Stratford Broadway isn’t a place to dawdle. The east Londonthoroughfare boasts a handful of low-end chain stores and market stalls hawkingdiscount household goods and cheap food. A gaggle of street preachers hectors passersbywith ominous-sounding blessings. Joblessness and crime rates are high. Livingstandards are low. Just yards away stands the entrance to London’s spectacularOlympic park, where billions of dollars of public money have been poured intocreating beautiful structures to house athletes and spectators for the brieffew weeks the games are in town. London won its bid to host the 2012 Olympicsseven years ago partly by promoting the games as a vast regeneration projectthat would breathe new life into a rundown part of the city. The event would begeared toward the L-word: legacy.
The legacy appears impressive on paper. London is set tospend an additional $470 million to transform the Olympic complex from adedicated sports venue into the “Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park” after the gamesare over. Some of the venues will be kept for public use and internationalsports events. The stadium may become home to a prominent premier league team,and the media center is set to be a business hub. Planners hope the projectwill create more than 10,000 permanent and temporary jobs. However, housingwill be the largest part of the legacy.
But some observers are urging caution over a blueprint thatstretches many years into a future economists predict will be characterised bya downbeat financial outlook. Some say the Olympic park’s distance fromLondon’s financial and tourist districts casts doubt over its power as a futuremagnet for business and visitors. Others believe simple economics couldundermine the ambitious housing plans by magnifying the kind of vastdisparities in wealth seen in many other London districts.
“They’ve been building this thing for years, spending allthis money,” said William Keane, a 32-year-old unemployed laborer. “I’ve got nojob and no real money coming in. I’m struggling, while over that fence they’reall enjoying themselves. Even a free ticket to see something would have beennice.”
