SF 2024 Olympics could be AWESOME!

Photo: Flavin, Kevin (US - San Francisco/SF Bid Committee)

For those who believe as Chris Daly does that a 2024 Olympics in San Francisco would be ruinous for San Francisco, I suggest they travel to London's Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park to see what the 2012 Olympics has done and is continuing to do to a part of that city that was very much like ours. Only by visiting it can you really understand how amazingly rejuvenating this kind of project can be for a neighborhood. The operative word here, of course, is "can". It can also be a disaster, but if done properly, it can be freaking awesome! In London, the surrounding older community is not negatively impacted - in fact it seems to be coming up and into its own with shops and restaurants being opened up by people already living there. The new community is full of open spaces, new affordable housing, and fantastic transit connecting the old and the new with the city center.

In San Francisco, plans are already in the works for housing, transit, and other expensive infrastructure in the Southeast part of the city. It is mindbogglingly shortsighted of "progressives" like Daly to want to stop this kind of project that will do nothing short of accelerate and fund construction of these projects, getting people who need housing into it faster, and getting them where they're going faster. During Daly's disastrous tenure on our city's Board of Supervisors, he did nothing but stymie real progress in this city. Now as a suburbanite, he wants to continue his record of stagnation.

This is not the America's Cup. This is not building housing only for the rich or the gentry. This is about getting low-income and working-class people into homes in the Southeast and improving transit and infrastructure for all, and using a catalyst like the Olympics to do it within our lifetime.

We should know this Thursday if San Francisco has been chosen as the USA's Olympic bid city. More on the Olympics bid at SFGate.