Stratford was recently named as the countries worst crime hotspot[0].
According to the FT, "the bounce" has failed to materialise [1].
I would not recommend a walk around the outskirts of the Olympic stadium for all but the very brave, it's still an area in much poverty with many social issues completely unresolved, notably violent crime (3.5 for every 1,000 people) [2].
[0] - http://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/westfield-stratfords-po...
[1] - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/543cabaa-8a41-11e2-9da4-00144feabd...
[2] - http://crimeinlondon.com/newham/stratford-and-new-town/viole...
Much of the crime is theft, rather than violent crime that south London sees - the postcode mentioned in the link above is the postcode of two shopping centres and transport interchange - the places you would expect to see high pick pocketing and shoplifting, which is what the majority crime mentioned in the report is.
I think the adjacent areas have changed, Leyton and Leytonstone are both far nicer - and in the last years have had new interesting pubs, cafes and shops open up.
Would this have happened anyway? Maybe - but most people I talk to are pretty happy with the changes the area has seen.
I'm still a little sad the plan to open Google offices in the Olympic park was shelved - that would have brought in a whole heap of jobs and new people to the area.
The setting of the movie 'Ill Manors'?
London has been re-developing brown fields since the mid-80s and shows no sign of slowing down. The Olympics may have accelerated it, but I'm not sure anyone I know who lives in East London or works in Techcity would buy that this re-development wouldn't have happened anyway. The pressure for space is just too great.
I'm fairly pro-Olympics now, afterall... that velodrome is something beautiful and I'm going to ride it.
a) new builds in the UK are made as cheaply as possible.
b) new builds go down in value as soon as you buy them
c) we in Europe hate soulless man planned cities - a lot of the area around the olympic park feels this way.
I think the government could have just paid for the cleanup of the area and done something like subsidise housing for the poor there with the money, rather than pay the the huge costs of running the games. The opening ceremony was pretty good though :-D
The whole point of development, especially development pursuant to the Olympics, is to push the poor out of the area. When any mayor says "we will clean up and develop this area," none ever mean "... in order to make a nice place to live for poor people." Indeed, if poor people still live there, the public won't even perceive the area as being nice.
E.g., this is one of the "bad neighborhoods" of Chicago: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=south+halsted+and+west+77+chi...
Like most of the city, it's actually quite well-maintained and pleasant. If lower-income people didn't live there, it wouldn't be considered a bad neighborhood at all.
Here's a bad neighborhood in Chicago:
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=west+garfield+park&ie=UTF-8&h...
It is not well-maintained and it isn't pleasant; it's block after block of board-ups and red-X placards.
"Chicago's Auburn Gresham neighborhood made the list twice this year, but the census tract around South Halsted Street and West 77th is ranked highest at No. 4. Within a one-year period, NeighborhoodScout says there is a 1 in 9 chance of being a victim of violent crime here, and per 1,000 residents, the violent crime rate is 116.56.
The average per capita income in this area is lower than 99.4 percent of other U.S. neighborhoods, and 51 percent of children in this section of Chicago are living below the federal poverty line, giving this census tract a rate of childhood poverty that's higher than 93 percent of neighborhoods around the country."
I'll defer to your knowledge of Chicago, though. My point really is that while people talk about "bad neighborhoods" on the south side of Chicago, much (most? at least what I've driven through) is in pretty good shape. Even West Garfield Park isn't so bad in places. E.g. https://maps.google.com/maps?q=west+garfield+park&ll=41.8819...
I wouldn't want to drive down Washington in Garfield Park at night.
All of this is really not super relevant to your point, except to demonstrate that the neighborhoods people think of as "bad" in Chicago aren't pretty tree-lined residential streets that happen to have poor people living in them.
There was also fairly widespread use of compulsory purchase orders [1] to obtain land for the olympic park [2]. A significant number of people lost their homes, and businesses were forced to move, so that private-sector developers could take-over the land.