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No AC but the ‘greenest’ ever Games? Inside Paris’ landmark Olympic Village [kraken14]

When Paris last hosted the Summer Olympics 100 years ago, organizers were so keen to bring athletes under the same roof that they built the first-ever Olympic Village.

It was spartan, made up of furnished wood huts, and it was razed shortly after.

The competition is back in the City of Lights a century later, but French officials are doing something completely different this time around. As part of their effort to make Paris 2024 the “most responsible and sustainable games in history,” they’re building something that’s meant to last.

“This village was thought up as a neighborhood, a neighborhood that is going to have a life afterwards,” said Georgina Grenon, the Paris 2024 director of sustainability. “Paris 2024 is renting it for a few months.”

Instead of rooming in apartments tailor-made for them, athletes in the Olympic Village this summer will be living in what will become someone else’s home or workplace.

Once the Paralympics have finished on September 8, the village — which contains 82 buildings — will be converted into office space for 6,000 workers and apartments to house another 6,000 people. he hope is that the project will provide a model to alleviate a housing crisis in the French capital, where rising interest rates, surging prices and a supply crunch have made it harder than ever to buy or rent a home. Demand for affordable housing is so intense that when a small 10 square meter (108 square feet) apartment in Paris’ up-and-coming 10th arrondissement hit the rental market last year at a price of 610 euros ($614) per month, it attracted a staggering 765 applicants in less than a week.