Cities should not pay for new stadiums | Hacker News Reader

Cities should not pay for new stadiums

sites.lsa.umich.edu

596 pointsdroptablemain564 comments

I think beyond the obvious large sports stadiums, local high schools are among the worst offenders. New tax levies for 'schools' almost always pass despite much of that spent on new sports fields meant for the exclusive use of sports teams that constitute only a very small percentage of the student body population (not to mention the overall population). Meanwhile, the school will not even have safe ways for children to ride bikes to school and bus service cannot even be properly maintained.

How about Opera Houses? Why should the federal taxpayer pour millions into the Kennedy Center just so rich old congresspeople can pretend to enjoy the plotless hellscape of "Cats"?

The Kennedy Center is used frequently to host federal government events that bring in large groups of people. In that one case.

Further, spaces like the Kennedy center (or amphitheaters) play a revolving set of shows which makes it difficult for any private entity to have enough skin in the game to fund it. If the stadium was owned by the city and rented to whichever group wanted it, that would be more analogous. But right now it's the X stadium, the sports team sells the naming rights, gets the revenue from other uses, etc. Instead, put them in a position where they can be outbid for the use during a home game and I might start agreeing.

> Further, spaces like the Kennedy center (or amphitheaters) play a revolving set of shows which makes it difficult for any private entity to have enough skin in the game to fund it.

It's really difficult to fund it when you have government backed competition which doesn't answer to the market.

I'm not sure if this applies to the Kennedy Center, but it certainly applies to the mega stadiums which double as concert venues that seem to be popping up around here. It would be impossible to compete against a government owned venue which will certainly have at least a conflict of interest in the development of supporting infrastructure and other legislation.

For every dollar I give to Uncle Sam, 12 cents goes to military defense contractors like Raytheon. 0.004 cents go to the National Endowment for Art.

I know which of those two provides more value to society, and I think it's a fucking joke how art & music are not seen as things humans do like birds making a nest, but as something to commodify and court private investment with. We completely cut art and music from most curriculums in K-12 to afford budget cuts and what did we get out of them? Did you notice the extra fraction of a fraction of a penny this year on your return?

The reason private entities don't fund art is the same reason they don't fund public transit or worker pensions or guaranteed pay sick leave or... it's not profitable. I yearn for the day Americans are willing to support something regardless of how much money it makes them. Especially for a country that waxes so much poetic about its "moral majority".

As a person living outside of US I appreciate those 12 cents from you much more than 0.004. US provides at least some level of global security and I don't want this role to be taken by any other country. As for art, I always can look for other options.

Billions are spent on art. Every video game, movie, cartoon, anime, song, comic book, coffee table book, and even ad, is art. There is arguably no reason the government needs to fund art as it's already extremely well funded.

> I yearn for the day Americans are willing to support something regardless of how much money it makes them.

HN sneers about "voting against their own interest" when they do that.

It seems like a lot of Americans are brainwashed into thinking that "public transit or worker pensions or guaranteed pay sick leave or..." are Socialist, or even worse, Communist.

I would point out, as an aside, that Opera itself is basically "an open-source community of musical-play development" — i.e. performances where the source material is in the public domain such that anyone can put on a performance of them without paying royalties.

This is unlike "musicals", which are protected by copyright, and are thus only run by the musical's rights-holder's licensed troupe(s), in a particular place (usually Broadway), with a particular interpretation of the material (the rights-holder's); where the revenues are due to high ticket prices that can be charged often only due to the artificially-created scarcity of performances of said musical due to IP law. (I.e. for many musical, nobody is going because they're fans of the particular actors/director/etc; they just wanted to see a performance of musical X, akin to what you'd get from seeing opera X. But there's only one available performance of a given musical X. Musical producers have a monopoly on performances of their musical.)

Musicals make money, by design. Opera does not make money, by design. Instead, opera houses take donations, in much the same way that you might imagine a "local open-source software development collective" might take donations.

When the people of a municipality get together and decide that they consider their local opera house a "local cultural institution" worth supporting with their tax money (usually only to prop it up in bad donation years), this does certainly make the opera house into a "government-backed" project. But in this case, the "government" here is just the mob-action of the people of the city. It's the atheist version of a church congregation agreeing that their tithes should be partly directed to some local needy cause.

While I love opera and have supported it financially in multiple places I've resided, I find it laughable that any major urban electorate in the US would actually support the Opera fiscally if that decision was left to them directly.

West End theatre in London is developed by a complex amalgamation of arts organizations, grants, &c. and personally I find the scene more inventive and exciting than broadway, as a theater-goer.

> for any private entity to have enough skin in the game to fund it.

This is exactly what capital markets are for and some capable and incentivized entrepreneur would acquire/develop such a venue and charge rental rates as applicable.

The answer to arts funding is not “capitalism” any more than military funding is. We don’t question the financial cost there because we assume there is a broader benefit beyond direct profits. Why aren’t the arts treated the same way? Do people really not see why they are worth funding, regardless of whether or not they turn a profit?

Unless I’m misunderstanding your point, you’re sort of indirectly advocating against grants for the arts. Is that accurate?

Yes, there is an issue with megastadiums that double as a concert venue. Among other things, the stadium and associated concert revenue, while built with government money, go to the sports team.

It's hard to get a large amphitheater going without government support. While I'm sure there are examples, but none spring to mind either currently or throughout history. But subsidizing live events of a revolving nature is different from subsidizing a billionaires sports team.

The flip side of it is I can't imagine going entirely private either. You would have a billion dollar asset completely beholden to the local government, which could extract what they want from you.

It seems like every new complex of buildings in NYC comes with a performance arts space. Did we really need one at both Hudson yards and the WTC?

Probably. There are a lot of people, which means you need a lot of performance art spaces.

I think the difference is that football is a money making endeavor for the team owner. Opera isn't making money for anyone and needs help if it is to exist.

Giving money to football teams is not much of a step removed from putting it directly in the pockets of the already rich owners of the teams.

Actual opera fans are frothing at the mouth right now at the suggestion that Cats is opera.

But this idea that opera is stuffy high culture is the same mistake people make with Shakespeare--it's pop culture, just removed from its context. Imagine upper-class twits a century from now screening an Adam Sandler movie.

Isn't what makes Shakespeare "high culture" is its ability to stand the test of time? I'm sure there were plenty of mediocre or terrible plays from other writers at the time that no one cares about now, and are thus not "high culture". Shakespeare's stuff has been consistently read/performed for centuries, indicating that there might be something a bit more to it than the average play. Pop culture doesn't necessarily imply not high culture.

I could be wrong obviously, but I would be extremely surprised if Adam Sandler movies have centuries of longevity to them; I think even people who like his movies will acknowledge that they're not spectacular films.

Of course the "test of time" test isn't always an indicator of quality. There are plenty of old books that I had to read that I thought were terrible, and moreover there are plenty of modern music that I think is fantastic that no one else will really care about.

That’s why Opera has so many long boring bits. Attendees weren’t expected to pay attention as if it were a High Mass. It was a social event, a place to see and be seen, as well as trade gossip and so on. The performance itself was somewhat analogous to the TV on in the background at a bar.

If people who actually like opera won’t fund it then then why should I, not an opera fan, fund it?

I like tennis but I would not force you to subsidize its existence.

The owner is making money, but so are the players, the referees, the concession staff, parking attendants, stores and shops that sell licensed apparel, and the bars, restaurants, and other adjacent businesses. Not to mention the marketing team, strength and conditioning coaches, web developers, and others who work for the team. And although temporary, it does create new construction jobs. This is true for football, soccer, baseball, basketball, and other sports.

But this is less true when the stadium is built and then surrounded with parking lots that you have to drive to to go park your car. It's more true when the stadium is built in a neighborhood or at least a walkable area.

Recently Columbus was going to lose the much beloved Columbus Crew soccer team. We had a stadium off of I-71 that was, you guessed it, surrounded by parking lots and not much else. You couldn't grab a beer before or after the game. People couldn't go camp out at a nearby bar and while you're not in the stadium you're close by and part of the atmosphere. Fortunately the state and local business leaders rallied together to #SavetheCrew and we were able to keep the team and we're building a new stadium next to Nationwide Arena in downtown Columbus where you can walk to the stadium. Hell, you can actually bike there from the suburbs using an existing bike trail and check-in your bike. Similarly, Ohio Stadium on the campus of Ohio State University is very walkable. People go and grab brunch before the noon game, they buy apparel, etc.

So I think that yea, a football team is likely to make money for the team owner and cities and governments should be weary of this. And I also haven't read the article so maybe the benefits I mentioned are washed away somehow, but I can't imagine Columbus without Ohio State football, Bluejackets hockey, or Crew soccer. I think it makes the city a better place, even if the owner (of the latter two) makes money.

