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How America Converted Its 1980 Olympic Village into a Prison

146 points by thisjustinm 10y ago

SolarNet 10y ago
The core idea here was good. Re-purposing these villages after use. Now if only we could do that in the modern day, with support from the IOC, and turn them into something positive. For example turn them into schools, homeless shelters, libraries, something along those lines.
- deleted 10y ago
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- ryanhuff 10y ago
  As part of the Los Angeles 2024 bid, they are supposedly taking a different approach, in that they plan to utilize the existing student housing at UCLA for their athlete village.
  - sjm-lbm 10y ago
    Atlanta used Georgia Tech's campus to house athletes in 1996 (and renovated/added additional dorms as well, at least as I understand it). Honestly, as bad as Atlanta's Olympics look at the time (with commercialism and the bombing, for example), I really think they deserve a lot of credit for using it as an excuse to provide the city with renovations people could use. Hopefully LA can do the same.
    - ja27 10y ago
      They gutted a pretty rough area south of campus and built a lot of new housing for the athlete village. For a while, both Georgia Tech and Georgia State used those buildings as dorms but Georgia State built their own closer to campus and now it's all Georgia Tech property. A lot of the Tech fraternity houses were rented out to media companies and got renovated. Tech did get a lot of use out of the aquatic center and it gets used for many NCAA events. They did finally defuel the Neely nuclear research reactor on campus before the games. I'd wondered how they were going to house athletes next to an experimental reactor. Nothing can excuse that mascot though.
  - tzs 10y ago
    That's not a different approach for Los Angeles. That's the approach they used in the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics, except they used USC that time. They also utilized existing venues for nearly everything, only having to actually build two new venues (a swim center and a velodrome).
- CM30 10y ago
  London seems to have done that after 2012. The stadium is being reused for various sports events and West Ham matches, the Aquatics Centre is a public swimming pool and gym, various other parts were converted in housing and an academy, etc. Of course, the fact it's in a very expensive city where leaving land unused would be commercial suicide helps a bit too.
- BrandonY 10y ago
  The 1996 Atlanta Olympics deliberately built all the athlete housing right next to Georgia Tech's other dorms with exactly this this in mind. Then, in 2007, Georgia Tech had some great new dorms that they would've needed to build anyway. Mind you, from 1996 to 2006, they put Georgia State students in the dorms and bussed them to and from Georgia State, which didn't make a lick of sense, but I give Atlanta's government a lot of credit for very nearly doing something right.
  - quantumhobbit 10y ago
    I didn't live there but I do remember students complaining about the quality of construction. Apparently they weren't built to last.
  - gtk40 10y ago
    It was helpful for Georgia State moving beyond being a commuter school.
- tzs 10y ago
  > The core idea here was good. Re-purposing these villages after use. Even better, hold the Olympics in places where there are already facilities that can temporarily be re-purposed for the Olympics, and then go back to their normal purpose. That's what happened for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. For housing the athletes they used student housing at the University of Southern California. If Los Angeles gets the 2024 Summer Olympics they plan to use student housing at UCLA for athletes and coaches, and student housing at USC for media housing. For athletic venues, only two needed to be built. They built a velodrome and a swim center. For the rest they were able to use facilities already present: LA Memorial Coliseum, LA Memorial Sports Arena, Dodger Stadium, The Forum, Long Beach Convention Center, Rose Bowl, Long Beach Arena, Anaheim Convention Center, along with the athletic facilities at several colleges and universities (UCLA, Cal State LA, USC, Loyola Marymount, Cal State Fullerton, East LA College, Pepperdine). The combination of low construction costs from being able to use so much existing infrastructure, and the use of corporate sponsorship to pay for the things that did need to be built (it was the McDonald's swim stadium and the 7-Eleven velodrome) resulting in the 1984 Olympics running a profit of more than $200 million. I was living in Pasadena at the time. I had expected the Olympics to be a pain in the ass due to increased traffic...but it turned out to have no negative effect that I could see. In retrospect, that should not have been too surprising. There are times of the year where the pro baseball, basketball, American football, and hockey seasons overlap, along with various college sports seasons. One could easily have a day with several team sporting events going on that will each draw a large crowd. On top of that you could have a major concert or two going on. In other words, Los Angeles already can handle many simultaneous major events. The Olympics is bigger than that, but not by anywhere near as big a factor as it would be in cities that do not have so many popular pro and college team sports and so many world class concert venues.
  - chatmasta 10y ago
    That would limit the Olympics to cities that already have modern infrastructure and economies in place. One of the benefits of hosting the Olympics is that it puts the host city in the spotlight when they might never be otherwise.
  - Declanomous 10y ago
- Someone 10y ago
