Inside S.f.’s Bid For 2024 Olympic Summer Games

A decaying bayfront pier that has resisted development plans for decades would become a beach volleyball venue and then a new over-water park if San Francisco is awarded the 2024 Olympic Summer Games. The idea is to contain costs in an era when the Olympic Games — particularly in Beijing in 2008 and Sochi, Russia, in 2014 — have often been marked by profligate public spending on facilities that sit vacant afterward. Public funds are being counted on for transportation improvements, many of them already planned, that include electrifying Caltrain, extending BART to San Jose, and building bus rapid transit lines in San Francisco. San Francisco’s Olympic Village to house the athletes would be located in 2,000 units of housing already approved as the fourth phase of development at the Hunters Point shipyard, which Olympic organizers would rent from developer Lennar Urban. [...] as it stands, 23 of the 26 planned venues are either already built, like Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara; in development, like the Golden State Warriors’ arena in San Francisco’s Mission Bay; or will be temporary, including a $350 million, 65,000-seat “pop-up” stadium on a damp stretch of land in Brisbane where track and field events and the opening and closing ceremonies would be held. Rather than go the route of the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, where construction of major venues helped drive costs to an estimated $44 billion, San Francisco is trying to apply the model used in London in 2012. The only permanent facilities currently planned to be built are a tennis center and BMX park on Treasure Island, which would remain to serve the planned new neighborhood there, and a canoe slalom course in Vallejo, organizers said. Piers 30-32, a 13-acre concrete slab with gorgeous views of the Bay Bridge, it to reprise its role as a site for competitive beach volleyball. The professional beach volleyball tour made it a regular stop from at least 2007 to 2009. A detailed financial plan, though, won’t be finalized until the U.S.