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January 6, 2011
Teams and Owners Find Public Money Harder to Come By
The New York Times
by Ken Belson
Amazing! Ken Belson, who frequently covers the Nets for The Times, manages to write a news-analysis piece on the public funding of sports facilities that doesn't mention the Nets or Atlantic Yards. The article does, however, mention the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets and Red Bulls, none of which are owned by the developer of The Times's headquarters building, aka Nets' minority owner, Atlantic Yards developer and corporate-welfare queen Bruce C. Ratner.
The sports world is littered with examples of governments spending hundreds of millions of dollars to host the World Cup or Olympics or to help build stadiums and arenas for privately owned home teams.
But the tide may be turning, ever so slightly. In the last few years, owners of the Mets and the Yankees in New York, the Jets, the Giants and the Red Bulls in New Jersey and the Cowboys in Texas built stadiums that they financed primarily themselves. Last week, San Francisco was chosen to host the next America’s Cup even though the city had no money to offer the race organizers.
The question for economists, fiscal hawks and even Tea Party activists who oppose public subsidies for professional sports is whether these examples represent a growing resistance or are exceptions to the rule. The answer is a little bit of both.
Cities that are short of cash can no longer afford to build stadiums, which is why teams in Sacramento, San Diego and San Francisco have struggled to win support for public subsidies.
Really? Nobody told New York City.
“I would like to be hopeful about the end of subsidies, but I’m not,” said Dennis Coates, who teaches sports economics at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. “The bottom line is, no matter how often the public sector says no, the people who want to build a facility will come back to that well because no is not permanent, but yes is.”
Coates and other economists note that while voters are increasingly reluctant to shoulder the entire cost of new stadiums, politicians are finding new ways to keep their home teams happy, either by providing land, paying for parking structures, public transportation and access roads, and offering tax breaks.
Posted by eric at January 6, 2011 11:34 AM