Olympic Games displace people through eviction. They also result in higher land values and the consequent displacement of poorer residents through rises in rents and higher house prices. A recent report by Dr Georgios Kavetsos of the Cass Business School has confirmed that this process is underway in the vicinity of the 2012 London Olympic Park.

Flagged up recently on our newsgroup was an article on the opendalston blog on the financial difficulties facing developers Barratts, contractors for the so-called Dalston Olympic Transport Interchange and numerous building projects around Stratford High St.

Despite admitting that there is no housing legacy from the Athletes’ Village, as the housing would have been built anyway, the ODA is still claiming the Athletes’ Village is an Olympic Legacy, a kind of Time Lapse Legacy, because they assert that the involvement of the Olympics means the project will be delivered earlier than it would otherwise have been, see article ‘2012 Legacy Housing Double Counting’. So I decided to ask another FoI question to establish when the ODA thought the housing would have been delivered if the ODA had not taken over the site and to ask them to further explain their reasoning.

The ODA has had to admit that housing for the Athletes' Village being built at Stratford City, now renamed Stratford 2011, would have been built anyway, making a nonsense of the claims of a Housing Legacy from the Village, see the attached FOI response. To justify its continued insistence that the Village does indeed have a Legacy value the ODA is resorting to the argument that the housing on the Stratford City site would not have been delivered until much later, if it had not been for the Olympics.

The Beijing Olympics has displaced 1.5 million people since 2000, according to the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE). A new COHRE report, One World, Whose Dream? Housing Rights Violations and the Beijing Olympic Games, has found that the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) decision to award the Games to Beijing has been a catalyst in increasing forced evictions and displacements in Beijing.

The website ‘They work for you’, referring to the various members of Parliament, Lords and Commons, contains some interesting interventions. Among the peers are the party apparatchiks who have been promoted to fill the benches on account of their ‘soundness’. One such is Lord Haworth, a former Secretary to the Parliamentary Labour Party, who made an eccentric contribution to the House of Lords debate on 17th January 2008 concerning the regeneration of the Lea Valley (see his attached speech). He states that his ‘only qualification’ for speaking is that he lived for more than 20 years in the Lower Lea Valley, which suggests that an awful lot of people are better qualified than he to speak on the subject.

Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, Miloon Kothari