furt:
And without them, Orlando is just a Mickey Mouse operation.
(rimshot)
I was going to mention the CIRM - California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, better known as “Stem Cells”
San Francisco is falling over itself to offer concessions on taxes, free rent, free hotel rooms, use of the Moscone convention complex, and such like that to attract these people.
Likewise, if Microsoft decided to get the heck out of Redmond, you better believe cities across the country will be doing the same.
Ok, there is one stadium that helped the area around it. It seems that the public transport system has a LOT to do with this. I’ll agree that if you can get people to come, and then have them walk around afterwards, it can work. No decent public transport system exists here, though DART is getting better. Arlington, where two of the stadiums in this area are going to be soon, has none, nada, zilch. So, I have to tone down my statements to say that you have to have the functional mass transit working first, then you can argue that it might help the local area. It still seems like that the money for the stadium should come out of the pockets of the frachise in question, since we are footing the bill for the public transport system already. In fact, if I were a franchise owner, I would demand they build that instead, since I can probably make more money off of alcohol sales since fewer of the fans would not have to worry about driving home after the game.
I always thought Bill Bidwill (owner of the now Arizona, formerly St Louis, Cardinals) had a lot of nards telling St Louis he was going to move the team out of town if they didn’t cough up a new stadium for him, considering the fact that the Cardinals could barely get 20,000 fans into Busch stadium to begin with. People aren’t going to flock to a new stadium if you still have a crappy team. I for one was more than happy to see his little blackmail attempt backfire on him.
We in the Twin Cities are going through three stadium debates at present. This has been going on for years.
We built a new arena for the MN Wild a few years back too. That building strips money away from the tax supported Target Center in Mpls, yet is still not doing well because of the hockey strike. A pro sports strike, who would have thought of that? The Wild arena has been hailed as a huge improvement for the St. Paul economy, but that is crap. The only new businesses that came into town because of the hockey building were a bunch a sports bars. They are just barely hanging on now because of the strike. The cities tax revenues have hardly budged as a result of these businesses. The nearby science museum is a much larger draw to the area.
We are told we need new stadiums for the Vikings, the Twins and the Gophers’ football team. All of them will be built with mostly public money and the total bill will come to something like one and a half billion dollars. The owners just can’t pay themselves because that would amount to them “artificially” supporting the team. Public tax dollars are not artificial support I guess.
The Twins are going to take 3 cents for every twenty-dollar purchase made in the county I live in. If this goes through (and it very well may) I will do whatever I can to avoid making purchases in Hennepin county. The new stadium will not enhance the local economy in any significant way. The Twins are not one of the top 100 businesses in Minnesota. The owner says he will move the team if he doesn’t get his ballpark, but no city has stepped forward to take them. He tried a phony sale of the team to North Carolina which turned out to be a joke. He tried to get MLB to buy the team from him and put it out of business. That didn’t fly either. His threats are empty. Yet he will probably get his hundreds of millions in welfare for his billionaire ass.
The Vikings could move, but so what? What economic value does eight games a year have in the state economy? It’s almost comical the way it is put to us. If we don’t have tax funded stadiums our convention business will die. There must be no conventions on the 355 days a year the Vikings aren’t playing.
The Gophers can’t move, but we will bail them out too. While the University is going through awful budget shortages they are direction massive fundraising efforts on this new white elephant. Each student will pay $50 per semester and the state taxpayers will have to cough up over a hundred mil. Plus they will have to tear out tons of parking spots, currently used by unimportant people (e.g. students and staff) to be replaced with a pricey parking ramp I am sure.
The economics of sports stadiums are not the same as with, say Saturn. A Saturn plant would bring lots of good jobs to the area while sports teams bring only a few. A manufacturer could move the plant to China or India. Sports teams can’t do that. They can only move to some other city. If the cities stopped paying the ransom demands of the owners the owners would be forced to build their own facilities. I’m thinking the vast majority of “unworkable” and “outdated” buildings would suddenly be okay again in that situation. Tax incentives to a major manufacturer may or may not be worthwhile, but bailouts for sports owners are always wasteful.
I’ve seen this argument before. The question is: absent a stadium, would similar development have happened elsewhere in that metro area?
