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Originally Posted by Tuckerman
The costs and benefits of hosting the Olympic games is very complicated as those of us from Atlanta can well attest. A nice analysis is found at https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/eco...-olympic-games .
It is also complicated by the fact that in some cases national financial support by the host country is given to the host cities to defray costs and allow for more spectacular opening ceremonies, etc. This is usually not the case for any American city that hosts the event. Therefore the financial burden has to be handled in a more challenging way.
My wife worked for the Atlanta Olympic Committee and we experienced a lot of the challenges and joys of the event. There is not room enough to explore all the dimensions.
Atlanta was a relatively small city at the time and the financial burden was great. Nonetheless, there was some clever planning that left the city with some tangible structures: an extension of a MARTA line to the northern suburbs; a stadium that continues to serve (first as a home for the Braves and now the football stadium for Georgia State University); an aquatic center for Georgia Tech; housing for Georgia Tech; and of course the development of Centennial Olympic Park in downtown.
How much the Olympics contributed to the extraordinary population growth of the Atlanta Metro over the years since 1996 is probably not knowable in any exact way, but there is general speculation that it was part of the fuel for the growth.
Was it worth it? Is it worth it for a city to put such large resources into the support of professional sports? We do it without much questioning for baseball, football, and basketball.
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I don't see Olympics affecting the trajectory of most cities. St Louis in 1902 was already a larger city and per Wiki, its best percentage growth decades were already behind it. Montreal continued to decline relative to Toronto and Vancouver for decades after the Olympics. Rio has not gained on Sao Paolo. Atlanta has started growing, but it is a small city in a large metro area, and the metro area's population growth has slowed since the 1990s. I even suspected that Atlanta metro population would become bigger than Houston's based on the explosive nearly 40% growth in the 1990s, but it does not seem that it will exceed Houston anytime soon. Atlanta is growing and will continue to grow because it is an important hub for business in its own right, even with more competition from NC cities and Nashville. Detroit's challenges included being highly dependent on domestic companies US manufacturing.
The preference for international companies to base their operations elsewhere (I hope we don't start talking about unions and the UAW) hastened its challenges with being highly dependent on a single industry. For example, I think Toyota has over 4000 at its DFW North American HQ and I would guess Nissan has at least 1000 in Nashville, and Atlanta has at least 1000 for Mercedes and Porshe, and who knows how many Souther Calif has for Honda, Kia/Hyundia, and NJ has many hundreds for Subaru. And of course, there are thousands of factory workers elsewhere - I believe over 8000 for Toyota in KY alone. I could image that if international energy companies decided not to locate their operations in Houston, Houston would probably be growing a lot slower. Or image if most of the international auto manufacturers based much of their operations in the Detroit area - I think the metro would be a lot bigger and larger parts of the city would have redeveloped and gentrified by now. But I don't want to get into discussions of causes, as it can get political....