I'm replying to a post about high school sports fields. Not known for their profitability. And at least kids can go run around there when a formal practice or game isn't happening.

I went few times to the Kennedy Center, and as a 35-year-old software engineer, I was not a token spectator. They were people of all walks of life watching Ballet, Opera, and Symphonic Orchestra.

And you can watch Music Hall for $50 or Operas/Ballets for $100. This are not crazy prices compared to a normal concert/stadium seat.

Your example brings to mind one of the many reasons why I oppose the funding of stadiums: it is about passive entertainment rather than active participation. Much the same can be said of opera houses. If the objective is to promote the arts, then direct funding to get people involved in the arts. If you want to promote sports, then direct funding to get people involved in sports. While I appreciate that the interest of some is sustained by watching the best in the field, the sad reality is that most people will be unable to partake unless it is made accessible to them. That means focusing money upon the stage and the field, not the stands.

We could do both. We spend less than 200 million a year on the arts in the federal budget. Increasing that instead of cutting it every year might even bring back some of those "useless art courses" in K-12 that got axed. I shouldn't give more tax money to Raytheon than the cultural institutions of my country. Either cut the former for once or increase the latter

> pretend to enjoy the plotless hellscape of "Cats"

...Low blow man, low blow. Cats (the musical) is a lot of fun, and has some fantastic musical pieces.

I'm 40% kidding :). Memory is good, at least.

Q: What's grey and wrinkly and writes gloomy poetry?

A: T.S. Elephant.

Because the entire live theatre ecosystem can only exist with subsidies.

Wages for everyone involved are low, everyone in the industry is working side gigs, and without government help, the entire thing will collapse.

(I'm also unsure anyone actually enjoys Cats.)

There's a few profitable companies here and there, but they wouldn't exist without a large feeder ecosystem.

Source: my spouse worked in theatre for a decade.

Cats isn’t opera of course. And when you do see pop culture musicals in opera houses that part of the operation is almost certainly profitable and helping to subsidize the rest.

> that part of the operation is almost certainly profitable

Profitable against variable costs, not fixed + variable costs. Those shows are still receiving a taxpayer subsidy and in the vast majority of cities, wouldn't be performed in nearly as nice a building without it.

The Kennedy Center is legally required to sustain itself through private funding and ticket sales. It also offers plenty of free performances.

What makes you think that? They got 40 million in federal funding this past year. It's in the annual report. Search "Federal."

https://www.kennedy-center.org/globalassets/news-room/annual...

It's funny how close this argument mirrors a certain episode of Yes, Minister (https://youtube.com/watch?v=Zl0aEz34A4o)

High school sports are not commercial.

Your post is literally a "whatabout". Aren't many publicly funded opera houses/theaters owned by the city and not at the same whims of football owners? A football stadium is almost exclusively designed and used for a single, privately owned entity.

It's a huge difference, not a minor one, and not one divided by class like you imply.

I'm replying to a post about high school stadiums, which are generally owned by a public school or a town. So it's a slight whatabout to the farther-jumping whatabout above me.

And I'd bet every penny I have that the average opera or theater attendee is significantly up the class scale from the average high school football game attendee.

Because the Kennedy Center isn't just an Opera House, but a venue used for any number of events, both public and private.

I'm with you on "Cats" though.

While I agree with your sentiment, at least the roof of the Kennedy center is open to the public day and night. Fantastic date spot. Great views!

Federal money is a different beast than city owned/funded sports stadiums. Otherwise why keep up the National Mall or Smithsonian?

What percentage of a new high school’s cost is the Football field?

The band, color guard, freshmen, and JV teams generally use that field as well. Many students attend games. Not to mention the fact that in many schools graduation happens on the football field.

Forget high school stadiums, I would move the whole discussion back to why society is subsidizing a game that is known to cause brain damage to children.

I think that OP is referencing new taxes for existing schools. This happened a lot in my area, where schools that were built in the 60's and 70's get major renovations often including new athletic facilities. One common large expense is a 'field house' which is like a large enclosed field. When I was in high school, there were only a few such 'field houses' with indoor tracks for winter track season. Now I can't think of a local high school without such a facility. FWIW I fully support such expenditure, field houses seem to benefit a wide array of groups within a school and make certain activities possible (e.g., indoor track and field) that aren't otherwise. But I live in the north where our high school football fields look like high school football fields, not stadiums like I believe exist at many high schools in the south. [1] I would not support a high school building a large football stadium.

[1] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/sports/highschool/article/T...

Here in Montgomery County, MD, I am unaware of any high schools with a Field House. The idea that they're standard is just completely bizarre to me.

I agree with your overall point, but is this still true?

> Not to mention the fact that in many schools graduation happens on the football field.

Maybe it's because I live where I live, but no high schools around me do this any more; it's all at local amphitheaters and the like.

This varies greatly by region. In Ohio, athletics are mostly dominated by single-gender Catholic high-schools, and they have the facilities to match.

Also the track and field teams.

And in my experience, when the teams are not using the field, the public can use it (either it's open for e.g. walking/jogging, or it can be reserved for a group event or youth football, soccer, or other community events).

The kids that attend games have been conditioned to do so. School graduations happen in the field because it’s there already.

"Don't subsidize X because only a small percentage of people use it."

"Actually, a fairly large percentage of people use it."

"Those people don't count because they've been conditioned to use it."

>it's there already

Doesn't change the fact that you'd need to pay for some alternative venue if it wasn't there.

> much of that spent on new sports fields meant for the exclusive use of sports teams that constitute only a very small percentage of the student body population (not to mention the overall population).

Curious where you go this idea. I don't have any evidence to back up my suspicion that this might not be correct, but wondering what yours is, too.

It’s how it is with local high schools near me. Coworker went to a HS with a brand new stadium but the students study in classrooms with ancient heaters. Said they had to routinely wear jackets and heavy clothes to survive class in the cold months.

Isn't this part of the US culture? I mean Americans are so into sports that cheerleaders and jockeys are the most popular people in schools. Encouraging schools to build stadiums for their teams appears a no brainer. Caltech are mocked because their basketball teams couldn't make it to NCAA -- a definite WTF moment for me as I don't see how basketball ever matters in a prestigious research university. Parents cheered for toiling in sports yet despise those who toil in STEM. Practicing free throw 4 thousand times a day heroic, but solving 10 math problems a day is considered a sin? To be blunt, this kind of culture is sick and contributes to the demise of the country.

You're a decode or two out of date.

I'd be happy if so. Somehow I remember that Caltech incident happened only a few years ago.

People vote for it though.

The financials on this are settled. Sports stadiums are an awful financial investment. However, running a government is not all about making sound financial investments. Sometimes it is about pooling resources to provide a joint benefit to society. Other times it is about trying to price in externalities to allow the market to do its work. These two issues are not as settled as the investment angle and are almost never discussed. Sports teams provide utility to people in the region, including people who never pay a cent for a ticket or merchandise. How do you quantity that value and should the government compensate the sports team for that value? I don't know the right answer, but I would like to see some economists at least engage with that aspect of these decisions.

Also the only way to stop these gifts to private companies is likely with a new federal law banning them. It is simple game theory. These businesses will go where the profit is. Any city or state that refuses to pay will lose out until every city or state refuses to pay. The best way to force that is with a federal ban.

Lol no, a professional sports team is of little "joint benefit to society", at least not of the kind that seriously concerns the government. You may as well argue that the government should be subsidizing new Marvel movies, or Call of Duty, because those are popular forms of entertainment too.

> Also the only way to stop these gifts to private companies is likely with a new federal law banning them. It is simple game theory. These businesses will go where the profit is. Any city or state that refuses pay will lose out until every city or state refuses to pay. The best way to force that is with a federal ban.

No. You can just...refuse to subsidize them. Seems to be working fine for Seattle, where IIRC the renovated stadium for their new NHL team was privately funded.

And if they do go somewhere else, what's the downside? Seattle lost its NBA team a while back, which was a bummer for basketball fans, obviously, but otherwise what was the harm to the city or region?

Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams. They seem to suffer little for it.

For a while, the Olympics were able to basically threaten their way into huge subsidies from even developed countries, but this seems to have mostly gone away now, as everyone collectively woke up from the delusion that the Olympics were a major economic boon worth investing in. Sports team stadiums could easily go the same way.

edit:

Okay, obviously I should've picked different world cities as examples, but even taking those: Tokyo's pro sports teams don't have anywhere close to the foreign popularity that London's EPL teams do. Does that seem to hurt it?

>Lol no, a professional sports team is of little "joint benefit to society", at least not of the kind that seriously concerns the government. You may as well argue that the government should be subsidizing new Marvel movies, or Call of Duty, because those are popular forms of entertainment too.

Local governments do subsidize movie production with all sorts of funding and grants. In addition to the local population, many people travel to cities where sports matches, concerts, and other events (e.g., conventions, auto shows, etc.) are held in the stadiums. This also affects other businesses in the city that benefit from the spending done by those that travel into the cities.

>Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams. They seem to suffer little for it.

Ever heard of... - London: Arsenal, Chelsea, or Tottenham (Soccer), Wimbledon Championships (Tennis) - Paris: PSG (Soccer), French Open (Tennis)

Every major "high prestige world city" as you describe is a hub for multiple sports and various tournaments that invites both local and international crowds.

> many people travel to cities where sports matches, concerts, and other events (e.g., conventions, auto shows, etc.) are held in the stadiums. This also affects other businesses in the city that benefit from the spending done by those that travel into the cities.

Sure, but when slg says the financials are settled, presumably they mean stadiums are a bad investment even when all such tangible benefits are taken into account.

The question is whether there are other intangible benefits - maybe a city with a sports team is happier; or has lower obesity; or an improved cultural life reduces brain drain; or the city can afford a mass transit system and needs one, but bundling it with a stadium breaks through some political deadlock; or it's just plain that voters support the stadium.

A theory of intangible benefits would also be helpful in explaining why cities keep on bidding for the olympics, which is otherwise hard to rationalise.

> Every major "high prestige world city" as you describe is a hub for multiple sports and various tournaments that invites both local and international crowds.

Big cities tend to attract big sports, can't deny that, I just don't think the causation really works the other way, at least not strongly. How much would London or Paris suffer if they lost their big sports teams and events?

> In addition to the local population, many people travel to cities where sports matches, concerts, and other events (e.g., conventions, auto shows, etc.) are held in the stadiums.

The article directly addressed this point by saying:

While counter-intuitive, tourism does not see an increase as the result of a sporting event, as often a similar amount would be spent by that city’s residents in a different city, thus creating no real net gain.

Now this may not be true for concerts or other events held in the stadium, but in general I think the idea is that the study indicates sports events don't generate significant tourism, instead drawing a primarily local crowd.

I would also argue that most people would have no issue(or minor issues) with local governments subsidizing _Some_ of the cost of a new stadium and other forms of entertainment. I think the issue comes in when the financial cost is extraordinary (> 1 billion USD).

>>. This also affects other businesses in the city that benefit from the spending done by those that travel into the cities.

This has been dis proven TONS of time,including in the parent link. Funding of sports stadiums DOES NOT increase economic activity enough to cover the costs

> Every major "high prestige world city" as you describe is a hub for multiple sports and various tournaments that invites both local and international crowds.

My gut says you have the causal relationship here backwards. The lack of those teams wouldn't ding the city much, if at all.

> In addition to the local population, many people travel to cities where sports matches, concerts, and other events (e.g., conventions, auto shows, etc.) are held in the stadiums.

The article refutes this point.

> Local governments do subsidize movie production with all sorts of funding and grants.

Which is dumb, though I don't think the stupidity quite reaches "city spends a billion dollars for one particular team" level.

> This also affects other businesses in the city that benefit from the spending done by those that travel into the cities.

Again, the research on this is quite clear: the economic benefits there are meager at best.

> Ever heard of... - London: Arsenal, Chelsea, or Tottenham (Soccer), Wimbledon Championships (Tennis) - Paris: PSG (Soccer), French Open (Tennis)

I've heard of most of those, I guess I've just never heard of my friends or family going to see them, even though many have visited those cities (and myself as well).

> Local governments do subsidize movie production with all sorts of funding and grants.

In yet another example of why government intervention in markets is mostly to make them worse: the politicians in charge can’t help but build and spend the citizens’ money on flashy vanity projects. Public expenses, private profits. They’ll talk it up like it’s some big “civic” investment in Prestige with all sorts of abstract benefits, rather than just being a handout to the rich — and if you challenge them, well, they will correctly tell you that everybody does it!!!

So what if City X gets some revenue from away-team fans when the City X Team has a home game? That only evens out with the revenue lost when the local fans go spend their money elsewhere on away games.

The article cites economic research showing the impact on tourism of new sports facilities is negligible.

Americans consider sport to be

* American Football

* Basketball

* Baseball

* Ice Hockey

Of which Ice Hockey is the only one really played outside of America (and I believe even that's mostly Canada which is basically America)

And why not city would ever fund a private team's stadium (like PSD or Tottenham), they do sometimes fund national stadiums (like Wembley)

You may as well argue that the government should be subsidizing new Marvel movies

The US government actually does subsidize Marvel movies pretty heavily by giving them free/extremely cheap access to military equipment and personnel. Peace movements pretty heavily criticize these movies for this reason. See for example: https://www.cbr.com/captain-marvel-mcu-military-relationship...

That seems quite a bit different, it's a marketing/PR move that probably doesn't actually cost the government very much. Not sure I'm for that kind of thing, but it's pretty radically different from a single city spending a hundreds of millions on a stadium that they'll see little benefit from.

Australia has put millions into filming Marvel movies. US provides many film subsidies, too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_production_incentives_...

This is not the same as multi-billion dollar local municipality subsidies.

Thats not a subsidy, it's advertising. The best way to make a highly incompetent and ineffective organization (like the military) look good is by imagining it is good.

>Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams. They seem to suffer little for it.

Ehhhh... What?

I could follow your argument until this line but Paris and especially London are absolutely known for sport teams.

How many days since one of their clubs was front page international news? Chelsea football club was near the front in New Zealand this week, I don’t follow football at all and I recall it.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/sport/463098/chelsea-now-owned-by...

I admit, I have a hard time believing that there are many people who would've never heard of London or Paris if not for their pro sports teams. There are absolutely some cities where I can believe it, like Liverpool or Manchester, but London and Paris?

It's a bit of a stretch to say that Paris is known for the Paris-Saint-Germain.

> Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams.

Not that I disagree with the general gist, I had to facepalm at that!

I think the general risk is that a rival politician will promise to bring back sports teams, with some dodgy financial setup that conceals the true cost, and the electorate will gobble it up

Why? Tons of friends and family of mine have visited those cities, I've never heard of any of them doing it to see their sports teams.

It is true though, those cities have big teams but aren't known because of the teams existing. I'd wager many more people know about Paris the city than PSG the club.

I don't even like football, but I find that in the UK, football is so intrinsic to our culture that some aspects of it should be considered almost like infrastructure. Governments pay for roads, why not for sports stadiums?

For example, it would be totally unacceptable to large parts of the country for Manchester United to go bankrupt and be sold off in parts as would happen in a normal business. I don't even really care and I think I'd find it outrageous too. The political sphere here is well aware of the value communities place on their FCs and protecting that system is commonly a part of political debate.

I feel like treating sports as a regular business is questionable. If we wouldn't allow a business to fail, it's not a real business, and looking at what literally just happened with Chelsea, it's clear we won't allow it to fail in the same way as a normal business.

> so intrinsic to our culture

You could say the same about monarchy, religion and, not long ago, smoking.

I couldn't care less about football. I doubt as many women care as men as well. "large parts of the country" can pay for their own shit.

I agree with your basic point. Businesses (the sports teams are) should fund themselves, apart from common things paid for by taxes like roads, bridge and such infrastructure. But London/Paris are well known for their sports teams. London alone as Tottenham, Chelsea, Arsenal which are big Premier league teams. Others lesser known Watford, westham, Crystal Palace are all basically London teams. Besides all? of PL teams are city based, Manchester City/Utd, Liverpool, Leeds, Leicester etc.

Originally I wrote "particularly known" before removing the "particularly", maybe I should've left it in.

Yes, the impact isn't zero, but I feel like the answer to the question of "How many people know about London" would change relatively little if you removed the pro sports teams.

But yeah I probably should've picked better examples. I think Tokyo works fine, Japan's pro baseball league doesn't have nearly the same global popularity as the EPL. Maybe Berlin? I lived in Munich and don't remember Berlin's football team, if they have one, really coming up much.

I would argue that London is actuallyba very good example. I would wager that a significant portion of non UK soccer fans would not even know that all these teams are in London (let's not even talk about non soccer fans). So yes the OP was correct London is not known for their sports teams. I think Manchester is probably an example of a city that is known mainly for its sports team.

It is ok if you don't like sports (which is obvious from your comments about Tokyo, London, and Paris which all have notably big sports cultures), but you don't have to pretend that other people don't find value in it.

A city with a sports team benefits in numerous intangible ways. These teams serve as marketing for a city, both internationally and externally. It is a marker of quality for a city, a stamp of approval. They help contribute to a public identity of a city. There is value in having a communal identity. It unites people and helps them work together on more serious problems.

People also love following the local sports team. Yes, this is entertainment similar to other forms, but it can often be free. You don't need to buy tickets to a game to enjoy it. For example, every soldout NFL game is broadcast for free over-the-air in their local market. Marvel movies don't premier for free on the TV in my home.

