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August 5, 2011
Why Do Mayors Love Sports Stadiums?
The Nation
by Neil deMause
A must-read from the expert in sports swindles. And after you read it, send a copy to every one of your elected representatives.
On a busy streetcorner in downtown Brooklyn, the steel girders are starting to rise. After a decade of protests by residents (including local celebrities like Steve Buscemi, Jennifer Egan and Jonathan Lethem) and innumerable lawsuits, developer Bruce Ratner’s vision of a new arena to bring the New Jersey Nets basketball team to Brooklyn—with the aid of about $500 million in city and state subsidies—is taking root, with a scheduled opening in September 2012.
Yet Atlantic Yards, as Ratner has dubbed his twenty-two-acre development project on the edge of the bustling neighborhood of Prospect Heights, won’t look much like the image he first unveiled in 2003. The “Miss Brooklyn” office tower, which was supposed to bring jobs to the community, is gone, a victim of the virtual collapse of New York’s commercial real estate market. Meanwhile, the condo towers that were supposed to provide more than 2,250 units of affordable housing are unlikely to be built anytime soon, if at all. (The latest plan involves a “modular” building, akin to stacking shipping containers thirty-four stories high.) The Nets, meanwhile, are spending two seasons playing in Newark’s Prudential Center, another heavily subsidized building ($200 million fronted by taxpayers) that was supposed to revitalize its surrounding neighborhood but that still rests among the same discount stores and fast-food joints that lined Market Street before the arena opened in 2007.
It’s a story that could have been told in almost any American city over the past two decades. Owners of teams in the “big four” sports leagues—the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL—have reaped nearly $20 billion in taxpayer subsidies for new homes since 1990. And for just as long, fans, urban planners and economists have argued that building facilities for private sports teams is a massive waste of public money. As University of Chicago economist Allen Sanderson memorably put it, “If you want to inject money into the local economy, it would be better to drop it from a helicopter than invest it in a new ballpark.”
The article is also cross-posted on the NPR web site under the headline "Stop The Subsidy-Sucking Sports Stadiums."
Related coverage...
Atlantic Yards Report, From Neil deMause in The Nation: Why Do Mayors Love Sports Stadiums?
Here's the basic explanation:
Why do new sports facilities have such a hold on local elected officials? The simplest explanation is fear: because team owners can choose new cities but cities can't choose new teams — thanks to the leagues' government-sanctioned monopolies over franchise placement — mayors feel they must offer owners anything they want.
However, as described, most teams don't leave, just use the potential as a threat.
Other justifications: sports facilities serve as monuments to the people who helped get them done. (As we've learned, elected officials like groundbreakings and ribbon-cuttings.)
Consulting firms produce glowing "economic impact studies," leading one public official to comment, "Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that elected officials are much into evidence-based decision-making."
And, deMause also cites "[o]utright manipulation" and increasingly clever financing deals, as with the two baseball stadiums in New York.
Posted by eric at August 5, 2011 11:48 AM