Groups who organized to oppose bringing the Olympics to Boston gathered last night to celebrate their success in putting an end to the city’s bid for the 2024 Games — but they’re not necessarily done with their advocacy.
One of the founders of the group No Boston Olympics, Liam Kerr, proposed a toast last night to a group of activists crowded into a the Beantown Pub, a downtown bar.
“I just want to say thank you to everybody that really made this happen,” Kerr said. “Thank you.”
Looking forward from their success here, Kerr says the people who bonded over this cause will probably work on some things together again.
“No idea what those might be, but looking forward to it,” he said.
His co-founder, Chris Dempsey, seemed to have a better idea of what might be coming, and he said it might actually include working with their recent foes, the group that organized the Boston 2024 bid.
“We have friends over there, former colleagues over there,” he said. “And everyone on that side was someone that wanted what’s best for the city, we just had different visions of how to get there.”
Dempsey said he thinks they can find common ground.
“We all agree we need to invest in the [MBTA] and get that working better,” he said. “We all agree we need to create more housing. We all agree we need to grow the tax base of the city. And so we hope we can sit down with them and say where are some areas where maybe we can work together, or have at least a healthy conversation about how the city moves forward.”
They might get a cold greeting from the city. In his comments Monday, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh suggested he didn’t think much of the Olympics’ opponents.
“I think the opposition for the most part are about 10 people on Twitter,” Walsh said.
Eli Gerzon is one activist who used Twitter to argue against the Olympics.
“Obviously it’s a joke,” Gerzon said. “It was dismissive, that Mayor Walsh said that. At one point I tracked how many people used one hashtag, #NoMoreBoston2024, it was 380 people.”
One of those people is Jonathan Cohn, who’s a co-founder of the group No Boston 2024 — not to be confused with the group No Boston Olympics — that’s a totally different organization. No Boston 2024 focused its attention less on the financial aspects of the game and more on what Cohn calls the social justice implications of the games, like gentrification and displacement.
“The bid being over doesn’t mean that the fight is done,” Cohn said.
Cohn says he expects his group to continue and evolve. But unlike No Boston Olympics, he says they won’t be working with the Olympics organizers.
“We don’t believe that our vision of the city is the same vision as theirs,” he said. “Because the vision of Boston 2024 is a vision that works for the one percent of the city. It’s a vision that’s been designed by developers and bankers.”
Cohn says the Olympic bid process was top-down and anti-democratic.
“And what the city needs is a more community-led development process, and that’s one thing we want to advocate for,” he said.
Cohn says he values the connection he’s made with other activists over the last several months, but he says he’d rather they came through working together for something than against something.