> It is ok if you don't like sports (which is obvious from your comments about Tokyo, London, and Paris which all have notably big sports cultures)

It's amazing how twisted adult mindsets about sports are. Notice how not caring about watching pro sports teams is, in your mind, "not liking sports." As if the primary function of "sports" is to be watched, rather than, y'know, played.

> It is a marker of quality for a city, a stamp of approval.

I really don't think so. It's more likely that causation works the other way: cities that are successful tend to attract sports teams to take advantage of the local market.

Take Seattle: lost its NBA team, lost its NHL team until very recently. Was just found to be the most desirable city for new college grads anyway. Nobody's been thinking that Seattle sucks because they only had two of the four major US pro sports present in the region.

Wat?

London has Chelsea, Arsenal, West Ham, Tottenham in the premier league. People come from all around to watch them play. I say this as someone who cares little about football.

Of course world cities like Tokyo, London or Paris are known for all sorts of things other than sports, that's why they are world cities.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure German cities like Dortmund and Leverkusen are primarily known because of their soccer teams (at least among those who are into soccer, and that is a lot).

That's actually a decent point, though I think it's debatable whether this is actually useful.

There are probably otherwise-sad US cities with decent pro sports teams that help bring name recognition...but does that actually translate into anything productive? The data on economic benefits seems to indicate the answer is 'no'.

London has 4X top flight football (soccer) clubs that are known the world over: Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham, West Ham.

Paris has Paris St Germain, who currently own two of the most recent top international players on the world stage.

Both cities also have lots of too-tier clubs from other sports, e.g. rugby.

These cities do have plenty of other attractions beside sports though to attract tourists and investment, so without these teams the cities would likely be fine.

> Lol no, a professional sports team is of little "joint benefit to society", at least not of the kind that seriously concerns the government.

As already the old Romans knew: panem et circenses is what you need to keep your population from uprising - aka, providing them with food and entertainment.

> You may as well argue that the government should be subsidizing new Marvel movies, or Call of Duty, because those are popular forms of entertainment too.

Movies, including blockbusters such as the MCU, are already subsidized. As for games - the European Union subsidizes developers since 2014[1], Germany runs an additional program since 2019 [2].

> For a while, the Olympics were able to basically threaten their way into huge subsidies from even developed countries, but this seems to have mostly gone away now, as everyone collectively woke up from the delusion that the Olympics were a major economic boon worth investing in.

The subsidies for Olympic Games and FIFA World Cups were for a very long time mostly housing, public transport and the stadiums that were sustainably usable for many decades (just look at my home city of Munich if you want to see an example). Only after corruption took over decisionmaking and sponsors demanded special laws (e.g. in Brazil with beer [3]), liberal democracies decided to not participate in the racket, and so dictators bought their way in.

[1]: https://www.treffpunkteuropa.de/wie-die-eu-die-entwicklung-v...

[2]: https://www.bmvi.de/DE/Themen/Digitales/Computerspielefoerde...

[3]: https://www.t-online.de/sport/fussball/wm/id_53306408/fifa-v...

I’m aware that some movies and games are subsidized, but most people here are probably against those too, especially when it’s big budget efforts. That’s part of why I chose the examples I did — people are more likely to object to subsidies for things that are already hugely successful and profitable on their own, than, say, little indie efforts.

Well, the last champions league winner comes from London.

But you might not know that about the most popular pro sport in the world.

Fair, I'm American and don't know who won the Super Bowl the other month, or even who played.

I can't imagine how boring and bereft of life cities would be if rational HN nerds ran them. Trees? Parks? Where's the return on them? We don't need them!

The trees and parks are available to everyone to enjoy though and can be used for many different things, almost surely to appeal to everyone in some way.

A sports team and a stadium have a very narrow appeal and is inaccessible to a large segment of the population either due to disinterest or lack of funds.

I get your gist here but I think it's pretty easy to make a distinction between these things. Even the most hardened Libertarian would agree that public spaces like parks are a net good.

> Lol no, a professional sports team is of little "joint benefit to society", at least not of the kind that seriously concerns the government.

Distracting and pacifying the populace with athletic spectacle is a trick governments have used for longer than history has existed. Major league sports are just the latest iteration in a long line of bread and circuses.

> Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams. They seem to suffer little for it.

There are counter examples as well. The New York Yankees? The Dallas Cowboys? Toronto Maple Leafs? Take away the sports franchises from those cities and it would definitely be a huge economic and cultural hit to those cities.

The Yankees could disappear over night and 90% of the city wouldn't notice or care. NYC is too big to have any 1 thing actually affect it much.

It’s all about the money. American cities make money on sports teams, so would rather have them than not. It isn’t a social benefit but an economic one consisting of tax revenue and knock on effects for businesses around the stadium. They aren’t throwing money away on a stadium, they are investing $100 million now to make $30 million more a year in tax revenue for 10 years.

But what I really want to know is who pays $200 for a sports ticket and $20 for a beer? There is money to be made hand over fist, but I just don’t understand why that is true at all. I’d rather not have these sports teams either if only for the traffic they generate on game days. But if you want to blame someone, blame the customers for this stuff, not the local government that is just giving them what they want.

Also, Tokyo is a really bad example of you are failing against prestige boondoggles. How many sky trees and Tokyo towers does the world really need?

Tokyo Skytree was privately funded and I believe Tokyo Tower was as well. Both of them serve the function of increasing sightlines for broadcasting to reduce the number of towers needed throughout the city. This serves as a public good in a city where space is at such a premium. Not to say there wasn't additional expense added into the skytree for the prestige factor, it really didn't need to be that tall.

Well I agree with your point but not the supporting argument. The thing about world cities is that they are world cities because everything can be found there, they are simply that large and diverse, and losing any one thing would not make them less important. Someplace like NYC isn't on the map because the Giants are there. Now it's also true that there are only a handful of cities that don't need to care about having a sports team (but have them anyway).

Maybe the more apt example is Green Bay, a city that would otherwise be a total unknown. Mid-tier cities like Indianapolis as well. There's a number of other cities like Liverpool that are known for the Beatles and a sports team. For those cities, you can see why the mayor might think it's worthwhile to help out the local sports team. Nonetheless, it's still likely the case that it's really a waste of money.

At least in the US the actual infrastructure has been failing for decades. Infrastructure actually pays out with a multiplier for years after the investment and upkeep. I’d like to see cities expend billions there before any burning of money on stadiums.

>Lol no

Genuine question: isn't it absurdly rude to respond to something somebody said in this way?

Yes. But a possible reason why it is relatively well received anyway is:

1) There are no new facts likely to come out any time soon & the situation is unlikely to change.

2) This is a question of public spending.

3) Joining dots, someone is being taxed to fund other people literally just entertaining themselves.

Eg, say I don't like team sports and there are some homeless people living nearby. Why should I be paying taxes for an uneconomic football stadium? The people who use the stadium can pay for it. If they can't afford it, it shouldn't be built. There are real problems in the world that are more important than people distracting themselves.

And from that perspective, downright contempt for pro-public-spending-on-stadiums seems a plausible position.

> Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams.

Not disagreeing with your overall argument, but London is the home of several Premier League clubs, with Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham having global followings.

Paris has PSG, which is infamous for spending seemingly limitless money to bring in superstars like Messi, Neymar, Mbappe and others. Their ownership by a Qatari sovereign wealth fund is the subject of constant conversation among those who follow football.

Tokyo I will grant you. They have the baseball Tokyo Giants, but I don't think they are closely followed outside of Japan.

> No. You can just...refuse to subsidize them. Seems to be working fine for Seattle, where IIRC the renovated stadium for their new NHL team was privately funded.

This also works for the Green Bay Packers (American Football). To raise money for an upgrade / expansion of their stadium, they just issued more ownership certificates, and the fans of the team bought them. GB has a unique ownership model compared to the rest of the NFL though.

> You may as well argue that the government should be subsidizing new Marvel movies, or Call of Duty, because those are popular forms of entertainment too.

The state of Rhode Island burned a huge amount of cash on by funding a loan for a video game company. That didn't pan out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/38_Studios#Bankruptcy

> Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams. They seem to suffer little for it.

You are kidding yourself if London and Paris are not known for sports. Baseball is big in Tokyo. Have you been to State de France? You think Wembly stadium, Arsenal, Chelsea, and Tottenham aren’t a global brands and icons?

> Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams. They seem to suffer little for it. For a while, the Olympics were able to basically threaten their way into huge subsidies from even developed countries, but this seems to have mostly gone away now

Tokyo - 2020 Olympics

London - 2012 Olympics

Paris - 2024 Olympics

I cannot recall where I read this but isn’t there a connection between a professional sports team and reduced crime? I believe there was a study showing it decreasing when a team was formed and increasing when a city lost its team.

