White elephant

2. The devil’s in the details. And at last week’s Goat Island press event – featuring New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Niagara Falls Mayor Paul Dyster – the details were astonishingly few.

Together, Cuomo and Dyster, who are both running for re-election (Dyster next year), announced a $150 million hotel and resort project to be built at sometime in the future at what used to be the Rainbow Centre Mall.

The preferred developers, Uniland and Delaware North, will receive an undisclosed sum from the state to help them build the thing, and be aided by some of the usual suspects like Canon Design.

Uniland’s proposal calls for the development of a 300-room, 15-story hotel, an indoor water park, a rooftop restaurant, a daredevil adventure center, an indoor family amusement center as well as retail and restaurant space. The project will be supported by the state-run Empire State Development Corp. as part of Cuomo’s “Buffalo Billion” economic development initiative.

“I can get that there's a certain amount of skepticism,” said one local developer who asked not to be named for this article. “But there’s a world of difference between Uniland and Hamister.”

He was referring to Buffalo developer Mark Hamister, who was given $2.75 million in grants through the state's USA Niagara Development Corp., a subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corp., which is a government agency created to throw taxpayer's money at rich guys like Hamister to provide vital “development.”

The city chipped in and let Hamister have a prime piece of downtown property appraised at more than $1.5 million for $100,000, or seven cents on the dollar. That was in 2013, and thus far he’s built nothing in Niagara Falls but he has redeveloped the high rise Tishman Building in Buffalo.

Hamister’s nonexistent hotel was the subject of 150 newspaper stories and a couple of dozen TV segments, and was also responsible for the defeat of former City Councilman Sam Fruscione. But you don’t hear much about it anymore.

The difference between Hamister and Uniland, the developer told the Niagara Falls Reporter, is that Uniland actually has money.

“I mean they say there’s going to be a water park,” the developer said. “How many square feet will it be? What flag will be on the hotel? What franchise restaurants, what retail? It seems like they ought to have thought it through before they held a press conference.”

Dyster criticized the building (Rainbow Mall) the city was gifted with by Baltimore developer David Cordish in 2010.

“It’s not even the normal eyesore,” Dyster said of the current structure, which has sat mostly vacant for the last 15 years. “It’s kind of an iconic eyesore. It’s the classic white elephant. This is a building that was created almost as an afterthought to the construction of a parking ramp.”

- Dyster, Cuomo Gear Up for Elections With News of New Development Here, NiagaraFallsReporter.com, August 12, 2014.

3. Following the extensive media coverage of the economics of the London and Sochi Olympics and Brazil’s World Cup, it should be no surprise that these lofty assurances rarely come to fruition. But even appropriately jaded readers are likely to be shocked by the evidence in “Circus Maximus”, a brief polemic by Andrew Zimbalist, an American sports economist, which reveals the magnitude of the deception that precedes these events and the disappointment that follows. The book’s misleading subtitle calls hosting the competitions an “economic gamble”, implying it is a risky bet with a potentially high return. In fact, “Circus Maximus” leaves little doubt that under current conditions, prudent city governments should avoid the contests at all costs.

In principle, there is no reason why hosting such events needs to be an economic own-goal. Between television rights, ticket sales, licensing and sponsorships, the most recent summer Olympics, in London, generated $5.2 billion in revenue. In a city with sufficient existing athletic, hotel and transport infrastructure, it would be easy to stage the competition for less than that figure and come away with a healthy profit—as Los Angeles did in the highly successful 1984 summer games. But over the past few decades, the IOC, in particular, has appropriated an ever-greater share of the proceeds for itself: the most recent public data reveal that it now pockets more than 70% of Olympic television revenue, compared with less than 4% between 1960 and 1980 (see chart). And there is little evidence to support the projections that hosting will bring a surge in tourism: Beijing and London both attracted fewer visitors during their summer Olympics in 2008 and 2012 respectively than they had in the same period a year earlier.

The international organisations argue, in return, that they also contribute to the costs of staging the contests: in particular, FIFA funds the entire World Cup operating budget. However, “operating” costs account for only a small portion of the price of hosting tournaments. The lion’s share is spent on construction, both on stadiums and on transport capacity to shuttle people between events. Those expenditures are borne entirely by the host. Although there is no formal requirement that such venues be new, the IOC and FIFA have consistently selected cities with the most ambitious plans for custom-built facilities. It is the need to build so much, so fast that leads to taxpayer-funded cost overruns that would be comic were they not so tragic, running from a low of four times the original estimate up to ten times or more.

To justify this spending, proponents of hosting often argue that these infrastructure projects will provide continuing benefits long after the events end. Such claims are almost offensively misleading. Mr Zimbalist offers a whirlwind tour of the “white elephants” that litter host cities following the Olympics or World Cup: in Athens a volleyball stadium inhabited by squatters and a softball park overgrown with trees; in Beijing a weed-infested cycling racetrack; in Brazil a football pitch with 40,000 seats now used by a second-division team that draws around 1,500 fans a match. All of these structures cost millions of dollars a year to maintain, making the games’ costs their enduring “legacy”.

- Just say no: Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup is bad for a city’s health, The Economist, February 28, 2015.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者張欣 中國日報網英語點津 編輯：王偉）