  Doesn't about every Olympics do that with the Olympic village? For example: - London (http://www.eastvillagelondon.co.uk http://www.eastvillagelondon.co.uk): "Welcome to London's newest neighborhood, former athletes' village." - Beijing (http://www.china.org.cn/2008-03/05/content_11646502.htm http://www.china.org.cn/2008-03/05/content_11646502.htm): "Once the Paralympic Games are concluded, the Olympic Village will be taken over by a private development company, which will remodel the apartments into residential buildings" - Athens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Village#List_of_Olympic_Villages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Village#List_of_Olympi...): "The Athens Olympic Village also became a residential area following the Games. Today, the village with a capacity of approximately 10,000 people is in use." - Sydney (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newington,_New_South_Wales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newington,_New_South_Wales): "The Athlete's Village was converted to residential apartments after the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games." That's not schools or libraries, but if you build apartment buildings for 10,000 sportsmen, using them as apartments afterwards simply is the best fit.
- Shivetya 10y ago
  Atlanta did just that. Regardless of the higher poster who only considered a correctional facility but the village was always intended to be used by the local colleges for dorms and that is what happened. The stadiums were put to use by local professional teams the the Olympic Park area still remains mostly in use from the fountains to newly built areas. Even SLC's village went to schools. People still keep downplaying just how isolated Lake Placid as compared to both where people are and where people want to be.
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  In Munich (they had the Olympics in 1972) they are apartment buildings as far as I know. In general, Munich did a great job at using the Olympic facilities later.
barney54 10y ago
Now if they could only put the crooks that run the IOC in prison...
X86BSD 10y ago
Of all the things to convert it to... It could have been a homeless village. But no we would rather expand space to continue to be the worlds largest incarcerator of non violent offenders. Disgusting!
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- panzagl 10y ago
  Not many homeless in Lake Placid. I guess you could ship them there, tell them they can't leave, I wonder if there's a name for a place like that.
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  - HillaryBriss 10y ago
    lol
kafkaesq 10y ago
Being as we've not only basically made mass incarceration into our national sport; but have racked up the gold, year after year in this "sport", since then -- this actually seems a fitting and poetic tribute to our collective character, and what we stand for as a nation in the eyes of the world.
- leijurv 10y ago
  *into
- tn13 10y ago
  Civil forfeitures is another sport that USA always wins at.
  - meric 10y ago
    $5 billion from Civil Forfeiture vs $4 billion from Burglary. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-took-more-stuff-from-people-than-burglars-did-last-year/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
    - sandworm101 10y ago
      Wage theft trumps all: "If these findings in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are generalizable to the rest of the U.S. low-wage workforce of 30 million, wage theft is costing workers more than $50 billion a year." http://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-workers-hundreds/ http://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-w... Contrary to popular belief, wage theft is a criminal act rather than a contractual dispute. Wrongfully withholding or sequestering a person's property is just as illegal as taking it from their hands.
      - tn13 10y ago
        Whoever wrote that does not know what is theft. Theft is when someone forcibly takes away your wealth irrespective of what the law says. Taxation for example is undoubtedly a theft but legalized one and something that most of us don't mind in principle though we might disagree about rates. > This failure to pay what workers are legally entitled to can be called wage theft; That is totally dumb. If a legal entitlement is denied it is a violation of law but not necessarily violation of a person's private property. I have happily worked more than 8 hours for my employer so many times and done unpaid internships happily even though the employer likely broke several labor laws. I think I gained from it. Even more importantly those people who think they are getting a raw deal can leave immediately or sue the employer.
jcbeard 10y ago
Hmm, maybe we should have gone with something more useful...like a free vocational school w/on-site free/low cost daycare and perhaps a primary school? I'm finding the biggest issue with people changing careers is doing so while taking care of kids. Enough free space, and it'd seem like something society would go for...then again, say "tax" and 1/2 the population turns off instantly.
- fluxquanta 10y ago
  There's not enough demand for something like that in this area. As the article states, Lake Placid is basically in the middle of nowhere.
  - jcbeard 10y ago
    You could always make it a live-in vocational school :). I thought they had more people..you're totally right, population of around 2k. Total county population might, but would be a long commute.
    - fluxquanta 10y ago
      North Country Community College in nearby Saranac Lake basically has that market covered, and there are fewer than 40,000 people in all of Essex county. People tend to underestimate how rural things really are up here since we're in "New York". It's a beautiful place to live, but it's also very conservative, not very diverse, and reliant on a few very temperamental economic sectors like tourism.
- sevensor 10y ago
  Maybe that guy from Utah who wants to build a utopian city in Vermont could be persuaded to consider upstate New York instead?
  - spqr0a1 10y ago
    Not likely near lake placid. Many land uses within the Adirondacks require a constitutional amendment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Preserve_%28New_York%29#Article_14 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Preserve_%28New_York%29... Much of central and western new york has a similarly depressed economy without quite that level of regulatory burden. So there's plenty more of upstate to choose from.
fluxquanta 10y ago
I live just a few miles from Lake Placid, and have for most of my life. It's unfortunate, but this area still relies heavily on the correctional system for the local economy. Along with a majority of the manufacturing jobs up here, it too has begun to shrink, however, and it's really turning the North Country (as we call it) into a rural slum. I'm not opposed to downsizing the amount of incarcerated people, for sure, but the void isn't being filled, and many of the communities up here are taking a turn for the worse.