>Plenty of high prestige world cities like Tokyo or London or Paris aren't known for their pro sports teams.

What a beautiful way to shoot down your own post, well done.

> should be subsidizing new Marvel movies, or Call of Duty, because those are popular forms of entertainment too.

Government subsidize movies and art for their cultural value.

> Lol no, a professional sports team is of little "joint benefit to society", at least not of the kind that seriously concerns the government. You may as well argue that the government should be subsidizing new Marvel movies, or Call of Duty, because those are popular forms of entertainment too.

can't believe what i'm reading. go read some cold war history, or even pre-WW2 history.

Most of the people here would probably argue against those too, so it doesn't really change anything about my argument.

Nope, no one’s ever heard of Paris St Germain, Arsenal, Chelsea or Tottenham Hotspur.

I've heard of the London teams, but not the Paris one no.

If you're going to make the argument "There's other benefit to the society that also need to be considered" then you also have to consider the negatives of a stadium. There's a lot of negative aspects that follow building a stadium, too.

I can't on the top of my head show any figures, but a classmate of mine that lived in the suburb with a stadium, a place everyone considered "the ghetto" because of crime rate, said it wasn't as bad as people said it to be; with the notable exception, and he was very clear about this:

when there's a football match going on in the new stadium close by, every family in the vicinity knew not to let their kids out (or go out on the night) because the city got too unsafe to walk around because of supporters/drunk hooligans trashing places and being violent. (risk of getting robbed, raped, assaulted went notably up every time there was a match that stretched in to the night)

The stadium to the locals felt like a net-negative. Bars and night life owners where happy, but to ordinary citizen it meant more crime, trashed streets, vandalized walls/shops + the immeasurable effect of the stereotype that got attached ("high concentration of immigrants = high crime rate")

I live close to a smaller stadium and recently rode past it while a game was being played. The number of police deployed there was insane, I estimate a ratio of 1 police per 10 visitors. The first thought that went through my head was that this could not possibly be worth it. Paying wages of the police alone has to absolutely dwarf ticket costs.

But I guess it's worth it when you factor in that without security, football fans might trash the place and mess other people up like you describe.

In my country those stadiums are just a money transfer schemes from public pockets via local government to local pockets. They have no problem building "temporary" stadiums while the old ones are "renovated" for hundreds of millions of dollars of tax payer's money. You cannot normally even visit the stadiums when there's no match being played. As you said, they usually need hundreds of riot police present each time because there is almost always vandalism and fighting. Those stadiums are not used for anything else. For example, I cannot ask the soccer team if I could use the pitch for say a day because I want to organize a drone racing competition. I would be laughed out of the room. As the other posters said, they just take my money and give it to some other persons who are living very luxurious. I know, Ferraris are expensive.

However, I understand that those sport events are like a safety valve on a pressure cooker. It lets those aggressive members of the community to vent so they don't realize how fucked they are in their daily lives. It something like a pacifier for those people. It is bread and circuses, and the bread is getting smaller and smaller.

That said, if the local government is spending money on (pretty much private) stadiums, then I would postulate that they have too much money and the taxes are too high.

I used to live near a stadium and can echo that. Depended on what it was used for too. If it was a concert it usually made the neighborhood fun and lively. If it was for a hockey game then the neighborhood was awful.

> a joint benefit to society

american top level sports teams are part of a multi-multi-billion industry.

this isn't getting together to build a library, it's a direct transfer of tax money to private companies that can or should easily afford to pay for it themselves.

christ alive.

Stadiums exist in the rest of the world, and multi billion corporations can still be a benefit to society. I don't agree with funding huge mega stadiums for a single team. But it's ridiculous to pretend sports teams, even big ones, can't provide a huge service for a community.

It's hard to overstate just how important big teams like say, Chelsea or Barca are for a huge chunk of not just the people who live in their home cities but also across the world. How do you quantify that in terms of cost? It will obviously never happen but let's say barca wanted to leave Barcelona, do you think the city shouldn't do anything about it because it helps billionaires?

Tons of Arts museums, especially those for contemporary/avant garde arts are usually displaying private collections and in practice only benefit a very small minority of usually rich people. Operas and orchestras too. Shouldnt we just stop funding those too then? Where do we draw the line?

> just how important big teams like say, Chelsea or Barca are for a huge chunk of not just the people who live in their home cities but also across the world.

Here "important to" is equivalent to "liked/entertained by", as a form of entertainment. The question here is what forms of entertainment should tax payers pay for and your comparison with art museums, operas and orchestras is apt.

> let's say barca wanted to leave Barcelona, do you think the city shouldn't do anything about it because it helps billionaires?

If barca were extorting the city of Barcelona by demanding they pay 10s or 100s of millions to upgrade Camp Nou, then the city should tell the team to go to hell. This exact scenario has played out in multiple cities in the US and with the IOC and city bids.

If I don’t pay the taxes to fund the stadium, men with guns will literally come to my house (this happened when I did my taxes incorrectly) to tell me to pay. I think the line should be drawn somewhere before that and everyone calls me crazy.

IMO we probably would be better off not funding any of it. Entertainment talent would be better allocated according to ticket sales than political prestige.

> Any city or state that refuses to pay will lose out until every city or state refuses to pay.

They may lose out on the chance to fork over millions (or billions) to a bunch of already crazily wealthy team owners, and maybe that means the stadium doesn't get built, or maybe it means that team leaves and market forces are such that if its a big enough city is makes economic sense for a new team to come in an build their own stadium (maybe not as glorious, but good enough to host games and sell tickets). Those millions (or billions) not gifted to the old team owner might be then spent on improving infrastructure or making better schools and parks and things that make a city nice to live making it even better off then before.

Remember when Amazon wanted all those perks from NYC to put offices there and then everyone was like 'no effing way' and so they backed down. Amazon still opened offices in NYC because it freakin' NYC. They never needed the incentives.

> Sports teams provide utility to people in the region, including people who never pay a cent for a ticket or merchandise.

Wait, what? Are you sure? I don't see a value of having sports teams other than entertainment.

> How do you quantity that value and should the government compensate the sports team for that value?

Maybe a good start would be to simply ask the people "how many sporting events have you been to in the last three months?"

If large numbers of people aren't that interested in sport now, they'll probably remain uninterested in the future.

OTOH, if large numbers of people are interested enough to go to games then they'll probably remain interested enough to go to games in the future.

My personal experience (not in the US), is that fewer than 1 in 20 people are interested in going to view live sporting events in a stadium.

> I don't see a value of having sports teams other than entertainment

At least in Europe, most teams have children organizations, and a lot of kids train. The sports provide motivation for the young kids to exercise and practice, watching high level plays is quite useful to learn tactics as well.

>how many sporting events have you been to in the last three months

It's COVID times, c'mon. Most events have no audience.

This is not generally true of big-money pro sports in the US. I'm unaware of any child leagues for the NFL (American / gridiron football), MLB (baseball), NBA (basketball), or NHL (hockey).

Pro soccer might have something, but it's also a rounding error in the American pro sports landscape.

> It's COVID times, c'mon. Most events have no audience.

Good point: Why use tax dollars to build a stadium that is going to be mostly empty?

Let's wait to see if interest in sports pick up again.

> I don't see a value of having sports teams other than entertainment

Entertainment is valuable!

Personally, I think the government spends money in a way that is foolish at best. If the money’s going to be wasted, at least spend it on something I like.

By that logic the government should subsidize/fund Netflix, Amazon and Apple because they deliver and produce content that entertains me.

Funding stadiums is about none of those three things.

Running a government is also about winning reelection, which means raising money, which means not pissing off the richest people in your area who also have a giant built-in loudspeaker in the form of the current stadium, team, etc.

At this point, publicly-funded stadiums largely amount to bribery. We'll let you keep your cushy elected position if you give us a few hundred million in public money and help us keep up the facade that this was for the public good.

I just wonder what the benefit really is to subsidizing billionaire's and multi-millionaire's private gladiators.

I've always felt there was just too much money (and DoD involvement) in it for "we can take your people to the limits of human capability... purely for entertainment!" to make sense. Do they sell their private advances in sports medicine to defence contractors? Are they some kind of advertisement for super soldiers? If not, what's the gimmick?

> The financials on this are settled. Sports stadiums are an awful financial investment.

Depends on what side you are. On the receiving side or on the spending side. If you're in the Stadium's management, or you're a player for the team, you're about to get rich, and you can buy your next yacht or your 7th Ferrari. Ask me how I know. This also goes if you're a construction contractor, or a local politician(s) who signed off the project.

This is the side benefit of the "pooling the money" and usually the only benefit.

If they've build the stadium with their own money; I would be more than happy for them. Also the local population would be that much richer.

> Also the only way to stop these gifts to private companies is likely with a new federal law banning them.

Or a way to punish politicians who sign contracts like this.

