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Where would one find detailed information on that? I have an acquaintance who deals in construction and real estate. I jokingly told them last week that they should be buying up properties where the Olympic construction is going to take place. They looked at me and said “all that stuff has been already bought up.”

Well, there are a lot of parcels that the city has come to own, one way or another, that it's been sitting on; no doubt all that underlay the original bid and the thought of where to hold the games. And they're going to do most of everything on city park land and build temporary structures that'll be torn down later (like the 1894 World Columbian Exposition).

The property containing Michael Reese Hospital was purchased for something like $70 million. I believe the University of Chicago owned that hospital. At one point the Olympic village was going to be built on stilts somewhere but that proved to be infeasible (probably not lucrative enough to someone). Now the hospital will be torn down and bazillions spent doing that, then renovating the land, then building something else there, maybe the Olympic village. I heard someone say (a guy leading the effort against the Olympics in Chicago) that there were $5 billion of private money lined up to pay for everything, but that other places, like London, ended up spending billions over that that the public had to pick up. I think in the end, though, it will have been private money being spent to build a very temporary enterprise with no lasting outcome for the purpose of that private money to make a lot more money in such a way that would not have been possible without the use of public land. In the end millions of Chicagoans will have been inconvenienced for years, some severely, so that a few can make a buck or so that Richard Daley can say in his soprano voice that he was the mayor of the American city to host the Olympics.

You heard it said that the reason Barry O decided to follow his wife to Copenhagen was because of all the pressure Daley was putting on him. If true, you've got to wonder what kind of leverage he can exert on Barry.