correct, though I'd shift the focus slightly to mental illness. Mentally ill homeless in LA are deemed competent to decide their own welfare, but not face criminal charges. Logically both or neither of those must be true. Leaving a giant gaping hole of "nothing can be done" in any long-term solution.
It's a private organization that contracted with another private organization with the support of the local governments and populace.
It helps to look at actual history instead of projecting tropes.
They used student housing at a UCLA (and USC?) for Olympic Village. That had plenty of capacity because a lot of students go home during the summer break.
Basically, the Olympics wasn't a lot more than Los Angeles normally handles, so I'm not surprised it went off well.
One time in 1932 (as if that matters at all today) and another time in 1984. Just security wise 1984 is vastly different than today. As are all sorts of employment issues and things that are done differently today than in the 1980's. I owned a company in the 80's and the things that you could 'get away with' (for lack of a better way to put it) have no resemblance to a company today. Sure tech has greatly advanced but it's an entirely different 'plan with zero failure' than it was back then (and honestly 1930's does not even count back then people dying in construction was a cost of doing business/construction).
Another problem in public policy is that a lot of major infrastructure/work would never be implemented if the public knew the end price tag at the start.
What an incredible waste.
Brindenstine has talked about having corporations sponsor missions before (e.g. the Doritos® ISS Crew Resupply Mission or the Mars Candy Company Rover). However there hasn't been much movement on that front, and I doubt that NASA's sponsorships would be as profitable. Imagine if IBM sponsors a rocket that self destructs after a computer glitch— it would be awkward for them and not good marketing for Watson.
The Olympics are also planning on making a billion dollars or so from ticket sales. I think NASA charges $50 or so for tickets to watch a launch at the cape. At the Olympics, some tickets may be that cheap or cheaper (e.g. the Slovenia vs South Sudan handball match, no offense to either of those countries). However tickets for more popular events like the opening ceremonies are going to exceed $1000.
The Olympics also has more events within a single year than NASA. There may be a few dozen launches a year, and they're hard to sell tickets for since most launch attempts get scrubbed/rescheduled at least once and they're not always in accessible locations. Meanwhile, the Olympics will have hundreds of events and you can be reasonably confident that they will happen on the same day that's on your ticket.
We're not leaving this planet for a long time yet. Even if we do, it's not desirable to abandon Earth, it's vastly superior to all other practical options we have. We're going to have to continue to try to co-exist and avoid any further world wars. $4b or $5b per year for a large gathering of the sort the Olympics represents, is dirt cheap if it lends even a tiny boost to global peace between nations.
Keeping in mind this isn't actually an either or situation. It's obviously not either NASA's budget, or putting on the Olympics at a $20b cost. We - humanity - can in fact afford to do both.
I'd vote for reducing NASA's annual budget by 19% (~$4b per year) to pay for the Olympics, if that was the only option. That's a very easy decision.
It's one of the few things that most of humanity does together. Over a billion people watch some part of the Olympics globally. It's a modest, important pillar of peaceful co-existence between nations and peoples broadly. We shoud do more things together in that spirit. Maintaining peace between the 195 nations is more important than NASA's continued operation, by several orders of magnitude.
For another example, the UN is also more important than NASA (the UN has a core budget comparable to an annualized cost of the Olympics). I'm not much of a fan of the UN, and I still recognize that it serves an important purpose of promoting cooperation and discussion between nations and would be almost entirely impossible to replace today.
Competitive sport is critically important to humanity and arguably always has been in some form or another. Sometimes people that don't love sport generally, entirely fail to understand what it accomplishes and how important it is.
If NASA goes away (and yes, it would obviously be a huge loss), a dozen other countries will continue with various space efforts. How many things do that many nations cooperate together on in an overwhelmingly positive spirit other than the Olympics?
Rockets don't make people punch other people in the face. Sports really do.
Rank and file people seeing the world come together and work towards a common goal, even on something as "trivial" as a game, humanizes those different people. And yes, it sometimes results in an occasional fight, but it's much better than the kinds of fights that occur which involve rockets.
* two people of different ethnicities holding hands
* cold fusion
Need I remind you we discovered fusion to kill people?
Sexism? I hope you do realize that you are actually defeating your own argument here, since women are segregated and compete separately.
Trans-men, who were not even top athletes among biological men, already dominate biological women's competition.
$20B would put an American on the moon and maybe even put an American on mars, surely that would get the world's attention.
