What Happens to Athlete Housing After the Olympics?

Last month, the Eiffel Tower donned five interlocking rings, signaling the imminent Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games. But the gesture is only the icing on top of the $8.2 billion endeavor, which includes a $1.5 billion Olympic Village that, according to the games’ website, will house 14,250 Olympians and 8,000 Paralympians. Over the past six years, 82 buildings have sprung up across a 128-acre site. And though the Olympic Village will tout all the bells and whistles required to host elite athletes—like the much-discussed cardboard furniture, exercise facilities, and massive cantina that will sling millions of meals—its real impact could be felt throughout the next decades. Organizers promise that the residential facilities will be repurposed into sustainable housing and commercial development. 

Dominique Perrault Architecture planned the site to be an "innovative district," spreading residences and facilities into three former industrial communities of Saint-Ouen, Saint-Denis, and L’ile St. Denis, nearly six miles from the city center. Although Le Monde calls the area, "an industrial wasteland," The Guardian notes that by selecting the working-class region, which has been marred by crime over the past decade and targeted for redevelopment, officials hope to "reconcile the poorer northern outskirts of Paris with the River Seine."  

Officials have taken an approach unique to many Olympic builds. Forbes reports that Paris originally won the bid to host because officials said that 95 percent of the games’ events would be held in existing infrastructure, but to produce an Olympic Village in an underdeveloped suburb, planners turned to new construction and adaptive reuse. The area’s centrally located Cité du Cinema—a film studio in St. Denis—has been retrofitted into a 3,200-seat, 24-hour restaurant; CNN reports that organizers retrofitted myriad other existing industrial buildings to hold training and hospitality facilities.  

Adaptive reuse typically has a dramatically smaller carbon footprint than ground-up construction, and the new buildings in the Olympic Village try to close that gap. Photographs of new residences show pastel shades and plentiful balconies, but the buildings’ strength comes from their sustainability. They were built using wood and recycled materials; one third are equipped with solar panels. All 3,000 athlete apartments will be cooled using geothermal technology, according to CNN—though some of the ground floor spaces will be cooled with air conditioning. Paris’s notorious summer heat has prompted a few teams, including Team USA, to bring their own air conditioners. 

Yet only so much can be said about the potential sustainability benefits of an Olympics bonanza after the games end; many former host cities have struggled to prolong facilities’ use. In Rio de Janeiro, the New York Times reported in 2017 that the 31 2016 Olympic Village towers were originally planned to be sold as luxury condos, "but fewer than 10 percent of the units had been sold." Claims of wasted public money and endless photographs of abandoned Olympics infrastructure populate the internet. In Chicago, concerns over misappropriated funds and gentrification prompted protests against the city’s 2009 bid.  

But perhaps Paris’s focus on housing could remedy this depressing legacy. Officials plan to retrofit athlete apartments into housing for local residents. After the Olympics, the area will contain schools, shops, gardens, parks, 2,500 homes, and more; already, 37 miles of added bike lanes coupled with the city’s ongoing Métro extension could yield more sustainable, connected, and equitable Paris suburbs. Architecture critic Olly Wainwright is skeptical, however; he notes in The Guardian that only 30 percent of the Paris Olympic apartments will be affordable, and the remaining 70 percent will be sold at a price that is almost double the local average. A BBC report released a decade after the London Olympics reveals the city’s unmet promises for affordable housing and echoes these anxieties. Whether or not these 2,500 units could help soothe the current Parisian housing crisis is questionable. But Wainwright believes that the focus on sustainability and transportation could leave a legacy that "looks set to be more promising than most, ultimately helping to stitch long-severed suburbs into the center." 

Top image: Paris 2024 Olympic Village, credit: Imago/Drone Press ABACAPRESS.COM Saint-Denis France