If the answer is No, then the stadium’s made a big difference. But if all the stadium is doing is changing which part of town gets the boom - well, that’s only a public good if there’s a reason why the public wants that particular neighborhood to prosper.
This is one of the arguments for the future Nats ballpark: having a ballpark in D.C. proper gets people to spend money in the city itself, rather than in the 'burbs, which are in MD and VA. So rearranging the development rearranges spending in a way that gets well-off MD/VA suburbanites to spend more of their money in DC than they otherwise would.
Well, you can never really answer a what-if, but I don’t recall anyone doing anything with the area until the ballpark plans were up. Most people only knew the area because there was a CalTrain stop there. And even if the ballpark merely “diverted” development to it’s neighborhood, I hardly think that’s a strike against it; this neighborhood desperately needed a facelift.
Oh, and if I recall correctly, very little, if any, public money went to building this ballpark. It was mostly charter seat sales and corporate sponsorship (which is why I can’t get upset at the ugly name “SBC Park.”)
True, but most downtowns have a multiplicity of such areas like that.
Generally, though, you can do various economic projections and estimates to get an idea of what might have happened otherwise. (I can’t; that’s not my field. But there’s people whose field it is.) When the MCI Center was built next to D.C.'s Chinatown, it brought a lot of development that way with it. But the downtown’s revitalization had been moving along - and working in that direction - at a pretty good clip before Abe Pollin built the MCI Center.
But of course, since he used his own money to do so, it didn’t matter whether it increased development or not. However, it’s just one more case study to enter into the database when discussing potential publicly-funded arenas.
See previous paragraph. If they used little public money, they can do whatever they want. But it still serves as a data point in the debate over whether public funds are justified for stadia.
I may well stand corrected: but how much of that development was organically “created” by the park? IOW, did the Gints built the stadium, and then there was a sudden demand for businesses, etc. in the neighborhood, or was it all a part of a larger project, where the city sunk millions into rebuilding the whole area.
As a question to the audience:
The Guggenheim in Bilbao was paid for by the government to the tune of nearly $200 million. If they had wanted to come to your burg instead, would you have said no?
Gotta disagree with you here. The neighborhood started to rebound in the early 90’s, when the Embarcadero Freeway was torn down following the 1989 earthquake.
Once the freeway was gone, people realized there was suddenly a lot of prime real estate just south of downtown, close to public transportation, and with great views of the bay.
The renewal really started to pick up speed with the Internet boom of the mid- to late-90’s, and the corresponding rise in land values. SBC Park wasn’t even announced until, I think 1997, and didn’t open up until 2000.
I don’t doubt that the neighborhood has undergone a startling transformation, I just think that SBC Park was simply another facet of that transformation, not the catalyst.
Is the Guggenheim a for-profit institution? (I honestly don’t know).
The reason people are opposed to stadium projects isn’t because people object to cities funding public works, but because the teams that play there make a killing off of it. The public resents having their tax dollars used to make some rich guy richer.
I personally hate the practice of naming public buildings after companies. The Hoosier Dome was a symbol to everyone in Indiana. WHo cares about the RCA Dome? It’s just disgusting. It’s a public building. You wouldn’t rename it to “MCI PRESENTS: THE WHITE HOUSE” or “The WAL-MART Supreme Court Building”!
Well, considering that my county voted 89% against this tax, and that all the other outlying counties voted similarly, I guess common sense won out over pride in this one. Not that it mattered or anything, like catsix said they found a way to get what they wanted anyway. The threats of leaving were totally hollow anyway; the people saw that, but it didn’t do us any good.
I think both authors spoke before Philadelphia city council the last time the Eagles wanted a stadium. They made a very strong case that - consumers would not spend additional money but simply rearranger their budgets, the stadium would not bring in revenue for the city, and that there was currently no city suitable for the Eagles to relocate to. Several council members strongly opposed spending city money on the stadium. Mayor Street bullied, presented a massive report and set the vote so no council members would have enough time to read it, and otherwise made it clear he really wanted the stadium.
I believe it is not-for-profit. Bilbao may well turn a profit, but it goes back into the foundation.
