When the throngs head to Atlanta this summer for the Olympic Games, Dick Myrick will be heading west for a little vacation–paid for by a few of those Olympic visitors.
Myrick, president-elect of the Atlanta Commercial Board of Realtors, is netting about $10,000 from renting out his $350,000 house in the city’s posh Buckhead section for two weeks.
He’ll bank part of the tax-free proceeds and use the rest for a getaway while his kids are at camp, he said. He’s going west to be in a more convenient time zone.
“I’ll be able to watch the Olympics on television earlier in the day,” he said.
Just about everybody in this city that uneasily blends Old South with new hustle is looking for a windfall from the games, which are expected to bring in up to 7.6 million people from July 19 through Aug. 4, when the events are held.
In fact, Myrick’s take is peanuts by some standards. One real estate company reports that some of the more lavish homes in Buckhead, only a few miles from most of the games sites, will bring in $100,000 and more over the duration.
Altogether, the impact of the games on Georgia’s economy over the 1991-1997 period is estimated in a study at $5.1 billion, and Atlanta real estate is getting a good bite of that pie.
Short-term, any place with rooms to rent–hotels, condos, apartments, homes–within 40 miles of the city center, where most of the events are taking place, stands to reap lush profits. Spending for lodging alone is estimated at well over $600 million.
Long-term, the consequences, though less certain, will undoubtedly be significant. At the very least, a legacy of more than a half billion dollars in construction of games sites, housing for athletes and a downtown park will remain along with hundreds of millions more in indirectly related development and improvements.
Whether the Olympics boom will markedly alter a long decline for the city of Atlanta is less clear.
The flight of businesses and the middle class to the suburbs has hit Atlanta harder than some other cities, and the fortunes of the central city have been in sharp contrast to the overall buoyancy of the region, which has been enjoying a boom in jobs and business. From 1980 to 1992, the city’s population dropped 7 percent to just under 400,000.
The central business district has a paltry 17 percent of the office space in its metro area (downtown Chicago has almost two-thirds). The city has one of the country`s highest crime rates. And especially at night and on weekends, downtown Atlanta can be stark, dreary and menacing, a haunt of the wandering poor.
Some local analysts say the downtown has a become as sort of non-edge “edge city” devoted to entertainment, conventions, tourism and sport rather than a regional hub.
“I hope no one thought that the Olympic Games and the associated construction was going to substantially change the fundamental economics of the Atlanta metropolitan area,” said Jeff Wingfield, who heads the Atlanta office of Hammer, Siler, George Associates, an urban planning firm. “That would be unrealistic optimism.”
On the other hand, downtown boosters can point to some positive signs that the Olympics have spurred developments in the central area–especially in housing–that could go a long way to making it safer and more vibrant.
In any case, the sheer volume of Olympics-related construction activity is impressive. Some major projects include:
– The $170 million Olympic Stadium that will be converted to a baseball park for the Atlanta Braves after the Games. The adjacent Fulton County Stadium, the current Braves home, will be demolished.
– The $47 million Olympic Village on the Georgia Institute of Technology campus near downtown, which will provide housing and services to the 14,000 athletes. Post-Olympics, the housing will be converted to dormitories for students at Georgia Tech and Georgia State University, heretofore a commuter school.
– Two hockey venues costing $25 million to $30 million that will be given to Morris Brown University for football and Clark Atlanta University for soccer and track. In addition, an $8 million gym for basketball preliminaries will be given to Morehouse College.
The three schools are part of the Atlanta University Center, a group of six predominantly black institutions just west of downtown Atlanta.
– A $50 million downtown park, Centennial Olympic Park, which will cover 21 acres formerly occupied by an unsightly collection of small office and industrial buildings and parking lots. The park, with an amphitheater and a plaza, is adjacent to the World Congress Center, Atlanta’s main convention hall, and is viewed as a future site for festivals and performances as well as a catalyst for development.
– A $20 million equestrian center in Conyers, about 30 miles east of Atlanta, which will become part of the 1,139-acre Georgia International Horse Park to be used for horse shows, rodeos and the like. With rows of stables, a steeplechase oval and a spacious arena with grandstands, it is one of the biggest horse event sites in the world.
These efforts all are being privately financed, with the major piece of funding coming from a $300 million line of credit from NationsBank. which is headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., and has a high-profile building in downtown Atlanta. Ultimately the financing will be repaid from estimated revenues of $1.58 billion, mostly from broadcast rights.
In addition, Atlanta in 1994 floated a $150 million bond issue for street and other infrastructure improvements whose blessing by the voters undoubtedly was encouraged by a desire to show the city’s best face to the world during the games.
Beyond that, the federal government is helping out. Some 9 square miles of run-down, largely black neighborhoods near the central core have been designated as an Empowerment Zone, which will bring in $100 million for redevelopment in addition to tax credits for businesses relocating there.
And a $42 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is being used to demolish and redevelop an eyesore public housing project adjacent to the Georgia Tech campus and the Coca-Cola Co. world headquarters.
Some if it will become low-rise, mixed income housing on a model similar to that proposed for Cabrini-Green replacement housing near Chicago’s downtown. Part of the land already has gone for Olympic Village housing to be turned into dormitories.
Civic leaders say the city’s ability to win those federal projects was helped enormously by the Olympics. Sam Williams, president of Central Atlanta Progress (CAP), a civic organization, said HUD took the opportunity to do a national demonstration project on the viability of mixed-income public housing.
It would seem that such an overwhelming infusion of cash and construction couldn’t help but make Atlanta, particularly center-city Atlanta, a better place.
Williams, former president of the Portman Co., which built much of modern downtown Atlanta, said this is happening already.
He said several old commercial buildings are being converted to loft housing, with financing generated through expected rentals during the Olympics. A recent study indicated some 25,000 downtown office workers would consider living in the central area, which now has only about 3,000 residents, he said.
New shops and entertainment venues are coming downtown as well, including a Planet Hollywood. And downtown property owners have set up a $2 million-a-year assessment fund for a 50-man security patrol to be launched in March to confront the crime problem, Williams said.
“We’ve been wanting to do it anyway, but the Olympics gave us a sense of urgency to do it now,” he added.
Even the impoverished Summerhill neighborhood on the southern edge of downtown adjacent to the new Olympic Stadium is getting a surge of housing development. New townhouses will be made more affordable to residents with the help of revenues coming from renting them as hospitality suites during the games.
But dazzling as all this activity may be, there is no assurance it will budge intractable economic and social realities.
Much of the perimeter of downtown Atlanta still will be home to the poor and underemployed when the games are gone, while money and power still will be enticed outward.
“We still have a large area where nothing is being done,” said urban planner Wingfield. “We are still fraught with all the inequities and discontinuities that we wring our hands about.”
Wingfield and other local observers hold out a hope that the Olympics’ greatest boon will be the international attention it brings to Atlanta.
“The magnitude of the legacy will be determined by how successful Georgia is in leveraging the Olympics into a development opportunity for foreign and domestic investment,” said Jeffrey Humphreys, a University of Georgia economist who co-authored a report on the economic impact of the games.
“It’s an opportunity–and nothing more than that,” he said.