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  Maybe they could hand out cash directly. Using prisons to support a local economy is probably the most inefficient way to go about it.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    If you gave people money, they'd want to do something with it, like improve their home, and they would then run afoul of the various regulations up there. It's probably the most rural and isolated area on the east coast other than northern Maine. I87 had almost zero phone service north of Lake George due to cell tower siting regulations. That only changed because a Orthodox Jewish couple traveling from Montreal senselessly died of exposure after a minor car accident. That incident triggered a big uproar in the community in NYC and elsewhere and led to a change in the rules. All of Northern New York is a "park", and it's impossible to do anything. The State is mostly exempt from its own rules, so prisons are pretty much the only thing that you can build. As a another commenter said, it's a rural ghetto.
- sangnoir 10y ago
  > I'm not opposed to downsizing the amount of incarcerated people, for sure, but the void isn't being filled, and many of the communities up here are taking a turn for the worse. You've just humanized the police unions' "tough against crime" motivation and lobbying for me (only by a bit, I still find it despicable). Is it really a zero-sum game where one community (urban inner city) has to suffer so another one (correctional) doesn't? What is the exchange rate between job losses vs. number of people incarcerated?
randyrand 10y ago
What do you do with 500 dorm rooms in the middle of nowhere? Honestly this seems like the perfect use case. Theres not enough demand at lake placid to use them as apartments.
- fluxquanta 10y ago
  You're not wrong. The only other use case would be to turn it into a college or something, but with North Country Community College and Paul Smith's already nearby, that market was already saturated at the time.
  - deleted 10y ago
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- okreallywtf 10y ago
  It may be a pragmatic approach but thats part of the issue in the Olympics in general - building a lot of stuff (on the public dime) that will likely never have a use again. We're "lucky" enough that we always need more prison space but a much better (and in the long term, more pragmatic) case would be to need less prisons by not incarcerating so many non-violent minor "criminals".
  - mstade 10y ago
    Not disagreeing with you, but would like to offer a counter story. I personality live in what used to be an Olympic villag. Or, more accurately, was supposed to be the Olympic village in the bid for Stockholm as the host city of the 2004 summer olympics. Interestingly, just like the Rio olympics the theme was environmental sustainability. The bid failed, but they went ahead with the plans anyway, and now it's lauded as a major success in urban redevelopment, taking what used to be a run down harbor and factory area which had mostly turned into a really shady part of town, and making it a great place for people to live and work. An old waste dump is now repurposed as a ski slope, and even hosted the Ski World Cup is past winter. While not technically an Olympic development, the idea was always to build a village that could then serve as a new residential area, and goes to show that the olympics can very much be the necessary catalyst in getting major developments off the ground. If IOC wanted to, they could absolutely push for all sorts of change by forming host requirements thereafter. They may want to claim they're non-political, but I don't think that's even possible on the kind of scale they operate.
brudgers 10y ago
One of the first buildings completed for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics was the Atlanta City Detention Center.[1] It was in preparation for arresting the homeless in bulk.[2] [1]: http://www.atlantaga.gov/index.aspx?page=201 http://www.atlantaga.gov/index.aspx?page=201 [2]: http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/01/us/as-olympics-approach-homeless-are-not-feeling-at-home-in-atlanta.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/01/us/as-olympics-approach-ho...
- peterwwillis 10y ago
  Actually much cheaper to give them all bus tickets out of town, like Portland, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, Sarasota, San Diego, San Francisco, NYC, Colorado Springs, Houston, Las Vegas, and other cities have done. But Prisons probably generated more profits.
  - pstuart 10y ago
    Cheaper only for that city. It's fucked up practice.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    There's no private prisons in Atlanta.
  - gcb0 10y ago
    your thinking is not as far from sending then to prison as you might like think it is...
    - peterwwillis 10y ago
      It's not "my thinking". And it can be worse than sending them to prison. Neither are good options.
HillaryBriss 10y ago
Same exact thing happened to the city of Los Angeles after the '84 summer games. Very few get out alive. Good food though.
drawkbox 10y ago
... The protest group STOP encouraged European countries to write letters of disapproval to the U.S. government. They also stressed the stark contrast between international models of criminal justice and the emerging American model—as Holland, Sweden, Japan, England, and others were reducing their use of prisons in favor of community sanctions, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons had doubled its number of prisons in the previous ten years. As controversy peaked in 1979, Ramsey Clark, the former Attorney General under President Lyndon B. Johnson, testified that the controversy about the Lake Placid project wasn’t just about Lake Placid, or the symbolism of the Olympics—this would be a litmus test for the future of incarceration in America. “We are going to be masters of our destiny or the victim,” he told Congress. “It’s precisely the psychology of the prison, that once it is built you believe you have to fill them up.” The people in opposition were right on this one.
- dmix 10y ago
  Interesting, this wasn't just a modern problem. But a long standing issue in American history - even connected to their 1980s Olympics.