One of the issues that is that a mayor or whatever can be elected to a single term then indefinitely sign away the keys to the city.

Either punish the people responsible, or give governments inherent "fuck you" clauses that allows them to back out of terrible contracts or bonds without penalty. Yeah, it makes lending more expensive. But the current system has massive loopholes that are being exploited.

> Sports teams provide utility to people in the region, including people who never pay a cent for a ticket or merchandise

Even if we assume that to be true, you have to also look at the costs: providing the required transportation infrastructure, policing sports fans, cleaning up after them (including vandalism) etc. Making matters worse, the "utility" sports teams bring is limited to a few businesses (hotels, restaurants, pubs, shops selling merchandise etc.), while the costs are paid by the taxpayer, i.e. all residents.

Sports and sporting events are a net harm to me. I don't attend, the traffic costs me, and I'm taxed for it. So team owners can get bent and start buying their own stadiums.

We live in a society. The question that the government asks when deciding whether to do an intervention isn't "will this benefit spacemanmatt?" it's "will this benefit our community?" I'm sure the government does things that you like and others don't care for.

Thanks for that analysis but it's not about me. The point is benefits go to a very small minority, and that's not a sustainable way to govern.

So you want a federal ban on all tax breaks? Government will always subsidize jobs and housing plus they will also prioritize external revenue sources like travel and tourism. Stadiums and convention centers and the like bring money into the city. Instead of taxing only city residents, you get to tax people who don't live there. Sure the owners are rich and don't need the kickbacks however part of politics is giving the public what they want. This is no different than Amazon looking for a handout for HQ2. This is no different than the (now cancelled) Foxconn nonsense in Wisconsin. Lots of existing factories have asked for massive tax breaks or they will outsource to Mexico, etc. This is all the same game.

I think we are looking at this the wrong way. I think cities should build and pay for these stadiums. However, it should come with express community benefit. During the off-season, it is a great place to do blood drives, have social service fairs, have people register to vote, have people vote (at a place that is built for high volume), run job training programs, run food drives/pantries, etc. Both the city and the players should be demanding this as part of the deal.

The problem with this is that you're effectively forcing people who hate sports stadium to pay for them, not to mention those living nearby who are going to be affected by the noise, traffic jam and pollution caused by the stadium.

Why not let the teams crowdfund and build their own stadium like any other risky venture without capital?

> Sometimes it is about pooling resources to provide a joint benefit to society.

That's what capital markets and entrepreneurs are for.

Governments are about fixing broken economic games (such as tragedy of the commons, to cite a single example).

If teams want a stadium, they should give the funding municipalities equity. A huge fraction of control.

They're not going to do that though. Sports leagues are a cartel, supply is extremely limited. Every city wants a pro team. It's too easy to get cities to compete against each other without federal guidelines.

The federal government could help by removing the tax exemption municipal bonds enjoy should they be used for a stadium. It's not an all encompassing change that would stop all of the corporate giveaways but it would be a start.

I live in Cincinnati and without the stadiums a lot of businesses downtown wouldn't be able to survive

That's what these economic studies look at - is it worth paying for the stadium in order to prop up those businesses? The answer appears to be overwhelmingly "no".

> provide a joint benefit to society

My sides!

John Oliver already settled this in 2015. After watching it, it's pretty clear that cities should not pay for stadiums.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcwJt4bcnXs

While it may be true that sports teams provide some kind of emotional or non-monetary value to a city, the question is should a government use threats of violence to collect money to pay for it? One must always remember that government, specifically local governments, pay for things with compulsorily taxation, i.e if you do not pay government sends people will guns to force you to pay.

I dont think sports teams should be treated as "critical infrastructure" and while you might be able to make the ethical case for Police, Fire, etc I am not sure how one would make an ethical case to use violence to fund a sports stadium

So not only do you ave a financial problem with stadiums, you have an ethical one as well

At the end of the day, Sports is not a proper function of government

What really upsets me about public stadiums is when the locals can't even watch the game. Take the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. That stadium is 100% publicly funded by the taxpayers.

Since 2011 the Rose Bowl game on Jan 1 has been on ESPN. So two colleges, the majority of which have been public schools, play in a public stadium and the locals can't even watch for free.

I think at the very least they need to make a law that says all events that take place in a publicly funded stadium need to be broadcast on a free local channel that reaches all of the taxpayers who paid for the stadium.

I'm not sure if it's still the case but from what I understand the NFL used to prohibit local games from being shown in the local area to encourage ticket sales.

Not just the NFL but also MLB. Usually the rule is that it has to be a near sell out crowd so it isn’t blacked out.

But they’ve gotten more lax about that after they realized that the trick doesn’t work — blackouts don’t really increase attendance.

Exactly - the "blackout" sales level - if not enough tickets were sold, the game wouldn't be available locally.

Sometimes a local entity (city, owner of the team, local businessman) would buy blocks of 10k+ tickets to ensure it could be shown locally.

I grew up watching the Patriots in the 80/90's when they sucked. Every game was blacked out because they didn't sellout.

It's such a short sighted policy. Every kid I grew up with was a Raiders, Dallas, SF fan because they couldn't be a Patriots fan.

What a great way to alienate millions so you can sell 60000 tickets. Every thing these leagues due is tied to an rooted in stupid television contracts that are getting more and more irrelevant.

Every local NFL game except monday night is now available for free over the air with an antenna or on Amazon for thursday games. That's probably because they're so popular and the big networks want to maximize ad money though.

> Every local NFL game except monday night is now available for free over the air with an antenna or on Amazon for thursday games

The only channels I can receive from my house are PBS and Univision. 15 years ago I could receive NBC, ABC, and FOX. FOX never converted to ATSC; NBC converted, but at laughably low power -- if you live on top of a hill and have a high-gain antenna you can pull NBC in with only occasional dropouts. I'm not sure what happened to ABC.

I don't have cable, but for those who do, it was for at least 3 years impossible to watch the local baseball team on cable, because the team's channel was part-owned by one cable company, but our town has a different cable company. Unsurprisingly they struggled to come to a licensing agreement.

Turns out there's a Wikipedia article about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_(broadcasting)

> I think at the very least they need to make a law that says all events that take place in a publicly funded stadium need to be broadcast on a free local channel that reaches all of the taxpayers who paid for the stadium.

This would inevitably result in everyone seeing it for free. If you send it, we can capture it, and redistribute it.

I think you vastly overestimate people's ability to consume pirated streams.

First off, all of these events are already being broadcast on ESPN. So if people were going to steal the stream, they're already doing it.

And secondly, I know some very competent engineers who have no idea how to get pirated content, nor any desire to learn, despite being perfectly able to do so. And then there are they laypeople who not only don't want to learn but probably aren't even capable of doing it if they did learn.

They just don't want to spend any mental space on it. If they can pay to watch they will, and if they can't they won't.

While your point is probably valid, your example wasn’t. The rose bowl is owned by the city of Pasadena, so the city gets payed when it’s in use.

That’s usually the case with a public owned stadium but it doesn’t change the fact that the taxpayers payers own it.

It seems that public officials are more fond of projects like stadiums than voters. Last November, voters in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Denver, Colorado; and Augusta, Georgia all voted against ballot initiatives to fund stadiums that would increase their tax bills. Meanwhile, the elected officials in each of these places seemed to have been fully behind these projects.[0]

In the Buffalo Bills example from the OP article, it sounds like they're attempting to negotiate directly with the governor. Smart, I suppose, since if the other examples are any indication, the elected official will be more receptive towards giving them money than the taxpayers.

[0]: https://reason.com/2021/11/05/voters-dont-want-to-pay-for-yo...

>In the Buffalo Bills example from the OP article, it sounds like they're attempting to negotiate directly with the governor. Smart, I suppose, since if the other examples are any indication, the elected official will be more receptive towards giving them money than the taxpayers.

Keep in mind that the Governor of New York[0] is from Buffalo. I'd imagine that might make a difference.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Hochul#Early_life_and_ed...

People in Buffalo aren't happy about this, but the Bills are a BIG part of this city's identity. The Bills owner (an oil billionaire, by the way) is threatening take the team to another city if the state doesn't help pay for the stadium.

When the Rams chose Inglewood as their new home, my apartment complex roared like thunder. It's like we had just won the Superbowl. There was literally fireworks exploding at my door and everyone was happy.

Few billion dollars later, construction everywhere, and the Rams are playing their first game. There are only two families remaining out of the 30 that lived here. Rent went up and everyone had to move out east, to a worst neighborhood.

Sure we have a stadium now. But the neighborhood has been completely gentrified.

In other words the government built some facilities and increased the land value of the surrounding area. Seems everything was working as intended?

do you suppose the residents were consulted in the same way they might be if ther were attempting to build in pac heights or west village or the hills?

Given how ecstatic the residents were, I'd think that such consultation would make little difference (ie. they already approve of the project).

