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What Next for the Olympic Athletes' Village?

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— The 2010 Winter Olympics Atheletes' Village project takes on more smells.

It's going to be interesting to see what a fiasco the Olympic Village in Vancouver turns out to be. I don't like being negative, but even the Calgary Herald reports that mould may be growing in the buildings, even though they're not done yet. We have enough wet conditions in Vancouver that you don't need to build mould into a building ahead of time.

Gasp.

And, it will be expensive mould. In mid-June the Vancouver city council was voting on spending more money on the Olympic Village (about $22 million more).

This is in addition to the $100-million bailout loan that the city was forced to put in when the

credit crisis messed with the development group Millennium's financing.

What perhaps is the most depressing is the attitude on social housing. As I understand it, part of Vancouver's Olympic bid was to provide social housing as part of the project and part of the Olympic Village's composition after the 2010 Winter Olympics is to be social housing. But with costs rising, there's uncertainty about these units.

I think as a community and a country, it speaks volumes that collectively we paid for all the sporting venues to be done a year in advance, but missed an opportunity to do have the social housing done in advance. Strangely, would this not have been a good photo opportunity for the Mayor of Vancouver, Premier of BC and the Prime Minister of Canada to exhibit that they are committed to helping the less fortunate in our society?

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