Want peace? Let's detonate a nuclear bomb in space and get people to recognize the destructive potential of our current arms.
The olympics is designed to get people to tune in, NASA is set up to create knowledge. Judging both organizations by outcomes that only the olmpyics is concerned about is a great way to obfuscate NASA's contributions.
IMO, that's an argument against Olympics, not for it.
I'm far from calling myself an environmentalist, but consider all the waste and pollution produced by people flying in from all over the world. The negative impact is significant.
If your country is already obscenely rich and you're literally reduced to begging tourists to please stay away what is the point of hosting the Olympics?
I'd like to know how much security alone ends up costing. London 2012 security ended up costing over £1 billion. I can't see a US city spending less.
Not much of a news story here - wait four years, inflation goes up - when you're looking at 6b, 700m in inflation seems reasonable with the state of inflation in the economy.
Could you provide a reference there? A 10%+ increase over four years seems excessive.
It comes out to about 2% a year.
Inflation is usually targeted between 2% and 2.5%. So an estimated 10% over four years seems reasonable.
Los Angeles of all cities (based on history) has a good chance of running a profitable Olympics.
>The bid contains nothing in the way of improved infrastructure, relying instead on public transportation projects already in the works. But LA 2028 faces challenges.
And they're planning on reusing buildings.
>Local organizers plan to use existing venues such as Staples Center, Pauley Pavilion and the Rose Bowl. Only a few temporary facilities will be needed at relatively little cost.
And they don't know what they're spending the money on.
>Organizers have been talking with City Council members about where to spend the money and are expected to present a plan next fall.
But that was a rare exception, as far as I can tell. Most Olympic cities appear to have that kind of effect as a goal and fall short. I read a proposal a while back that the summer Olympics just get permanently moved to Greece and that sounds like a great idea to me.
Atlanta also used its Olympics to modernize the city, and much of that infrastructure still remains.
Surprisingly, LA in the past did not use the Olympics to modernize the city. Its bids were submitted on the basis of largely not building anything for the Games, because every time LA's bid on the Olympics, the Games have been out of favor due to the enormous costs of hosting. (For the 1932 games, LA was unopposed.) LA's success in hosting profitable Olympics without much building is, quite ironically, one of the biggest factors in other cities thinking that they could also host the Games.
LA, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Vancouver, Calgary, London, Beijing, etc. all did quite well with the olympics in the past.
People making these decisions don’t care if it’s a net loss to other people as long as they personally benifit. As long as the rest of the US subsidies it, LA can still profit.
"The 1984 Summer Olympics are widely considered to be the most financially successful modern Olympics[4] and serve as an example of how to run the model Olympic Games. As a result of low construction costs, coupled with a reliance on private corporate funding,[5] the 1984 Olympic Games generated a profit of more than $250 million."
Peter Ueberroth is still alive, perhaps he could consult.
1) Cost increases over the past year have all been to account for estimated inflation between now and 2028. This is deliberate--the committee wants to have a realistic budget to target revenue goals against, not a fairy-tail budget, even if it looks bad early on.
2) LA is not building many new facilities for the Olympics. Almost all of the facilities will be existing facilities, like Staples, the United Airlines LA Coliseum, the Rams/Chargers(?) stadium, the pools at Loyola Marymount, UCLA and USC, the tracks and fields at all three colleges, the port of Long Beach, Santa Monica Beach, etc. Athletes will be housed at UCLA and USC (again), and the media center will be paid for and built by NBC largely at existing facilities.
The facilities that will need to be built: a velodrome for indoor cycling. A rock wall for the climbing events, location undetermined, but which is expected to remain after the event. BMX courses in Big Bear, which the resorts there have said they will maintain after the event depending on location.
3) Tax dollars are not being wasted on this event. The purpose of the budget is to raise private funding, i.e., donations or sponsorships. LA 2028 is working with NBC (first time in history organizers have worked with broadcasters) to sell a joint package so that they aren't competing against the broadcaster.
The lack of tax dollars also means that it's not a choice between the Olympics and housing, etc. In fact, the Olympics are spurring the use of tax dollars on housing and transportation infrastructure, including the acceleration of nearly 40 years of public transit building into 12 years. The public transit lines planned have already led to thousands of new housing units being built in LA county in proximity to those lines.