bbarn 10y ago
I feel like part of the problem here is the IOC and trying to "win" having the Olympics. A more sensible approach would be temporary housing, akin more to trailers and inexpensive pop up temporaries rather than plush living. These athletes don't need to be treated like royalty. Heck, most of them are used to competing out of cars and cheap motels when on the road because they make so little money. (emphasis on most, not all). Basically something like a FEMA response with a little more class and forethought put into it. Instead we have cities trying to show how grand and massive these buildings will be, rather than how practical and well put on the event can be. I was honestly thrilled when Chicago lost the bid for 2016 to Rio. That chaos the rest of the world is talking about now would be in my back yard, and potentially even worse given the density of our city, and the poor strength of our government.
- Gracana 10y ago
  One of the things they talk about in the article is building structures that can be moved and used elsewhere after the event, which seems like a pretty good solution.
- raisedbyninjas 10y ago
  Movie and TV production has solved this problem with mobile living quarter trailers.
derekfletes 10y ago
right on
- triplesec 10y ago
  just a friendly note as I see you're a newish poster: I know you mean well, but simple 'me too' posts don't really add any information to the conversation and may well get you downvoted. Have another look at the HN posting guidelines because people here are quite particular about keeping a high signal to noise ratio here!
Houshalter 10y ago
What a practical solution. We hear story after story of how hosting the Olympics costs more than it's worth and ruins neighborhoods. Here they found a place that already had many of the facilities needed, and found a way to pay for the cost of building new ones. And it even gave jobs and income to the local economy long afterwards. I really can not understand how anyone could be against this. Of course we all wish the war on drugs would stop, that sentences would be reduced, etc. But until that happens we can't just ignore the problem. Overcrowded prisons are awful and seriously harm the quality of life for the prisoners. Additionally, even with normal population growth, you would eventually need to build new prisons. And significantly reducing the prison population is actually really difficult, as demonstrated by this interactive: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/03/04/how-to-cut-the-prison-population-by-50-percent https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/03/04/how-to-cut-the... Surely this new prison would have been built anyway. And if they had built it someplace else no one would have noticed or cared. Using it to reduce the cost of the Olympics was a very practical solution that didn't change anything.
- int_19h 10y ago
  Symbolism also matters. You want to beat the swords into plowshares, not into shackles, even if there happens to be a higher demand for the latter right now.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  > even with normal population growth, you would eventually need to build new prisons Other countries are shutting down prisons... http://qz.com/644914/the-netherlands-keeps-having-to-close-its-prisons-due-to-lack-of-prisoners/ http://qz.com/644914/the-netherlands-keeps-having-to-close-i... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/11/sweden-closes-prisons-number-inmates-plummets https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/11/sweden-closes-...
okonomiyaki3000 10y ago
Well, the headline says it all, doesn't it?
Zigurd 10y ago
Hosting the Olympics where you already have facilities is ideal, but that's much harder for the winter Olympics. Building athlete housing and spectator housing that can be moved would let you have an Olympic Village without it turning into a ghost town or a prison. Kasita is an attempt at this: https://kasita.com/ https://kasita.com/ But even conventional mobile home manufacturers seem to have taken a hint from the Tiny House movement and are making trailer homes for hipsters: http://www.championhomes.com/park-model-rv http://www.championhomes.com/park-model-rv
tn13 10y ago
Prisons in America is a massive scam and so tightly linked with war on drugs. American government is like the Mafia boss while the City officials acting like henchmen. The first time I read about "civil forfeitures" I felt like someone kicked me in the balls. But here is my favorite "Prison Project" story. Kaiser Steel started a mining project in California in 1942 or so called "Eagle Mountain". A town was built for the workers (around 4k) and it was a very busy town until 1980s. Environment regulation killed the mining business and Kaiser left the place in ruins. State of California then spend millions of dollars to convert the ghost town into a correctional facility in 1988. State could not budget it properly and one insane prison riot that got few people killed the prison was closed. This prison was privately operated and not sure how many people benefited by the whole scam. CA then decided to convert the abandoned mine into a giant landfill (the mining was problematic for environment but somehow the landfill was not!) and after spending few more millions of our money the project of abandoned too or perhaps it is still being planned on paper. The best part is however today the entire ghost town is closed and there are some people appointed just to make sure no one trace-passes over a town that no one wants to live into. I am not even sure who owns the land, the buildings and who is spending the money to keep it fenced etc.
ommunist 10y ago
Wait, 1980 Olympic games were in Moscow, USSR. It was Winter Olympic games that took place in Lake Placid in 1980. I applaud, even the USSR did not built GULAG camps in Olympic villages. What an exciting time we are living in. Democracy, freedom, you know the drill.
ForFreedom 10y ago
May be Brazil can do the same
dmh2000 10y ago
sounds like a good idea to have some future use for olympic infrastructure instead of ending up with rotting hulks. http://www.indiatimes.com/culture/who-we-are/24-abandoned-olympic-venues-in-the-world-that-are-the-biggest-example-of-money-down-the-drain-259876.html http://www.indiatimes.com/culture/who-we-are/24-abandoned-ol...

