London will not host the "Austerity Olympics"

An article in the New York Times Magazine looks at the upcoming London Olympics, and the interface with that country's economic realities:

The Olympics are slated to cost taxpayers $14.7 billion. In this time of “austerity,” youth clubs and libraries are being shut down as expendable fripperies; this expenditure, though, is not negotiable...

The Games’ security plans grow ever more dystopian and surreal. There will be snipers in helicopters; jets; warships in the Thames; more British troops on duty in London than in Afghanistan. 

“They won’t do it,” Marqusee says, “but what would have been nice is if they’d made these the Austerity Games in a nice way. Just get rid of everything else, it’s not appropriate, it’s just going to be the sports, and we’ll enjoy it, everyone’ll go half-cost, no big hotels.” With the pleasure of the Londoner by choice, he continues: “And you know, this is London! No, we’re not going to compete with Beijing, we’re not that kind of place anyway, we’re not an authoritarian state that can get 10,000 people to march up and down. But why not be, you know, just who we are?...

Everyone knows there’s a catastrophe unfolding, that few can afford to live in their own city. It was not always so... Rich areas of this city have long been unusually mixed. “In Britain even 30 years ago, 30 percent of the population lived in council housing. And it has a proud and treasured part to play in life for ordinary people.” But that stock has been depleted for years. Houses taken from the pool were left unreplaced, at rates accelerating fast under Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme from the 1980s. New Labor did little to reverse this. The shortage is severe. Rents are rocketing, house prices, stagnating gently or not, are utterly prohibitive...

Diasporas have sustained us. It’s a terrible cliché, multiculturalism through food, but there’s a reason it’s what Londoners reach for. Smart restaurants like St. John have rehabilitated English fodder, glorying in pork, blackberries, eulogizing offal. Fine. If you’re of a certain age and grew up here, you remember that aside from the lucky, rich or recently immigrant, we had no food. We gnawed bread like bleached plastic, cheese like soap. We yowled, a hungry people. New Londoners took pity before the rest of us succumbed to malnutrition and misery, and shared their cuisines. Indian, Jamaican, whatever — name a culinary tradition, it won’t be too far to find, near the greasy spoons keeping the faith. Each new group of incomers brings something — now Polish food has mainstreamed, and there’s dense bread in the corner shops, krufki in supermarkets...

I like the concept of an "austerity Olympics," but of course such a thing will never happen.