I think there is some truth to this; but I think you can also consider an arena “public work.” Build an airport and you make the airline people richer; build a park and you make the guy running the hot dog stand richer.
I’m pretty much opposed to corporate welfare on principle; but I’m just trying to point out that the economics are not the only consideration. Even though it doesn’t create jobs, some people may feel the “civic asset” of having a team and/or a showcase stadium is worth it.
Assuming that public financing for sports stadiums IS a losing proposition why does it continue? I am certainly guilty of oversimplification and overgeneralization here, but I for one believe the relevant politicians in most of these cases haven’t the cojones to do right thing because they see thousands and thousands of potentially lost votes in the stands, whereas others simply see the 75,000 or so fans. I have little confidence that the Joe and Joesephine Six Packs that swarm to the stadiums would not hold it against The Mayor with their votes should a major sports team be ‘driven’ out of town. Rarely do you see a politician knowingly risk political suicide by doing what is right. It would not be appealing to the common denominator.
Oh, that’s absolutely right. The synergies that drive stadium construction don’t have a lot to do with the public good. Newspapers and TV stations derive a lot of advertising revenue from sports teams and their editorial departments take notice of that. While a politician saying " No" to a team owner looking for a new stadium is the right thing to do it happens about as often as a child turns down ice cream in favor of veggies.
Exactly right.
Look at the city of Los Angeles. They used to have an NFL team (the Rams). They let the Rams move to St. Louis. Has the economy of Los Angeles suffered as a result? Not a whit!
Look, the Rams used to play 8 home games in L.A. each season (maybe 1 or 2 more if they made the playoffs). Assuming they got around 55,000 people in the stadium each time, that means 440,000 fans attended Ram games.
Once the Rams left won, did those 440,000 people take the money they WOULD have spent on tickets/hot dogs/beer/pennants and burn it? Did they flush the money down the toilet? Of COURSE not! They found something else to do with the time and money they would have spent at the game and did something else with it- PROBABLY in the same surrounding metropolitan area.
Put it another way- suppose a man in San Diego has 2 kids, $150 in his pocket, and a free Saturday afternoon. There are many things he could elect to do with his kids on that Saturday. He could decide to take his kids to the Padres game and spend the money there. But if the Padres pull what the Baltimore Colts did, and move to another city in the middle of the night, does the man just decide to throw the money out the window and stay home? NO! He may take his kids to the zoo, he may take them to Sea World, he may take them to the beach, he may take them to the video arcade, he may take them to the movies, he may take them to an amusement park… but regardless, he’s going to spend that $150 somewhere in San Diego.
In other words, the city of San Diego receives very little in the way of economic benefit from the presence of the Padres. The Padres merely offer local citizens another choice of leisure activities in a city that already offers a host of leisure activities.
Yes, but maybe some of the people from LA now go to San Diego to watch the Padres play because the Rams have left. Thus giving San Diego more money and LA less.
First things first - the San Diego football team is the Chargers. The Padres play baseball, and L.A. has a perfectly fine baseball team, or even two, depending on how you count the Angels.
Now, astorian, you mention that with the Rams gone, people “found something else to do with the time and money they would have spent at the game and did something else with it- PROBABLY in the same surrounding metropolitan area.” (bolding mine). Now, I don’t know how entertainment taxes and related dollars work in California, but most cities are not satisfied for entertainment dollars to be spent in the “surrounding metropolitan area.” Does the city or county of Los Angeles get any benefit from money that’s spent in Orange County (Disney Land) or San Diego (Sea World, Chargers games)? It’s even more of an issue when the “surrounding metropolitan area” includes other states - New York City and New York State see no benefit when Jets fans see a game in New Jersey. Cincinnati and the state of Ohio get nothing if people who would otherwise go to Reds or Bengals games decide to go to the Aquarium in Newport, Kentucky instead. Washington DC gets nothing if entertainment dollars are spent in Maryland and Virginia.
Metropolitan areas are not big, happy, hippy communes. Each state, each city, and each county is in competition with every other for every tax dollar it can get and for every business it can attract. And sports businesses and sports stadiums are just as valid an investment as any other, as long as there’s reason to believe it’ll pay off in general increased revenue…even if it doesn’t pay for itself when viewed in isolation.