Professor Barry Bluestone, Northeastern University economist and head of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at that institution, has long advocated for the city and local colleges and universities to take a more proactive approach to housing the tens of thousands of students who come to Boston each year – and to him, the Olympics seems like a perfect opportunity to push that agenda forward.

Behind the scenes, he and other housing advocates are working to turn the city’s Olympic bid into the spark to create tens of thousands of units of “Millennial” housing – affordable units for young students and professionals.

It’s not that building more affordable and middle-income housing isn’t already a popular idea with the city’s political class. The Walsh administration has announced ambitious housing goals for the city, with the mayor’s current plan calling for 53,000 new units by 2030, more than 20,000 of them to be aimed at moderate-income buyers.

But substantial obstacles remain, including the complex approval process, restrictive zoning, and most of all high land prices and construction costs, which often require some sort of subsidy to get new middle-class housing projects off the ground. While efforts have been launched on some of these fronts, the cost issues remain paramount, with few solutions on the table.

“Even with Mayor [Martin] Walsh’s plan, it’s going to very difficult to build significant amounts of new housing for working families – the costs are so high,” said Bluestone. “What would be great is if we could build housing that was so attractive to young grad students and interns and others that they would start choosing this housing … it’s housing ju-jitsu, creating new opportunities for working families by creating new housing for Millennials.”

Housing advocates are hoping that the requirements for hosting the Olympics – and the corporate sponsorship and advertising it will attract – could help overcome the cost hurdle. Housing for the tens of thousands of athletes headed to the games will be a fundamental part of any proposal – with the right kind of planning and innovative construction techniques, the former Olympic village could be transformed into permanent housing, advocates say.

A Modular Approach

Bluestone envisions an Olympic village of small studio and one-bedroom units with large, shared common spaces. Modular construction techniques could allow the units to be dismantled and reassembled at other sites and campuses around the city. Three of his own graduate students have been working to help develop the proposal.

“They’ve designed a basic unit of 419 square feet, suitable for two people. You could also take that basic 419 and double it or even triple it,” to make dorm-like accommodations for four to six students, he explained.

It’s not only colleges who might benefit, Bluestone said. He’s also received interest in the idea from businesses looking to attract and retain young employees who want and need to be in the city even at the low-paid start of their careers – famed Southie-born restaurateur Barbara Lynch among them. Boston’s thousands of medical students and residents would also be ideal candidates for such units.

Perhaps more importantly, creating thousands of units attractive to grad students and young professionals could help siphon off part of that population from the double- and triple-deckers to which they typically flock, opening up those older units for rent by the blue-collar working families for which they were originally designed, Bluestone said.

Taking Tips From London

Full details of the proposal have yet to be made public – the Boston Olympic committee has pledged to release a more detailed version of its entire proposal for the games ahead of the first public meeting on the issue next week. But the idea is not entirely without precedent: London, site of the 2012 games, transformed its own Olympic Village in the formerly industrial neighborhood of the East End into a mixed-use affordable development after the games’ conclusion. Host to over 17,000 athletes and officials during the games, the site now holds 2,818 rental and ownership units, along with schools, medical facilities and a community center. Residents began moving in in November 2013.

But though the transition from Olympic site to permanent housing may have been relatively smooth, it wasn’t exactly free – even after selling the site to developers for £557 million (U.S. $848 million), British taxpayers were out £275 million (U.S. $418.9 million) on the deal after the costs of infrastructure improvements and construction. Those losses helped balloon the final tab for the London games to over $14 billion from an initial estimate of less than $4 billion in 2002.

Boston’s current lowball $4.5 billion bid is a price Olympics supporters argue can be entirely covered by sponsorships and advertising. A critical report on the bid by the advocacy group No Boston Olympic points out that a London-like final tab for the games would be more than enough to cover other needed infrastructure projects, like buying new rail cars for the MBTA and Commuter Rail and paying off that agency’s debt.

And if numbers even approach the eye-popping tallies seen in some other cities – Beijing 2008 is estimated to have cost about $40 billion, Sochi 2014 over $50 billion – the final tally for the games would surpass the $19 billion Big Dig as the costliest public works project in Bay State history.

The 2,800 units of permanent housing in London, “sounds like a pretty good number, but when you compare that to the mayor’s stated goal, you could build an Olympic village every year and still fall short,” said Christopher Dempsey, a spokesman for the No Boston Olympics campaign.  “There are smarter and better ways for us to grow.”