This is pretty much the reason my football/soccer team in the UK is doing the exact same thing. Except they’ve done the additional step of refusing to play at their current ground, instead moving to share a ground about 35 miles away, in a different county. So now there’s a perfectly good, new (it was opened in the last decade) stadium doing nothing in the city of Coventry. What they didn’t count on was the fans disagreeing with it all and refusing to go watch the team, meaning attendance has dropped from an average attendance of 11,000 to around 2,500.
So now the club is demanding that the owners of the stadium sell it to them.
It is all very, very messy.
The stupid thing is the team is playing the best it has for years. Due to financial irregularity (it gets really messy here with the team going bankrupt and then being bought by another company owned by the company that went’s bankrupt’s owners) they started on -10 points. If they hadn’t had them deducted they’d be fourth in the league (out of twenty four).
Google “Coventry City stadium dispute” for the gory details.
If you choose to trust a car dealer who tells you that used car “was only driven by a little old lady to and from church,” that’s your business. More wary people recognize the general conditions (1. Used car dealer, 2. Claim car was lightly used to inflate value) that are the hallmarks of someone about to get suckered. If you choose to ignore the past of stadiums built with public money, that is your choice. I will continue to warn others “caveat emptor.”
BTW, here’s where you said it was flawed:
This is attempting to point out a flaw (lack of evaluation of new stadiums where none existed before) which already addressed by the research in Florida from 1980 to 2005, during which several new stadiums were built on grounds where there was no stadium before… the Sun Life Stadium in Miami, Tropicana Field in Tampa, the BB&T Center in Broward County, and more.
You also tried to say it was flawed because “every deal is different”:
And every car dealership is different, should we just trust the guy who says he wants another $1000 for the car because it was only driven by a little old lady? No, we should not just trust him, too many people get screwed over that way.
Sure! That would be great! Just tell us how these stadium deals have changed? I’ve not heard this before… not sure why you haven’t said how the deals are different yet, but there’s no time like the present, right?
Not quite. I’m saying there is a high probability this deal will be bad for the taxpayers of Cobb County. The reason I’m saying this is because most taxpayers in jurisdictions where stadiums are built with public money lose more tax money than is gained through sales & business taxes. I’ve posted two cites to explain how this trend is observed.
ETA: Maybe the taxpayers of Cobb County will be an exception, and avoid the drain of funds that has plagued so many other communities that put up public money for stadiums - if so, that’s great! But I am not optimistic on that score.
I’m pretty right.wing with a heavy doe of libertarian and I completely agree with that.
Why would you waste money bringing in a stadium that will never pay for the moeny spent? It’s taking money out of teachers, police, firefighters and giving it to rich people.
I do no such thing, and your comment is nonsensical. The two situation are not analogous.
No, I never said it was flawed. I said every deal is different, and that the deals in the study may not apply to this situation. If you don’t know the difference, you have no business posting anything about any study ever.
No, we should evaluate every deal on its own merits. Using you logic, no one should ever buy a car becasue some people have been screwed in the past.
Many are paid with bonds, motel taxes, etc. If you’re going to claim a study proves your point, you need to be prepared to show how it does. You need to be prepared to show why this deal sucks. You’re just pointing at a study and demonstrating total ignorance. That’s pretty unconvincing.
How many are? How similar were those deals to this one?
This would support your point, right? Right. However, that’s not the point I’m arguing. They go on to say (and support, with citations):
That’s what needs to be considered. Does metro Atlanta as a whole (city and surrounding suburbs) net additional tax doallers? Maybe not. Does Cobb County take a nice chunck of those tax dollars away from the city? Quite possibly.
SF built a nice ballpark on the water by ripping down some old warehouses, and that ended up revitalizing the neighborhood where it was built. Same thing I heard about the Arena District in Columbus, OH. In both of those examples the facility was built within existing cities and infrastructure, close to where a lot of people live and work, and easy access to public transit.
What this thing in Atlanta looks more like is the Cowboys new stadium in suburban Dallas. Maybe the jury is still out, but can any Dallas-area dopers comment on how Jerry’s castle has worked out for that location? Granted it is football versus baseball, but the locations seem similar (suburban).
I’m not from Dallas so I can’t comment on that part of your post but you also touch on one interesting fact about the Braves new stadium proposal: It goes against the trend in baseball over the last two decades to build new ballparks either in a city’s central business district or some other heavily urbanized area. Aside from Tampa Bay’s Tropicana Field, which was built years before the Tampa/St. Pete area secured an MLB franchise, the model for nearly every new ballpark has been Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards: A retro-designed ballpark located downtown or in a long-established neighborhood with restaurants and bars nearby for fans to walk to before and after the game. The proposed Braves park is a throwback to the boring cookie-cutter stadiums put up from the 60s to the 80s that were surrounded by seas of concrete and little else. If built, I hope this won’t signify the beginning of a new trend where all the baseball owners who extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from the public to build stadiums downtown will now start demanding millions more to build new parks outside the city limits at the edge of the sprawl.
