Challenges rise in developing Olympic Village..

Real estate developers are starting to get a glimpse of the challenges they’ll face in developing the athletes’ village if Chicago is chosen to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.
Among them is building up to 2,500 residential units that will hit the market all at once, obtaining financing and meeting the needs of the Olympics and those of the private market, which is the final destination for the project. Cassandra Francis, who is spearheading the project for the Chicago 2016 bid committee, offered some details during a luncheon Wednesday sponsored by the Chicago School of Real Estate at Roosevelt University.

The village is the highest-priced item to be built for the games. It’s a nearly $1-billion project on the site of the former Michael Reese Hospital on the city’s South Side. Although Chicago is buying the site for $86 million, the city and the Olympics organizing community are counting on private developers to construct and finance the housing project. That has become an increasingly dicey proposition since London and Vancouver, British Columbia, sites of the next two Olympics, have needed government help to keep privately developed villages on track.
Financing could be hard to line up because banks are no longer lending as generously as they did before, raising questions about whether private developers can handle the project alone.

“That’s one of the concerns the (International Olympic Committee) has,” Ms. Francis said. “We do believe we can get traditional financing.” She said the bid committee also is looking into federal financing for portions of the project that involve affordable housing, housing for seniors and student housing. ..more