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June 16, 2010
Stadium Status: Federal Subsidy for Private Development
Next American City
by Willy Staley
More coverage of the Internets Celebrities' Stadium Status.
New York City, as Stadium Status shows, was fooled three times over in one year. Starting in Queens, our hosts Dallas and Rafi take a look at Shea Stadium’s replacement, Citi Field, which uses the old Shea Stadium’s footprint as a parking lot. Then, they go uptown to The Bronx to see The House that Ruth Built reduced to rubble directly across the street from a shinier version of the same, only this time with a Hard Rock Cafe built into the ground level, and prohibitively expensive tickets. About half of each stadium’s cost was covered by taxpayer subsidies. In the case of the new Yankee stadium, the taxpayer bill was about $1 billion. And yet, in interviews with fans in and around the stadiums, no one seems upset. Everyone, after all, likes a new ballpark.
The main event of the video is Dallas and Rafi’s examination of the controversial Atlantic Yards project in Downtown Brooklyn. The project, which will receive twice the amount of subsidy that the Yankees received, is a basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets, and 16 high-rise residential buildings. As Dallas and Rafi point out, the only thing worse than the Nets was the use of eminent domain to remove so-called “blight” from the neighborhood, clearing out a few hundred residents to make room for the project’s massive footprint.
Despite all the destruction, the development got most of its political support because of Ratner’s promise of 2,250 units of affordable housing, which that particular area or Brooklyn lacks. But, even that is dependent on a great deal of public subsidy, and some critics fear Ratner won’t deliver. Even if he does, the Internets Celebrities point out, he only has to deliver a fraction of those units in the first decade of development.
Additional coverage...
The Consumerist, Do New Stadiums Really Give Back All They Get From Taxpayers?
Are new stadiums, like Citi Field, the new Yankees stadium, and the proposed new Nets stadium/Atlantic Yards project, really worth the oodles of public dollars, tax breaks, and the hundreds of residents displaced, their land seized under eminent domain? Stadium Status is an awesome new 20 min documentary by the Internets Celebrites that examines the issue and has come to a firm "Nahhhh" as its conclusion.
...I was in Detroit recently. They have a nice new stadium. Just a few blocks away down the main drag it still looks like a bombed-out warzone.
Posted by eric at June 16, 2010 11:35 AM