Well, one good thing came out of the Olympics pick: Reading the whining from LA

And how do they have an NFL football team?

-LA Times, maybe

That's a great reason to mortgage the state's future. Nothing like a revenge tax bill that you pay for 30 years.

My three favorite cities in the country are Boston, DC and San Fran - have said that for years - moderately sized, cool older architecture, well educated - all pricey for a reason. That said - I don't think any of these could pull it off - you either need a BIG city or the major city in a country with the country's resources behind it. Sure the US will chip in - but it won't be like people from Chicago will come out of the woodwork to help. In South Africa for example - if Cape Town gets it (SPECTACULAR city BTW), I think the whole country would - of necessity and pride - get behind it - even though it's a smaller city.

Bottom line - the Olympics requires scale. We have many strengths - scale isn't one of them. Bigger cities - this is still big - but it's not life as they know it. For us - we will need to live and breath colored rings for a decade to do this right - all hands on deck and from the sounds of it - we'll be lucky to have half the hands on deck.

supported San Francisco, because I think an Olympics might force San Francisco to address some of the issues that it's currently sticking its head in the sand about.

SF NIMBYism makes it nearly impossible to address the severe shortage of housing and mass transit options needed to keep the city affordable to all, because a lot San Franciscians have the attitude that "if we don't build it, they won't come and in fact, people who are already here will go away."

It would also force SF to handle its laisses-faire attitudes towards crime, as the Olympics has high-security needs and would require the police force to grow and train to handle an event of global scale and top-level security.

Finally, San Francisco seems to be totally OK with using the streets as an open-air mental hospital, which given the security needs and increase in tourists that the Olympics brings, would have to be addressed by providing meaningful long-term mental health care/rehabilitation. Currently, a lot of homeless/mentally ill individuals are turned loose on the streets to fend for themselves, which creates a bad situation for pretty much everyone involved.

Also, I suspect it would have been easier to get projects underwritten by private investment in the Bay Area, where there's more corporate money than there is potable tapwater. While in Boston, some of the universities might agree to upgrade their current facilities for Olympic use and their future use (Northeastern University, I'm looking at your out-of-date-pool), a lot of the Big Names in Boston function as nonprofits, so while you might see a Google Equestrian Venue, you'll never see a MGH Equestrian Venue.