146 points by thisjustinm 10y ago

The core idea here was good. Re-purposing these villages after use. Now if only we could do that in the modern day, with support from the IOC, and turn them into something positive. For example turn them into schools, homeless shelters, libraries, something along those lines.

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ryanhuff 10y ago
As part of the Los Angeles 2024 bid, they are supposedly taking a different approach, in that they plan to utilize the existing student housing at UCLA for their athlete village.
- sjm-lbm 10y ago
  Atlanta used Georgia Tech's campus to house athletes in 1996 (and renovated/added additional dorms as well, at least as I understand it). Honestly, as bad as Atlanta's Olympics look at the time (with commercialism and the bombing, for example), I really think they deserve a lot of credit for using it as an excuse to provide the city with renovations people could use. Hopefully LA can do the same.
  - ja27 10y ago
    They gutted a pretty rough area south of campus and built a lot of new housing for the athlete village. For a while, both Georgia Tech and Georgia State used those buildings as dorms but Georgia State built their own closer to campus and now it's all Georgia Tech property. A lot of the Tech fraternity houses were rented out to media companies and got renovated. Tech did get a lot of use out of the aquatic center and it gets used for many NCAA events. They did finally defuel the Neely nuclear research reactor on campus before the games. I'd wondered how they were going to house athletes next to an experimental reactor. Nothing can excuse that mascot though.
- tzs 10y ago
  That's not a different approach for Los Angeles. That's the approach they used in the Los Angeles 1984 Olympics, except they used USC that time. They also utilized existing venues for nearly everything, only having to actually build two new venues (a swim center and a velodrome).
CM30 10y ago
London seems to have done that after 2012. The stadium is being reused for various sports events and West Ham matches, the Aquatics Centre is a public swimming pool and gym, various other parts were converted in housing and an academy, etc. Of course, the fact it's in a very expensive city where leaving land unused would be commercial suicide helps a bit too.
BrandonY 10y ago
The 1996 Atlanta Olympics deliberately built all the athlete housing right next to Georgia Tech's other dorms with exactly this this in mind. Then, in 2007, Georgia Tech had some great new dorms that they would've needed to build anyway. Mind you, from 1996 to 2006, they put Georgia State students in the dorms and bussed them to and from Georgia State, which didn't make a lick of sense, but I give Atlanta's government a lot of credit for very nearly doing something right.
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  I didn't live there but I do remember students complaining about the quality of construction. Apparently they weren't built to last.
- gtk40 10y ago
  It was helpful for Georgia State moving beyond being a commuter school.
tzs 10y ago
> The core idea here was good. Re-purposing these villages after use. Even better, hold the Olympics in places where there are already facilities that can temporarily be re-purposed for the Olympics, and then go back to their normal purpose. That's what happened for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. For housing the athletes they used student housing at the University of Southern California. If Los Angeles gets the 2024 Summer Olympics they plan to use student housing at UCLA for athletes and coaches, and student housing at USC for media housing. For athletic venues, only two needed to be built. They built a velodrome and a swim center. For the rest they were able to use facilities already present: LA Memorial Coliseum, LA Memorial Sports Arena, Dodger Stadium, The Forum, Long Beach Convention Center, Rose Bowl, Long Beach Arena, Anaheim Convention Center, along with the athletic facilities at several colleges and universities (UCLA, Cal State LA, USC, Loyola Marymount, Cal State Fullerton, East LA College, Pepperdine). The combination of low construction costs from being able to use so much existing infrastructure, and the use of corporate sponsorship to pay for the things that did need to be built (it was the McDonald's swim stadium and the 7-Eleven velodrome) resulting in the 1984 Olympics running a profit of more than $200 million. I was living in Pasadena at the time. I had expected the Olympics to be a pain in the ass due to increased traffic...but it turned out to have no negative effect that I could see. In retrospect, that should not have been too surprising. There are times of the year where the pro baseball, basketball, American football, and hockey seasons overlap, along with various college sports seasons. One could easily have a day with several team sporting events going on that will each draw a large crowd. On top of that you could have a major concert or two going on. In other words, Los Angeles already can handle many simultaneous major events. The Olympics is bigger than that, but not by anywhere near as big a factor as it would be in cities that do not have so many popular pro and college team sports and so many world class concert venues.
- chatmasta 10y ago
  That would limit the Olympics to cities that already have modern infrastructure and economies in place. One of the benefits of hosting the Olympics is that it puts the host city in the spotlight when they might never be otherwise.
- Declanomous 10y ago
Someone 10y ago
Doesn't about every Olympics do that with the Olympic village? For example: - London (http://www.eastvillagelondon.co.uk http://www.eastvillagelondon.co.uk): "Welcome to London's newest neighborhood, former athletes' village." - Beijing (http://www.china.org.cn/2008-03/05/content_11646502.htm http://www.china.org.cn/2008-03/05/content_11646502.htm): "Once the Paralympic Games are concluded, the Olympic Village will be taken over by a private development company, which will remodel the apartments into residential buildings" - Athens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Village#List_of_Olympic_Villages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Village#List_of_Olympi...): "The Athens Olympic Village also became a residential area following the Games. Today, the village with a capacity of approximately 10,000 people is in use." - Sydney (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newington,_New_South_Wales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newington,_New_South_Wales): "The Athlete's Village was converted to residential apartments after the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games." That's not schools or libraries, but if you build apartment buildings for 10,000 sportsmen, using them as apartments afterwards simply is the best fit.
Shivetya 10y ago
Atlanta did just that. Regardless of the higher poster who only considered a correctional facility but the village was always intended to be used by the local colleges for dorms and that is what happened. The stadiums were put to use by local professional teams the the Olympic Park area still remains mostly in use from the fountains to newly built areas. Even SLC's village went to schools. People still keep downplaying just how isolated Lake Placid as compared to both where people are and where people want to be.
maxxxxx 10y ago
In Munich (they had the Olympics in 1972) they are apartment buildings as far as I know. In general, Munich did a great job at using the Olympic facilities later.