Well… the location is hardly “at the edge of the sprawl” and likely hasn’t been since 1975. There are 500,000 people in the city of Atlanta, and 5 million surrounding it, and this location is about 2 miles from the city limits
Arlington, while large enough overall to be a typical suburb throughout most of it, was already something of an amusement-central for the area. Cowboys Stadium is right nearby the Ballpark in Arlington for the Texas Rangers, which is right next to Six Flags over Texas, which is across the street from the big water park, with a horse racing track technically in a different suburb, but all of 5 minutes or so away down the same interstate.
So moving the Cowboys there was something that pretty much everyone in the area found perfectly logical and obvious.
I wasn’t talking about Atlanta so much as other cities. The stadiums and sports venues built from the 60s to the 80s were often in areas that were, at the time, semi-rural or industrial because the land was cheap and there was room for immense parking lots. As you stated, the location of the new Braves park is neither semi-rural or industrial. However, it does look like it’s going to be a stadium surrounded by a vast ocean of concrete and isolated from its surroundings. That’s a trend I hope is not coming back for baseball stadiums.
There is absolutely nothing around Turner Field. There are a lot more restaurants and bars near the new location, which is literally one or two miles outside the city limit. It really isn’t very far out at all. It will also be next door to a large conference center and a performing arts auditorium.
The new 49ers stadium is in Santa Clara, about 40 miles down the road from Candlestick Park. Santa Clara is more suburban to San Jose, but then again many consider San Jose suburban to San Francisco anyway. While no doubt the new stadium is definitely not near any urban core, there is access to transit, and like Dallas, Great America amusement park is right next door. There is a convention center and a number of large office parks also in the vicinity. Still, I wonder what the heat map for 49er fans is now that the stadium is 40 miles from the team’s home city.
Locally for me, the mayor and city council have been jonesing for a new arena for the Sacramento Kings for years. They have floated all kinds of ideas, 100% of which involve building it downtown. They definitely believe in the whole revitalization theme - that a new sports bauble will somehow get people to party downtown.
Back to Atlanta, it does seem a shame to desert a 20 year old facility, but I can see good reason why the team would want to move if there is nothing keeping them in downtown. I do not always subscribe to the idea that these stadiums need to be downtown - I think sometimes that an urban politician’s fantasy does not always make sense.
I was going to mention that in that post you quoted but decided it was getting too off-topic. In any case, as I said in my other more recent post, the fact that there are many fast-food places and franchise restaurants near the new ballpark’s site won’t matter much if it’s isolated from the rest of its surroundings by an immense parking lot.
I can’t help but notice that you’ve changed the metric from return on investment to taxpayers to economic output, but that’s either you misunderstanding my point or deliberately trying to address a different point that’s not mine.
You seem to imagine that I said: Publicly-funded stadiums don’t generate economic activity which is not only not true, it’s not what I said at all. (and 0.09% - really??)
To help you understand what I am saying, here is a short summary of my point and I’ve bolded the relevant portion of my previous posts so you know that I’m not talking about economic activity and never have been.
My point:
It’s easy to convince public funders to put more public money towards stadiums than taxpayers will see back from taxes paid resulting from stadium-related activity.
Measurements of stadium-generated economic activity indicate that it is both (a) inflated in attempts to secure public funding for stadiums and (b) small enough that work stoppages at the stadium (lockouts and strikes) do not generate a measurable change in tax receipts even over entire states and many years.
Because #1 and 2 have played out so often over their alternatives, it is more likely that Cobb County will be out taxpayer money than will find this as a revenue-neutral project.
Hopefully this will illustrate my point that you may have missed a few times: I’m not saying stadiums don’t generate economic activity or increase economic output. I’m saying that the return on investment to the taxpayer sucks.
Do you really walk away from any negotiation when the price is too high? Maybe you don’t negotiate much, but the original scenario makes clear that the context is negotiation over price not either/or decision to buy a car.
Bolded the relevant part of the post you were responding to. You don’t just walk away from every negotiation where someone asks a higher price than you’re willing to pay. You counter-offer with the lower price that you think is fair.
Wow. It would be pretty inconvenient for your rant if the study I cited way back in post #16 of this very thread included stadiums paid with bonds, motel taxes, etc…
Tropicana Field was built in 1986-1990 in Florida, and so was constructed during the 1980-2005 data set examined by Baade et al. in “Selling the game: estimating the economic impact of professional sports through taxable sales.”
Bonds and sales taxes – sounds like the research I cited included your objection, so I wonder why you bothered to bring it up. Why did you bring that up?
Look, Labrador Deceiver, if you want to advocate for the new stadium, that’s fine. There’s plenty of reasons to do so, but don’t try to ignore the history of stadiums siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars in public money in exchange for a pittance in increased tax income.
May be. How many tax dollars is a relevant question though. Let’s take your 0.09% from your earlier cite from New York, and find that the economy in Cobb County included $12.4 billion in sales in 2009, $14.3 billion in 2008… cite: http://economic.cobbcountyga.gov/about-cobb.htm
Being generous by using the 2008 number, $14.3 x 0.09% = $14.3 x 0.0009 = $129 million/yr. 6% sales tax gives us $129 * 0.06 = $780,000/yr to Cobb County taxpayers.
How much are the taxpayers thinking of putting into this project?