4) The LA Olympics have been profitable. Every. Single. Time. The 84 Olympics are still the most profitable in history by whatever metric you use, especially once adjusted for inflation. The returns from the 84 Olympics are still being used to fund K12 athletics today. As in 84 and 32, LA wasn't the first choice for the Olympics and its plan every time has been the overwhelming re-use of existing facilities. (Even the LA Coliseum was built more than a decade before the Olympics as a war memorial.)
5) LA is capable of holding an Olympics next year, if necessary. The only other city with sufficient facilities to hold an event of this magnitude on such short notice is London, which has maintained most of its facilities from the 2012 Games.
Staples Center gets a pass since it's been Staples since it opened.
https://www.latimes.com/sports/usc/la-sp-united-airlines-col...
There may also be some restrictions on changing signage due to historical status.
You can leave this sort of thing out in order to both strengthen your own points and improve the quality of discussion here. Winning all-round.
Every city is capable of hosting the Olympics without subsidizing the efforts of the organizers. It's simple: Charge more for tickets to attend, charge for press passes.
If it was profitable, the Olympic committee would be funding the events themselves, not asking for large handouts from municipalities.
This is simply not true. The Rio, Athens, Sochi, and South Korean games were unable to sell the majority of their tickets at face value. Even London had trouble selling all of its tickets and gave entire blocks free to schoolchildren (though this was an issue primarily for preliminary and early rounds for multi-stage competitions and not at all an issue for marquee events). Increasing ticket prices would simply have resulted in even fewer ticket sales.
If it was profitable, the Olympic committee would be funding the events themselves, not asking for large handouts from municipalities.
Many of the Games have been profitable...at least the well-run ones. The IOC also does fund part of the costs of each Olympics, as well as numerous events that serve as trials for Olympic placement, and sporting federations that govern Olympic sports. The IOC is in fact one of the largest funders of organized amateur sports competitions in the world.
The Olympic committee's inability to accurately forecast demand does nothing to refute my statement. Overly (and most likely, IMO, fraudulent) optimistic revenue projections are a symptom of externalizing the cost of the event.
You don't need to sell over priced tickets (or many, many tickets) if your costs are low. If it costs billions and billions of dollars, yeah, you gotta sell lots of tickets. Seems like any decently size university could host summer olympic games. The question then comes down to capacity. If only 20k people can attend, that dictates a certain price per ticket. They still have television rights, etc. If it turns out not to be profitable, then that's an accurate gauge of how important it is to society.
Scale matters. The Olympics draw millions of attendees: Atlanta sold 8 million tickets; London sold 11 million. Moreover, there are over 100 different sports in the Olympics, most of which have multiple rounds of competition (except for the long-distance races like the marathon), requiring several thousand hours of competition.
No university has the facilities for all of the Olympic events. No university has the space to hold all of the events within a two-week time-frame (or even a two month time-frame). No university in the world can handle those sorts of crowds.
And finally, the crowd sizes you suggest - 20k, are generally smaller than the crowds that attend annual specialty regional events like the Mt Sac Relays or Penn State Open.
To who? Why should a city invite 10's of millions of people to watch competitors?
If you can generative the same profit with 20k more expensive tickets, why invite 20 million? Just so people can spend their money in your town? Money they could have spent on something else.
Seems like such a colossal waste of public funds.
Don't you wonder why the IOC or the LA organising committee aren't volunteers?
They have their beauty pageant/silent auction/bid every two years, where cities across the world bid against each other for a single year Olympic event, and the process is riddled with bribery. The NFL (and all other pro sports teams) at least sign a multi-decade contract. Still a terrible deal for tax payers, but not as bad as the Olympics.
More seriously: this always happens; what’s the point of hosting an olympics anyway? Even a permanent location would be better.
Why should we care who the fastest runner on the planet is? Or the fastest cyclist? In what way does it enhance the lives of the great majority of people?
My point is that bidding your city to host the olympics, or other such activities, usually ends up not making anybody happy.
These projects include the Subway to UCLA, the LAX People Mover and Metro connector, the "Regional Connector" downtown, the extension of the Gold Line in the San Gabriel Valley, hundreds of miles of bike lanes, and various freeway upgrades. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-eight_by_%2728)
1. Economic Impact of the London 2012 Olympics (https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/handle/2100/994)
2. Analysis of Impacts on China's Economy of 2008 Beijing Olympic Games (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5369536)
3. The Economics of Hosting the Olympic Games (https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/economics-hosting-olympic-g...)
4. Google Scholar Search: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C11&q=eco...
I'd heard the Athens Summer Olympics was a disaster but putting a number on it is pretty sobering.