barney54 10y ago

Now if they could only put the crooks that run the IOC in prison...

X86BSD 10y ago

Of all the things to convert it to... It could have been a homeless village. But no we would rather expand space to continue to be the worlds largest incarcerator of non violent offenders. Disgusting!

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panzagl 10y ago
Not many homeless in Lake Placid. I guess you could ship them there, tell them they can't leave, I wonder if there's a name for a place like that.
- deleted 10y ago
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- HillaryBriss 10y ago
  lol

kafkaesq 10y ago

Being as we've not only basically made mass incarceration into our national sport; but have racked up the gold, year after year in this "sport", since then -- this actually seems a fitting and poetic tribute to our collective character, and what we stand for as a nation in the eyes of the world.

leijurv 10y ago
*into
tn13 10y ago
Civil forfeitures is another sport that USA always wins at.
- meric 10y ago
  $5 billion from Civil Forfeiture vs $4 billion from Burglary. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-took-more-stuff-from-people-than-burglars-did-last-year/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
  - sandworm101 10y ago
    Wage theft trumps all: "If these findings in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are generalizable to the rest of the U.S. low-wage workforce of 30 million, wage theft is costing workers more than $50 billion a year." http://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-workers-hundreds/ http://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-w... Contrary to popular belief, wage theft is a criminal act rather than a contractual dispute. Wrongfully withholding or sequestering a person's property is just as illegal as taking it from their hands.
    - tn13 10y ago
      Whoever wrote that does not know what is theft. Theft is when someone forcibly takes away your wealth irrespective of what the law says. Taxation for example is undoubtedly a theft but legalized one and something that most of us don't mind in principle though we might disagree about rates. > This failure to pay what workers are legally entitled to can be called wage theft; That is totally dumb. If a legal entitlement is denied it is a violation of law but not necessarily violation of a person's private property. I have happily worked more than 8 hours for my employer so many times and done unpaid internships happily even though the employer likely broke several labor laws. I think I gained from it. Even more importantly those people who think they are getting a raw deal can leave immediately or sue the employer.

jcbeard 10y ago

Hmm, maybe we should have gone with something more useful...like a free vocational school w/on-site free/low cost daycare and perhaps a primary school? I'm finding the biggest issue with people changing careers is doing so while taking care of kids. Enough free space, and it'd seem like something society would go for...then again, say "tax" and 1/2 the population turns off instantly.

fluxquanta 10y ago
There's not enough demand for something like that in this area. As the article states, Lake Placid is basically in the middle of nowhere.
- jcbeard 10y ago
  You could always make it a live-in vocational school :). I thought they had more people..you're totally right, population of around 2k. Total county population might, but would be a long commute.
  - fluxquanta 10y ago
    North Country Community College in nearby Saranac Lake basically has that market covered, and there are fewer than 40,000 people in all of Essex county. People tend to underestimate how rural things really are up here since we're in "New York". It's a beautiful place to live, but it's also very conservative, not very diverse, and reliant on a few very temperamental economic sectors like tourism.
sevensor 10y ago
Maybe that guy from Utah who wants to build a utopian city in Vermont could be persuaded to consider upstate New York instead?
- spqr0a1 10y ago
  Not likely near lake placid. Many land uses within the Adirondacks require a constitutional amendment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Preserve_%28New_York%29#Article_14 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_Preserve_%28New_York%29... Much of central and western new york has a similarly depressed economy without quite that level of regulatory burden. So there's plenty more of upstate to choose from.

fluxquanta 10y ago

I live just a few miles from Lake Placid, and have for most of my life. It's unfortunate, but this area still relies heavily on the correctional system for the local economy. Along with a majority of the manufacturing jobs up here, it too has begun to shrink, however, and it's really turning the North Country (as we call it) into a rural slum. I'm not opposed to downsizing the amount of incarcerated people, for sure, but the void isn't being filled, and many of the communities up here are taking a turn for the worse.

