Opinion

Olympics awards gold in poverty

Surrounded by unrelenting presidential campaign coverage, it’s often easy to lose focus of other events taking place in the world around us. It’s been easy to forget lately, but the scope of global relevancy expands beyond a constant onslaught of political banter. Lately, the issue of poverty has been very indicative half-hearted championing. We all listen intently to politicians discussing ways to fix poverty, and we feel that we are very concerned with the issue, yet, we ignore real-life examples all around us.Take Vancouver, for instance. With on-going preparations for the 2010 Olympic Games, the international spotlight has finally focused on the issue of the city’s increasing poverty problem, which is exacerbated by redevelopment in anticipation of the games.


While the city still has two years before the Winter Games, protesters have reminded us that perhaps the most drastic effects of the Olympics are indirect — the stresses incurred by low-income residents in the city who are negatively affected by Olympic-related redevelopment.


The “Poverty Olympics” were the most recent form of protest, drawing attention to such a point. The Carnegie Action Project hosted the event in downtown Vancouver late last month. Olympic events such as the high jump were combined with Vancouver’s growing poverty problem to create a mock-competition where participants unsuccessfully attempted to leap over the impossibly high “poverty line.” It also satirically claimed to have a $6 budget, in contrast to the Winter Games’ $6 billion budget.


Such protests stress the point that the coming of the Olympics encourages landlords of low-income housing developments to evict their tenants and sell their buildings to allow for hotels and other redevelopments in anticipation of growing tourist attraction due to the 2010 Winter Games.

 

From a business perspective, it makes more sense for owners to sell their buildings to hopeful beneficiaries of Olympic-related tourism than it does to rent out rooms to welfare recipients. From the city’s perspective, it makes more sense to concentrate its efforts (and enormous budget) on successfully pulling off an enormous, glamorous event than it does to focus on the poor and downtrodden.

 

From the perspective of the homeless — well, that perspective doesn’t seem to matter, because they don’t have much say in the matter.

As a result, rampant homelessness and drug use — not exactly the first thoughts that generally come to mind when thinking about Canada — have grown increasingly more commonplace in parts of Vancouver. Unaffordable housing continues to displace more and more residents.

City officials concede the city is thousands of rooms short of housing all of the homeless in the area, but are unwilling to direct the blame toward the Olympics. With 500 more rooms having vanished in the past year, though, they’re finding themselves under increasing pressure to explain the “real” source of the growing problems.
And to be fair, the city has — still without admitting the Olympics’ contributions to its rapidly growing homelessness catastrophe — taken some action. It has bought and converted several hotels in the past year, resulting in more than 500 rooms becoming available for the public. In contrast, that is roughly the same number of rooms that have been lost to redevelopment in the downtown east side. In addition, the increasing attention on the city as 2010 draws near will require it to take some sort of action to protect its image, but this pressure will hardly be enough to secure any sort of long-term guarantee.


Vancouver’s best hope is that more of China’s Olympic displacement comes to light. After all, Beijing’s complete destruction of neighborhoods in preparation for its upcoming Summer Games — among other controversies that it has recently begun to encounter — provide a much clearer view of the potential harms of hosting such a huge event, and will hopefully translate into deeper consideration and recognition for Vancouver.


Perhaps we can take this example and draw attention to it, as although the Summer Games haven’t officially commenced and the Winter Games are two years away, Vancouver and Beijing are already competing for gold and silver medals in carelessness. If we do so, these cities and future hosts alike could finally be pressured into conducting their Olympic preparations a little less selfishly and a little more responsibly.

Brenton Martell (bmartell@wisc.edu) is a sophomore majoring in English.