Excellent points, CM. Having said that, as Quick & Forte pointed out in the treatise I quoted above, as investments sports stadiums are losers for the government, any government, be it San Diego’s, LA’s, Cleveland’s, NYC’s or NJ’s. They’d be better off “investing” in schools or lotto tickets. The ecomomic impact of the Browns leaving Cleveland for 3 years equated to the closing of one shopping mall. Big whoop. As investments stadiums have big concrete footprints but little measurable positive economic impact.
I would like to bring up a few points about **Troy McClure SF’s ** comments about SBC Park.
In this case we are talking about a new stadium for an existing sports franchise, rather than a team moving to a new town. IMHO the distinction is significant, and the discussions regarding each flavor should be distinct.
While it is a question whether SBC Park is a catalyst, or a beneficiary of other development and investment in the immediate vicinity, the question remains: What happened to the spot they moved from? The decline (and associated costs/loss of revenue) of the old location should be factored into any formulations discussing whether the new arena has a positive economic impact.
Regarding the discussions of undersupply, in a perfect world, as population numbers grew, the number of teams would follow suit. Expansion teams would be the norm and the specter of a team uprooting itself and heading for greener pastures would be rare. My question is why don’t we see the natural increase in teams to follow population trends? Based on the population numbers of smaller markets and the success of their franchises, a city like Los Angeles should have 5 football teams and 9 baseball teams!
Simple. There are significant barriers to entry. One can’t just start up a team and join the NFL, MLB, NBA, etc. You have to get permission from the existing owners, pay an expansion fee, get funding for a location to play at, etc. So, for example, even though New York could support another baseball team, and probably ought to have another one, Steinbrenner and Wilpon will never allow another team in the area because they don’t want to lose market share. Look at how Peter Angelos was able to extort massive concessions from MLB to get a team in Washington.
That may be true but then cities should have the intellectual honesty to cite that as a factor rather than speaking to the questional economic benefits of a new stadium.
In every analysis I’ve read, sports stadiums are big-time losers (for the unlucky taxpayers who foot the bill). The people who make out are the team owners (who if you are lucky enough to belong to this group, are mostly millionaires). I also find it suspicious that baseball teams are private-you can’t even get access to their records! The baseball leagues are also monopolies, and anti-trust laws do not apply to them.
The Hunters Point area around Candlestick Point has long been a crappy and generally unsafe neighborhood, even when the Giants were playing there. The 49ers still play there and any new 49er stadium built within the city of San Francisco will likely have to be built there. There is no connection between the stadium and the surrounding neighborhood (perhaps just as well, given the condition of it). After football games, people get back on the 101, pretty much as quickly as traffic allows, and leave the area.
Hunters Point is a sore spot for the city, no doubt helped by the fact that a good portion of it is a former naval yard that needs to be cleaned up but nobody wants to pay for it. A shiny new football stadium certainly won’t turn the neighborhood around by itself, though city politicians and team ownership would probably like to think that it is an absolutely necessary piece of the puzzle.
But SBC really is the exception to this debate, given that no public money went into the building of it. Whether or not the stadium is responsible for the revitalization of the Mission Bay neighborhood, it certainly was an overall net-gain for the city. Even if the Giants drift into a decade of post-Bonds mediocrity that they appear to be heading towards, the biotech companies around the ballpark will keep that area humming.
Zamboniracer:
I haven’t read the Quick & Forte study (though I’ll try to find it in my library), but I have to question a few things:
- If the absence of the Browns for 3 years equaled an economic loss equvalent to the closing of a shopping mall, then doesn’t that indicate that a stadium as a LONG-TERM investment may indeed make sense? Most relocations are not just for a three-year period…how much did St. Louis lose for letting the Cardinals get away, not to be replaced for 9 years, the equivalent of three closed shopping malls? How about Baltimore, team-less for 12 years (four shopping malls)?
1a) Don’t plenty of cities give developers of shopping malls various breaks in order to encourage their development?
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I really don’t think you can make a blanket statement about whether it’s right or wrong for cities to kick in money for stadiums, or municipal improvements to support stadiums. In some cases, the cities are replacing stadiums that are so decrepit as to be unusable (Cleveland Municipal Stadium, Tiger Stadium, the Kingdome)…that would seem to me to be as a valid capital infrastructure project as road repair. After all, these are city-owned properties that were being put to use, if they have become unusable and are not repaired or replaced, that’s a loss for the city, not just the team. On the other hand, I think it’s foolish for cities to spend money to replace stadiums which are fundamentally sound and usable but simply don’t have all the bells and whistles that some newer ones do. What would have been so bad about using Three Rivers, Veterans (Philadelphia) or Riverfront/Cinergy for a few more decades? Unlike the Kingdome, I hadn’t heard anything about those stadiums (and others built in the 60’s and 70’s) that would lead me to think they require replacement. And replacing the Metrodome, which is even newer (and which is very friendly to the Twins, to boot) seems even more absurd to me. This is especially true when there’s no real threat of re-location (which is true of most established teams).
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Another factor that makes it hard to gauge is when the stadiums in question sevre more than just the team. You can say, for example, that the Falcons alone don’t justify the cost of the Georgia Dome, but when you throw in the 1996 Olympics and Super Bowl XXXIV (plus the likelihood of future Super Bowls), that adds a lot of revenue to the calculation. By the same token, I’m rooting for the Manhattan Jets Stadium to get built, because it will a) give us the 2010 Super Bowl, b) raise our chances at getting the 2012 (or future) Olympics, c) add space to our under-sized convention center, and d) get that Jets revenue from New Jersey (unlike the above-mentioned Georgia Dome, for which the Falcons revenue was already in Atlanta). In addition, much of the infrastructure that’s being invested in the stadium is infrastructure that would be necessary without a stadium as well, in order to expand the convention center, and this way, at least the city has the Jets kicking in some money as opposed to a stand-alone convention center expansion, which would be totally on the city’s dime.
Bottom line: I see the point that the study is trying to make, but the portion you quoted, at the very least, leaves me unconvinced that stadiums can’t sometimes be a good use of public monies.
Candlestick Park, still home to the 49ers, is in an insulated corner of the City, with SF Bay and US 101 to the south, a small mountain to the west & north, and a neighborhood to the northeast. The surrounding area is very much the ghetto of San Francisco. It’s the Hunters Point/Bayview district, if that helps. As such, no one dared to shop in the surrounding neighborhood, and went directly from the freeway exit to the parking lot.
What the area was like in 1960, I couldn’t say.
Decent article on this subject at Reason.com this month: Demolishing Sports Welfare. Gives some information on the current deal sought by Jerry Jones for the Cowboys, as well as some background on court cases which may impact stadium deals in the future. One case concerns the issue of “eminent domain,” the other challenges the Anti-trust status of the NFL.