maxxxxx 10y ago
Maybe they could hand out cash directly. Using prisons to support a local economy is probably the most inefficient way to go about it.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  If you gave people money, they'd want to do something with it, like improve their home, and they would then run afoul of the various regulations up there. It's probably the most rural and isolated area on the east coast other than northern Maine. I87 had almost zero phone service north of Lake George due to cell tower siting regulations. That only changed because a Orthodox Jewish couple traveling from Montreal senselessly died of exposure after a minor car accident. That incident triggered a big uproar in the community in NYC and elsewhere and led to a change in the rules. All of Northern New York is a "park", and it's impossible to do anything. The State is mostly exempt from its own rules, so prisons are pretty much the only thing that you can build. As a another commenter said, it's a rural ghetto.
sangnoir 10y ago
> I'm not opposed to downsizing the amount of incarcerated people, for sure, but the void isn't being filled, and many of the communities up here are taking a turn for the worse. You've just humanized the police unions' "tough against crime" motivation and lobbying for me (only by a bit, I still find it despicable). Is it really a zero-sum game where one community (urban inner city) has to suffer so another one (correctional) doesn't? What is the exchange rate between job losses vs. number of people incarcerated?

randyrand 10y ago

What do you do with 500 dorm rooms in the middle of nowhere? Honestly this seems like the perfect use case. Theres not enough demand at lake placid to use them as apartments.

fluxquanta 10y ago
You're not wrong. The only other use case would be to turn it into a college or something, but with North Country Community College and Paul Smith's already nearby, that market was already saturated at the time.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
okreallywtf 10y ago
It may be a pragmatic approach but thats part of the issue in the Olympics in general - building a lot of stuff (on the public dime) that will likely never have a use again. We're "lucky" enough that we always need more prison space but a much better (and in the long term, more pragmatic) case would be to need less prisons by not incarcerating so many non-violent minor "criminals".
- mstade 10y ago
  Not disagreeing with you, but would like to offer a counter story. I personality live in what used to be an Olympic villag. Or, more accurately, was supposed to be the Olympic village in the bid for Stockholm as the host city of the 2004 summer olympics. Interestingly, just like the Rio olympics the theme was environmental sustainability. The bid failed, but they went ahead with the plans anyway, and now it's lauded as a major success in urban redevelopment, taking what used to be a run down harbor and factory area which had mostly turned into a really shady part of town, and making it a great place for people to live and work. An old waste dump is now repurposed as a ski slope, and even hosted the Ski World Cup is past winter. While not technically an Olympic development, the idea was always to build a village that could then serve as a new residential area, and goes to show that the olympics can very much be the necessary catalyst in getting major developments off the ground. If IOC wanted to, they could absolutely push for all sorts of change by forming host requirements thereafter. They may want to claim they're non-political, but I don't think that's even possible on the kind of scale they operate.

brudgers 10y ago

One of the first buildings completed for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics was the Atlanta City Detention Center.[1] It was in preparation for arresting the homeless in bulk.[2] [1]: http://www.atlantaga.gov/index.aspx?page=201 http://www.atlantaga.gov/index.aspx?page=201 [2]: http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/01/us/as-olympics-approach-homeless-are-not-feeling-at-home-in-atlanta.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/01/us/as-olympics-approach-ho...

peterwwillis 10y ago
Actually much cheaper to give them all bus tickets out of town, like Portland, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, Sarasota, San Diego, San Francisco, NYC, Colorado Springs, Houston, Las Vegas, and other cities have done. But Prisons probably generated more profits.
- pstuart 10y ago
  Cheaper only for that city. It's fucked up practice.
- rayiner 10y ago
  There's no private prisons in Atlanta.
- gcb0 10y ago
  your thinking is not as far from sending then to prison as you might like think it is...
  - peterwwillis 10y ago
    It's not "my thinking". And it can be worse than sending them to prison. Neither are good options.

HillaryBriss 10y ago

Same exact thing happened to the city of Los Angeles after the '84 summer games. Very few get out alive. Good food though.

drawkbox 10y ago

... The protest group STOP encouraged European countries to write letters of disapproval to the U.S. government. They also stressed the stark contrast between international models of criminal justice and the emerging American model—as Holland, Sweden, Japan, England, and others were reducing their use of prisons in favor of community sanctions, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons had doubled its number of prisons in the previous ten years. As controversy peaked in 1979, Ramsey Clark, the former Attorney General under President Lyndon B. Johnson, testified that the controversy about the Lake Placid project wasn’t just about Lake Placid, or the symbolism of the Olympics—this would be a litmus test for the future of incarceration in America. “We are going to be masters of our destiny or the victim,” he told Congress. “It’s precisely the psychology of the prison, that once it is built you believe you have to fill them up.” The people in opposition were right on this one.

dmix 10y ago
Interesting, this wasn't just a modern problem. But a long standing issue in American history - even connected to their 1980s Olympics.

bbarn 10y ago

I feel like part of the problem here is the IOC and trying to "win" having the Olympics. A more sensible approach would be temporary housing, akin more to trailers and inexpensive pop up temporaries rather than plush living. These athletes don't need to be treated like royalty. Heck, most of them are used to competing out of cars and cheap motels when on the road because they make so little money. (emphasis on most, not all). Basically something like a FEMA response with a little more class and forethought put into it. Instead we have cities trying to show how grand and massive these buildings will be, rather than how practical and well put on the event can be. I was honestly thrilled when Chicago lost the bid for 2016 to Rio. That chaos the rest of the world is talking about now would be in my back yard, and potentially even worse given the density of our city, and the poor strength of our government.

