(Not So) Alternate Reality: The Chicago Olympics Are So Screwed

Seven years ago, when the IOC announced that Chicago—one of the four finalist cities along with Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, and Tokyo—won the bid for the 2016 Olympics, there was wild jubilation in the city, as throngs of supporters rushed the streets to celebrate the city's promising future.

Now, less than two weeks before Chicago kicks off the first summer Olympics held in the United States in two decades, there are so many problems that the games are bordering on a total, complete disaster.

Just how screwed are the Chicago Olympics? The city has become synonymous with gun violence, so much so that it is referred to as "Chi-raq," also the name of a recent Spike Lee movie about the city's violence epidemic. Over the July 4 weekend, Chicago had its 2,000th shooting victim this year. Shooting deaths are up some 50 percent citywide over last year, and has averaged 10 shootings a day. In 2015, the murder rate was 17.9 per 100,000 residents, only slightly lower than the murder rate in another finalist city, Rio de Janeiro, at 18.5 per 100,000 people (it should be noted that, in Rio, police are responsible for approximately one in five killings, according to Human Rights Watch).

It's unclear how Chicago will keep the hundreds of thousands of tourists flooding into the city safe from all the bullets flying, or whether they are even capable of doing so. Attempts to quell the violence have been met with the police force's notorious brutality and human rights violations, particularly in Chicago's South Side where several venues and Olympic viewing centers will be stationed. Since 2004, Chicago's police force has run a secretive, clandestine detention center out of a warehouse where they have "disappeared" more than 7,000 people (Chicago purchased the warehouse in 1995 but only released records from 2004 onward, so whatever happened prior to 2004 is largely unknown). Inside the warehouse, police tortured and brutalized the captives with "'Gestapo' tactics." Amnesty International USA has called on the mayor to launch an investigation into the facility.

The warehouse is another chapter in a long history of Chicago's brutal police misconduct. Police commander Jon Burge ran infamous torture chambers in the city's precincts, using methods he learned from Vietnam to elicit confessions. He was convicted in 2010, but only of lying under oath, and has since been released. Between the cost of wrongful conviction suits, civil rights violations, and his pension, Burge cost the city some $102 million, not including the $20 million reparations fund Chicago activists seek for his victims.

Meanwhile, current Mayor Rahm Emanuel may have been complicit in covering up a recent police shooting, leading to mass protests calling for his resignation. Chicago is no stranger to cover ups. The city's politics are so hopelessly corrupt—the most politically corrupt city in the US, according to a recent study—that it's hard to imagine a solution. Even the former mayor who championed the Olympic bid, Richard Daley, was caught up in a corruption scheme.

The problems go well beyond violence. Chicago—and the entire state of Illinois—is a fiscal and political disaster. Chicago's debt per capita is among the highest in the country, and the city can barely even afford to keep its schools running. The city's public schools are in $6.3 billion in debt and the district needs to keep borrowing to function, money the taxpayers will be forced to repay along with their Olympic bill. The city is in so much pension debt that Moody's downgraded the city's credit to junk, which has made borrowing money for the Games incredibly expensive, and damaged the city's long-term financial prospects. Mayor Emanuel criticized the downgrade, but a Moody's senior executive replied that the downgrade was "basic mathematics." Indeed, the math is so basic, that the state of Illinois—which has a $6 billion deficit of its own—doesn't have enough money to pay lawmakers, who will now have to "get in a long line" for their paychecks.

The city and state desperately need this money for a host of reasons more vital to civil society than the Olympics. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, Illinois reflects the American norm of infrastructure neglect and decay. Almost one out of every ten bridges in the state are "structurally deficient." 15 percent of the state's major roads are in "poor condition," costing motorists $3.7 billion a year in maintenance and repairs. Further, the ASCE estimates the state will need to meet $17.5 billion in wastewater infrastructure and $19 billion in drinking water infrastructure needs over the next 20 years.

Drinking water needs are particularly relevant to Chicago, where city officials have dragged their feet on fulfilling their promise to clean up the lead-soaked water streaming through the city's pipes. Clean drinking water was a specific item in the city's Olympic bid, but weeks before the Games, they have made few strides in fixing the issue, and deny it is even a problem to begin with.

Unfortunately, all of these expenditures will be delayed due to the cost of the Olympics. The games were initially sold to the public as not requiring any taxpayer dollars, but this was a supremely truth-y claim, if not an outright lie. The estimated total Olympicscost of $4.8 billion—with, again, no Chicago taxpayer contribution—was a massive underestimate. This shouldn't have caught anyone by surprise, since London 2012 estimated a $4 billion Games but ended up spending $14 billion. And that's nothing compared to the estimated $40 billion China spent on the 2008 Games. It didn't take long for the Chicago bid to rise in cost, needing a $500 million commitment from the city council that nobody quite knows how to pay off, then another $15 million from the Parks Department, and so on.

The Chicago Olympics are mostly benefitting massive construction firms that won out on public-private partnerships in which the public pays for private gain. This win-lose arrangement is perfectly exemplified by the Olympic Village. The city engaged in a dangerous bit of real estate speculation that, quite predictably, didn't pay off, and taxpayers now have to swallow all that debt, too.

This is all money Chicago doesn't have, so it's now forced to borrow to pay for basic things like schools and police. And again, the borrowing rate is high thanks to the credit downgrade, plus there's no real plan to pay it off. Bankruptcy might not be far away.

It seems increasingly evident that the Games were not simply mismanaged, but rather were from the start a predictable and inevitable recipe for disaster. Chicago can hardly afford an increased police presence at the Games to quell the massive violence throughout the city that endangers every Olympic visitor. And the city itself shouldn't be the only American institution asking hard, soul-searching questions. Why are we, as a society, inviting hundreds of thousands of people from around the world to come to one of our most dangerous cities, given all of its health risks, corruption, and violence? Why are we throwing our much-needed cash away to stage a two-week sports-themed reality TV show that mostly benefits NBC? Why did we even think this was a good idea to begin with? It's time to face a hard truth: Chicago had no business winning or even attempting to get the 2016 Olympics to begin with. Perhaps Rio would have been a better choice.