>When the Rams chose Inglewood as their new home, my apartment complex roared like thunder. It's like we had just won the Superbowl. There was literally fireworks exploding at my door and everyone was happy.

Worth mentioning that other than a few tax subsidies the Inglewood stadium was built with private money.

In Germany local municipalities for example pay for renovations of churches.

The case I knew from my hometown was that the Church (as in country organization) payed one third. The congregation hat to pay one third as well and the secular municipality also had to pay one third.

In Munich the "Allianz Arena" (named after a big insurance company) for the FC Bayern was also substantially supported by the tax payer. More than one third of the estimated costs were planned to be payed by the government. As they cannot subsidize directly that was mostly the cost of the infrastructure like streets, power, water and so on. The richest socker club in Germany argued that the tax payer has to finance it, as the city would profit from the visitors.

If I remember correctly, BMW got 150 million subsidiaries (from the EU and Germany) for building a new production site near Leipzig as it was seen as helping the development of the former GDR states after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Seems like a regular thing at any scale for any organization/company with enough lobbying power and influence.

> The case I knew from my hometown was that the Church (as in country organization) payed one third. The congregation hat to pay one third as well and the secular municipality also had to pay one third.

The lack of institutional separation of church and state within Germany surprised me when I lived there. The populace isn't particularly religious on a personal level, but they tolerate a surprising amount of religious interference or intertwining with state institutions. IIRC there are church schools/daycares that are publicly funded as well, and of course the state cooperates with churches for religious taxation (yes, really -- if you're a member of one of those churches, you can't opt out short of leaving that church, they take the money directly out of your paycheck).

Which ends up funny if you migrate there. I've heard so many stories other Poles going there, declaring they are atheists so they won't pay taxes, and then being surprised when they come back only to their their local priests laughing them out of door when they want service XD

Huh, that's interesting to me. Didn't realize you had to be a member to attend services. My experience has been that churches are generally quite open to visitors.

In Sweden at least, if you leave the church you don't get to have your wedding, funeral or baptism there. If you're a member then it's all free. You can of course still attend the Sunday services, but I don't know about taking communion or other rituals.

By "services" I think the parent means "getting married at the church" etc.

jakub_g was correct, that is what I meant

I'm not sure if this was the case in Munich, I could be off on the details but if remember correctly the city built it for 2 clubs (Bayern and 1680) and the rented it to both clubs. Later when 1860 yielded because they couldn't pay , Bayern bought all the shares. Also both the Autobahn (Äusserer Ring) and Mittlerer Ring(North) were restructure at this time for other reasons(traffic)so cost cannot directly be added to the stadium. So yeah I think this staduim was supported by public money, but I think it really is hard to put a number behind this.

Many years ago, the San Francisco Giants were looking for a new stadium to replace the decrepit Candlestick Park. They settled on some land in the south bay on the outskirts of my town. Local town officials approved a plan that would implement a utility tax on residents that would pay a portion of the costs. However, it required the approval of the voters. In the next election, the approval vote appeared on the ballot where, to my pleasant surprise, it was massively rejected, 70% to 30%. Ultimately, the Giants built a fine, new stadium with their own funding on land provided by San Francisco. For us, it was fortunate we had the opportunity to vote on it unlike so many other cities where they're given no choice. (See Seattle, Dallas, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Glendale, New Orleans, Chicago, ...)

On the other hand, having the stadium built in SF was arguably the primary catalyst in the transformation of SOMA from an underused-warehouse district to the new tech epicenter of the world, stealing Silicon Valley's fire in a way previously thought impossible.

If the stadium had been built in the south bay, SF might today be saying, "Whew, we really dodged a bullet there", and meanwhile Twitter and Dropbox and Uber and Airbnb would all be headquartered in Santa Clara county and giving them all their employees' tax revenue.

Well we have a comparison here, right? Levi's Stadium, where the 49ers play, was built in the South Bay. I wouldn't say that Levi's Stadium sparked a major transformation in the area even after being open nearly 8 years now. Usually the opinion is that Levi's is (relatively) in the middle of nowhere.

I'm not arguing that you can plop a stadium down anywhere and be assured of an entire industry swooping in to cluster around it; I'm arguing that in some situations (particularly the transit-rich urban shells of former industrial/pier/warehouse areas) a stadium can be the catalyst that breaks through the chicken-and-egg barrier and unleashes the neighborhood's latent potential.

The area around Levi's Stadium didn't really have much latent potential waiting to be unleashed.

SOMA would have developed regardless, and it is nonsense to suggest tech companies want to locate near baseball stadiums.

I never said tech companies want to be near baseball stadiums.

Rather (like in Baltimore and San Diego), the new stadium revitalized a neighborhood whose original reason for being had mostly dried up, bringing enough business to support the (re)emergence of nearby restaurants and other amenities, and those investments in the neighborhood made it an attractive place to have offices that eventually became the new primary source of support for the restaurants, condos, hotel, etc.

The stadium was what broke the neighborhood out of the chicken-and-egg quandary.

It's nice that we need to write scholarly articles on why the public shouldn't buy billionaires new toys when they tire of their old ones.

This is part of why I stepped away from sports couldn't be happier.

NFL teams demanding things is pretty much what's entirely soured me on professional sports. I grew up near St. Louis and the city has been screwed over not once (Rams) but twice (football Cardinals) in my lifetime by NFL teams.

They enrich the owners and drain the locals. I lived in downtown St. Louis when the Cards were in the World Series (2011) and the benefit to local restaurants + bars was minimal. There'd be a flood of traffic to get to the stadium, and another flood out - very little spillover to local bars and restaurants around the stadium. (Not none, but not the rosy picture painted when they talk about driving business to local establishments, either.)

Did you see the NFL's settlement with the Rams over that move? It was something like $1 billion. You may have been screwed with the football Cardinals but I think St. Louis got a nice return on investment from that settlement with the Rams.

We need a Hackerdome in Menlo Park.

Sure, we have that Metaface company, a few little robin hoods, and those people who venture onto the sand dunes.

But where can two teams of world class hackers fight it out to the finish? Nowhere, I tell you!

There is some underused land in Bedwell Bayfront Park, at the end of Marsh Road.

It gets a few hikers, some ham radio people on Field Day, and not much else?

We can build our Hackerdome there, and insure that hackers will always be welcome to compete in Menlo Park!

All we need is your support and your tax dollars. Vote YES to support the Hackerdome!

Isn't that basically what they built in Vegas? The MSG Sphere. I've been building holographic performance tools for over 10 years and no one really knows who the fuck I am but I intend to be the first qualified act to rock that bitch till the wheels fall off. You're more than welcome to meet me there and we can do a battle of the bands style thing but it's also capture the flag for some weird as distributed systems.

I've got analog bass that'll make you cry and enough compute power to model some pretty weird shit. I'm not sure if I'm a world class hacker, but I think the venue should be looking more at folks who win demoscene compos than top 40 acts. Maybe get top 40 acts to work with demoscene cats.

I'm also not as good as those folks but I'm fine with tipping my hand here and see if anyone else is thinking the same thing. I've got a plan and the tools! Lets go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydOn8qwLJzA

>All we need is your support and your tax dollars. Vote YES to support the Hackerdome!

That's Proposition 1337 then?

Why would the Hackerdome not been in cyberspace/metaverse?

And let one company control it? Even a company right down the street?

No, you need a physical space.

This is why it is so important to have public funding for the Hackerdome. We need a place where two teams of hackers can compete to see who is the best, and who should go down in shame.

And we can do it all under standardized conditions.

This is too important to leave to the private market. Vote YES now!

I agree, make it stop. It's insane. Sacramento CA seems like its still reeling from building the Kings basketball stadium and its effectively made an entire district of town inaccessible and unaffordable for any of the small businesses that make this town vibrant. Minor league sports cost enough to support and teams support local pride and healthier fan followings imho.

Ive been dying for covid to be over forever so I can start going to triple A baseball games. Id rather watch semi-normal humans play than a bunch of millionaires.

I'm not a libertarian, far from it, but as someone who doesn't give the first #### about watching sports, this really does seem to me to be an area that should be left to market forces. These sports teams are businesses, they have customers, massive income streams etc. If they can't afford the facilities they need, then they need to restructure the business. The taxpayer should not be on the hook, as it's not a municipal service, it's just entertainment for a subset of the population.

I find it weird this happens in the US, where there is such an emphasis on not providing things other countries may see as a state function (healthcare, public transport...). It's not just the US of course, but it seems to be most apparent there.

I'm probably a smidge more pro sports than you. I don't go to many games (other than if my child is playing), but I do go to some.

But like, cities do all sorts of things that aren't economically sound. Who am I to say what they should do? If the taxpayers/voters/etc want to spend their money on a stadium, that's fine, as long as they know it's unlikely to make economic sense. Large stadiums are a prestige project, and those often don't make a lot of economic sense (and sometimes don't meet any of their other goals, either).