Getting quality trained human resources is the biggest dividend. Use the facilities to train top quality athletes, or you have to get them from other countries.
Even in other projects. Like say space projects, one of the biggest goals of any big budget project is to train human resources.
It takes billions to produce rocket scientists, 400m gold medal swimmers.
There are more than ethical reasons why they put ejector seats in fighter planes. Training human resources and producing the right people for the job is an expensive enterprise, replacing them is even more expensive and harder.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/gallery/2014/aug/13/abando...
It’s not profit by the traditional meaning of having cash in pocket. Why not just invest in youth sports and bypass the whole investment charade? I still think it’s a bad use of money but it’s better than hosting an infamously corrupt body in a different city every 2 years to MAYBE generate some youth sports profits as happened in 84.
First, and importantly -- both previous LA Olympics generated real profits, as in, actual economic profits. Not unicorn fantasy profits like most tech companies embrace (ahem Groupon, Uber, Twitter, Tesla, etc.).
Second--while you may not care about the Olympics or sports, literally billions of people around the world--and millions of people in Los Angeles--do care about the Games. The Games are both a celebration of sport, health, community, unity, and a vessel for raising money to fund youth athletics.
Sure, and what did they spend it on? Was it worth the displacement? Did they build more public housing? Of course not.
> Second--while you may not care about the Olympics or sports, literally billions of people around the world--and millions of people in Los Angeles--do care about the Games. The Games are both a celebration of sport, health, community, unity, and a vessel for raising money to fund youth athletics.
LA could also house the homeless—that would be something to actually celebrate. Right now, the Olympics are a celebration of capital.
The City of Los Angeles has never organized an Olympics. A private group, located in the city of Los Angeles, organized an Olympics in cooperation with various cities in Los Angeles County, including the city of Los Angeles.
The private group acquired the right to put on this event in part by pledging that profits from the event would go toward funding youth sports, which was one of the options provided by the event licensor (the IOC).
The private group earned $250 million in profits on the event, after paying for expenses like the costs of police and fire personnel working the Games. That profit was then used toward its contractually-obligated purpose of funding youth sports.
Sure, and what did they spend it on? Was it worth the displacement? Did they build more public housing? Of course not.
No people were displaced by the LA Olympics, because no housing was torn down to construct Olympic facilities, because only 1 or 2 facilities were built for the 32 and 84 Olympics.
No public housing was built, because the Olympics were put on by a private organization. However, important to note: private housing was used for the Olympics. Specifically, USC's then-new student housing was used to house athletes before students moved in. The construction of student housing freed up hundreds of houses around the campus for occupation by lower-income residents.
LA could also house the homeless—that would be something to actually celebrate.
LA could house the homeless. The problem is that a lot of them don't want to be housed because it means giving up alcohol or drugs, or taking their medication, so thousands of shelter beds go unused every night.
None of that would be part of LA 2028’s budget "
The problem with 'budgets' for things like this is that they show exactly what you want them to show.
The current leaders want to show that the project is cheap and on budget, so of course that new road isn't included in the budget. The next leaders will want to show how bad the previous incumbents were with finances for the Olympics, so of course that road will be included in the budget.
The other option would be to host different sports in different countries, so the burden get's spread out more. It's kind of ridiculous that countries have to build artificial rivers now and all kinds of ridiculous crap. Why not host the kayaking somewhere there is a natural river they can use.
The U.S. has been pretty good on this front. Salt Lake City nailed it, almost all of the major additions are still actively used by the community (hockey, cross country skiing, ski jumping, etc).
Still not sure that alone makes it a good choice, but I expect a lot will be in use in the future.
Only a handful of facilities need to be purpose-built for the games, like a velodrome for indoor cycling, and it is expected that those facilities will be kept after the games.
They're reusing existing stadiums:
Coliseum (seats ~80k and previously featured in 1932 and 1984 Olympics)
New Rams stadium in Inglewood (seats ~80k. Being built privately with relatively small indirect subsidies)
Rose Bowl (seats ~90k)
And smaller preexisting venues (2 soccer stadiums, Staples Center, the beach, the ocean, etc).
There's no new megastadiums being built. When I looked at their budget, I think the biggest facilities expense was $7 million to make an area at the Rams stadium safe for shooting and archery events.
To be interpreted as: It takes multiple revisions of the budget before somebody in the city government was even realistic enough to apply a discount rate to future cash flows.