BEIJING—On the good days, when the building across the street is full of men from around the world pummeling one another, a handful of extra customers will wander into Lu Guoli’s little restaurant, a neighborhood place where the dumplings are excellent and the waiters more than a little surly.

Still, given that a good chunk of the world’s boxing fraternity is camped out so close, Lu is surprised that business isn’t better.

After all, the Olympics remade much of Beijing over the past 10 years, and brought immense change to his neighborhood. Entire blocks of cramped housing were torn down around the corner, and the residents forced to move away. The streets are shiny with new pavement. New glass-walled buildings have gone up, and cranes mark spots where more are coming.

But when the Olympics finally arrived—the games everyone here had been longing for—the changes to the neighborhood have been somewhat less than expected.

“We’ve had a little more business,” said Lu, a man with a buzz cut and a near-constant frown. “But things are definitely not as good as I thought it would be ... Maybe if we were near the main venue.”

Maybe. But probably not.

“Host a Great Olympics, Build a New Beijing” say banners hanging on highway overpasses around this city. And building is exactly what they’ve done.

By most estimates, at least $40 billion was spent preparing China for the 2008 Olympics, and in many areas Beijing is barely recognizable compared to what it was a decade ago.

But the games themselves remain a distant idea to much of the city. Most of the Olympic venues are multi-million-dollar islands of new development, isolated from the neighborhoods around them by layers of security, eight-lane roads and roaring freeways.

The Olympic Green, the 2,800-acre area that is home to the Bird’s Nest stadium and the Water Cube swimming arena, was designed as a self-sustaining city-within-a-city. While there are a few nearby residential areas, that part of north Beijing was effectively torn down and rebuilt over the past 10 years, and an area that was once small factories and neighborhoods of low-slung housing was crafted into iconic sports venues and parks.

But even in neighborhoods that press up close to the smaller sports venues—like Lu’s street, where boxing matches are being held in the Beijing Worker’s Gymnasium—the competitions often appear to residents as little more than lines of air-conditioned buses ferrying in athletes and journalists, and occasional groups of people milling outside the front gates.

“I like the crowds,” said Liu Tianle, who runs a small photo studio down the street from Lu’s restaurant. While he’s thrilled with the development in recent years—the shiny buildings, the neat rows of new trees and shrubs—the actual games have meant little to him.

The closest he’ll get to an event is the occasional customer bringing in boxing photos to be printed.

“I love the Olympics. I like any event where the Chinese could win a gold medal,” he said, smiling. “But the games haven’t made a difference to me.”

That is no surprise to urbanization experts.

“That’s the nature of these (sports) venues nearly anywhere in the world,” said John Baick, an urban historian at Western New England College in Springfield, Mass. “They are completely distinct, walled off by parking lots, and have almost nothing to do with their environments.”

“They could be anywhere,” he added.

For many Beijing residents, though, the games have brought nothing but change.

In a poor neighborhood in eastern Beijing, a sliver of life at the edge of a freeway not far from the beach volleyball stadium, a few hundred people live in a warren of one-story brick rooms. They share pit toilets and communal water taps. Many came to Beijing from poverty-stricken parts of Henan province, leaving behind lives of rice farming that gave them barely enough to survive.

They are part of an enormous wave of immigration from across China that has descended on Beijing over the past decade, hoping for jobs, better schools for their children and the chance to make the jump from rural poverty to urban working class. In a city being rebuilt, they provided much of the unskilled labor—and helped push Beijing’s population from 11 million to 17 million in the last eight years.

This particular neighborhood has no name, and residents refer to it by the complicated directions required to reach it. Many people living there have moved repeatedly since arriving in the city, trying to stay ahead of government bulldozers.

While they have benefited from the changes in Beijing—in jobs, pay, and the chance to escape their old lives—they have also paid the price for the city’s changes.

“I moved here because they turned my last house into a subway stop because of the Olympics,” said Zhang Huihua, 42, who runs a small fruit stall with her husband. Each works at least 15 hours a day, bringing home about $800 in a very good month. “There were thousands of people living there. We all had to leave.”

Still, she’s consumed by the patriotic enthusiasm so commonly heard here about the Olympics, and is thrilled to have one of the venues nearby. Occasionally, she’s even seen Chinese athletes passing by in their buses.