Gracana 10y ago
One of the things they talk about in the article is building structures that can be moved and used elsewhere after the event, which seems like a pretty good solution.
raisedbyninjas 10y ago
Movie and TV production has solved this problem with mobile living quarter trailers.

derekfletes 10y ago

right on

triplesec 10y ago
just a friendly note as I see you're a newish poster: I know you mean well, but simple 'me too' posts don't really add any information to the conversation and may well get you downvoted. Have another look at the HN posting guidelines because people here are quite particular about keeping a high signal to noise ratio here!

Houshalter 10y ago

What a practical solution. We hear story after story of how hosting the Olympics costs more than it's worth and ruins neighborhoods. Here they found a place that already had many of the facilities needed, and found a way to pay for the cost of building new ones. And it even gave jobs and income to the local economy long afterwards. I really can not understand how anyone could be against this. Of course we all wish the war on drugs would stop, that sentences would be reduced, etc. But until that happens we can't just ignore the problem. Overcrowded prisons are awful and seriously harm the quality of life for the prisoners. Additionally, even with normal population growth, you would eventually need to build new prisons. And significantly reducing the prison population is actually really difficult, as demonstrated by this interactive: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/03/04/how-to-cut-the-prison-population-by-50-percent https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/03/04/how-to-cut-the... Surely this new prison would have been built anyway. And if they had built it someplace else no one would have noticed or cared. Using it to reduce the cost of the Olympics was a very practical solution that didn't change anything.

int_19h 10y ago
Symbolism also matters. You want to beat the swords into plowshares, not into shackles, even if there happens to be a higher demand for the latter right now.
kalleboo 10y ago
> even with normal population growth, you would eventually need to build new prisons Other countries are shutting down prisons... http://qz.com/644914/the-netherlands-keeps-having-to-close-its-prisons-due-to-lack-of-prisoners/ http://qz.com/644914/the-netherlands-keeps-having-to-close-i... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/11/sweden-closes-prisons-number-inmates-plummets https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/11/sweden-closes-...

okonomiyaki3000 10y ago

Well, the headline says it all, doesn't it?

Zigurd 10y ago

Hosting the Olympics where you already have facilities is ideal, but that's much harder for the winter Olympics. Building athlete housing and spectator housing that can be moved would let you have an Olympic Village without it turning into a ghost town or a prison. Kasita is an attempt at this: https://kasita.com/ https://kasita.com/ But even conventional mobile home manufacturers seem to have taken a hint from the Tiny House movement and are making trailer homes for hipsters: http://www.championhomes.com/park-model-rv http://www.championhomes.com/park-model-rv

tn13 10y ago

Prisons in America is a massive scam and so tightly linked with war on drugs. American government is like the Mafia boss while the City officials acting like henchmen. The first time I read about "civil forfeitures" I felt like someone kicked me in the balls. But here is my favorite "Prison Project" story. Kaiser Steel started a mining project in California in 1942 or so called "Eagle Mountain". A town was built for the workers (around 4k) and it was a very busy town until 1980s. Environment regulation killed the mining business and Kaiser left the place in ruins. State of California then spend millions of dollars to convert the ghost town into a correctional facility in 1988. State could not budget it properly and one insane prison riot that got few people killed the prison was closed. This prison was privately operated and not sure how many people benefited by the whole scam. CA then decided to convert the abandoned mine into a giant landfill (the mining was problematic for environment but somehow the landfill was not!) and after spending few more millions of our money the project of abandoned too or perhaps it is still being planned on paper. The best part is however today the entire ghost town is closed and there are some people appointed just to make sure no one trace-passes over a town that no one wants to live into. I am not even sure who owns the land, the buildings and who is spending the money to keep it fenced etc.

ommunist 10y ago

Wait, 1980 Olympic games were in Moscow, USSR. It was Winter Olympic games that took place in Lake Placid in 1980. I applaud, even the USSR did not built GULAG camps in Olympic villages. What an exciting time we are living in. Democracy, freedom, you know the drill.

ForFreedom 10y ago

May be Brazil can do the same

dmh2000 10y ago

sounds like a good idea to have some future use for olympic infrastructure instead of ending up with rotting hulks. http://www.indiatimes.com/culture/who-we-are/24-abandoned-olympic-venues-in-the-world-that-are-the-biggest-example-of-money-down-the-drain-259876.html http://www.indiatimes.com/culture/who-we-are/24-abandoned-ol...