> Who am I to say what they should do?

A voter and a taxpayer? I mean, sure, like everything (hopefully) it's subject to democratic forces and what the local people want. But there's endless debate over what the state should and shouldn't get involved in. I and my vote, (not that I am eligible right now, as a recent migrant) think this falls on the "shouldn't" side, where community facilities, public transport etc fall more on the "should" side.

> as long as they know it's unlikely to make economic sense

I guess that's the thing - is it made abundantly clear that these things are likely to be a net negative? That those of us not into sports are going to be footing the bill equally and not benefiting from and side-effects? Perhaps it should be more so.

Provide infra for amateur sports teams, youth and adult?

Provide free public transport?

Provide better health care to the residents? Heck, how about just providing health care!

Provide bountiful resources to schools to improve education?

Oh, wait a sec, I forgot. Those suggestions are things which are economically sound. Sorry, my mistake.

> Who am I to say what they should do?

You're a citizen who can argue for it.

Of course ultimately, cities are democracies and can decide to give away money to private sports teams, I'm not gonna dispute their right to do so.

But I'll definitely argue that it's really dumb to do that.

> but it seems to be most apparent there

Looks more like they are less good at hiding it or don't need to. In the town's around here the cities usually bail out the sport teams after they go bankrupt (and thus don't) or put the stadiums into massive infrastructure plans so it gets murky how much was spent on it with public funds. Fortunately the trend seems to go towards letting the football (original, not the US version) clubs drown in their own mess more and more but it's far from over.

It's quite different. Outside of the US, football ( the original, not US version) is often a community thing, and clubs are bound to their localities. They won't just move to a more profitable location, they're a part of the community. In some countries stadiums are often municipal ( even in Italy, whose top flight is a top 5 one), so the city gets revenue directly.

Also it isn't even in the same ballpark between bailing out a club that's in debt and getting the club in return, and building new a stadium for a billion or more USD, and getting hope in return.

There are not just spare parcels floating around zoned for stadiums (or hospitals, or university campuses, or whatever). Creating one of these things is always an act of government.

That’s not to say the government should also have to pay, but the idea of sports teams acting like any other consumer of commercial real estate is clearly off.

Sure, and my point was much more about funding than it was about land use. Yes, any project of that size is going to require not just a location, but infrastructure, transport etc etc. So perhaps you're right and it can never be a purely commercial project.

To my mind the sports team would also have to pay for the infrastructure improvements etc and knock-on costs too. But then I really have little time for professional sports!

Zoning is different than paying. Apple built a campus the size of a stadium without city paying for it.

Their counterpoint would be: why should they invest 100% of the capital in a stadium that bringing tens of thousands of middle class credit card holders to the city’s commercial district when — after you subtract the money spent at Mel’s Bar over the road — they only take 95% of the revenue?

Removes tongue from cheek

The real issue is touched on by the article. No mayor or town council member wants to go down as the person who "lost the team". Even if losing that team is an economic boon to the city, it's incredibly unpopular. Many things good for society are unpopular with society.

We’re more susceptible to the narrative in which these stadiums used to get funding (now days more so is my meaning). Goes something like this:

- You have poor shitty neighborhoods

- Subsidize building of a stadium in said shithole, and watch the dollars come in.

- You’ll have increased commerce and development of surrounding area with ample employment for said shitty neighborhood residents.

We don’t need recent history to post mortem this, they figured out it actually doesn’t improve the region much a long time ago.

———

The only thing that reasonably works is gentrification, but, well, you know … that’s racist. How do you solve it? I don’t know, white people seem to have the money. We have to start much higher up to root cause analyze this, and while I’m annoyed by wokeness, root causing this kind of more or less leads us to ‘why the fuck are there so many white people with money’?.

Anyways, stadiums. It’s just a bug way down the ladder.

Have fun going to Yankee Stadium in the middle of the fucking South Bronx. Utopian shit never works.

Repairation payments directly addresses the "white people have the money" problem.

John Oliver made a much better case than I ever could in a HN comment. It also answers "why do the white people have so much money" question.

https://youtu.be/_-0J49_9lwc

public funding (and related: subsidies) is a part of market forces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

https://spinor.info/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/felcsu...

We (Hungary) are spending huge amounts of public money on building stadiums everywhere (dozens and dozens of them). On the linked picture you can see a large-ish stadium built in a small town with a population of 2000 people. The marked place is the house of our prime minister :D He likes soccer.

For you it's different since many people agree that those projects are just a way to siphon EU funds.

Plenty of mention of different sports, but the post and references cited seem to focus on examples from the NFL. So I suggest the title should be Cities shouldn’t pay for new NFL stadiums. The NFL is over the top from an opulence perspective and isn’t international, so I don’t think it should be used as a baseline for anything.

I am interested to know the actual net effect of FIFA World Cup 2026 for example, but the post doesn’t seem to focus much on basketball, hockey, soccer, or baseball.

There are two aspects to this

One is the problem that governments make investments, and private firms are the primary beneficiaries. This exists broadly. In some instances, it feels fine. Governments are supposed to make investments that benefit the economy. Roads, ports, fiber, etc.

This gets sticky when it's a select group, monopoly or cabal that gets most of the benefit. Many national or regional postal systems currently have this dilemma. Postal systems need major public investment to keep up with modern e-commerce. AMZN & BABA, the world richest firms, are the main beneficiaries.

The point at which people seem to stop and challenge is often when things get explicit. Sports stadiums are that. Team owners make explicit demands, or threaten local polities. That gets people upset.

Imo, the only way to deal with these is returning "hardball" tactics. Make hard demands, like control of key assets (eg the team's brand/IP) in return for investments. Threaten financial ruin of owners' investments back. Legislate away contractual lock-ins.

No one likes to be strongarmed. That's why people are so infuriated by "give us money or we take your team."

What cities need to invest in is a large exclusive trough where an elite can come to squeal and gobble their slops. Call it the "Pork Barrel Dome" and charge regular people to come and watch the rich satisfy themselves. Have publicly run gambling rings to make book on which participant will inhale the most in a limited amount of time just to keep things "interesting".

I find it baffling how much is spent on NFL stadiums for just 8 home games a year. That's just over 1 game per day for a week every year. And the stadiums take up prime real estate. Also, some teams are forced to play out of the country for one of their games and lose a home game.

I've never been to a live NFL game but I've been in NFL stadiums probably >100 times.

Here's the schedule at NRG Park, the stadium where the Houston Texans play.

https://www.nrgpark.com/event-calendar/

They're currently hosting the Houston Rodeo and have pretty big concerts every night for the next few days after already having events every night for the few days before. There's literally a massive rodeo going on on the grounds around it and in it. Then there's a large auto auction, then a lot of other shows going on. There's 21 days of events going on in the next 46 days, meaning something is going on in that stadium ~46% of the time in the next month and a half.

Take a look at how full the calendar is for American Airlines Center, the stadium where the Dallas Stars (NHL) and Dallas Mavericks (NBA) play.

https://www.americanairlinescenter.com/events

Once again, a lot of things going on separate from both teams, and that's while both teams are actively playing season games as well!

These stadiums aren't just for a single sport.

As a european football fan it is easy to forget how few games there is in regular season NFL. At the same time NHL, MLB and NBA have a crazy amount of games in a season. I just assumed the NFL had a similar-ish amount of games but that few games a season sound like a waste. Especially since franchises can just move away the stadiums don’t have a feeling of ”home”.

It's exceedingly rare for an NFL stadium to be used exclusively for NFL games. If you look at the schedule for e.g. the Buccaneers stadium[1] in Tampa - which the city owns and leases to the team - you'll see that it regularly hosts concerts, monster truck shows, college football games, etc.

1. https://raymondjamesstadium.com/upcomingevents

I know my local NFL stadium sees plenty of use outside of football season. Probably around 50 or so events a year even though no one wants to be outside 4 months of the year.

This topic has been a long standing issue for the Reason folks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1LDjTgMEGU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMQsYENfWJ8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5x3ECFemvk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBgpbTcpDEo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIpJXfNPqVA

It’s also like the first topic covered in Urban Studies 101 for like 20 years. Weirdly, most of America needs to just take a basic Urban Studies course to fix half our culture issues.

I remember a quote from an economist on hearing about a stadium project (or racetrack, or casino, for that matter -- I think it was either Baltimore or Atlantic City) --

"If the economic benefits of the proposed development turn out to be as the mayor suggests, he would be the first mayor in the history of such projects to be correctly predict the effects."

The beneficiaries of these projects never end up being who the backers say they will be. And the beneficiaries who they actually are designed for are never the ones being touted.

If economic benefit for the city were the motivation, let the developers put up their money to pay the difference if the economic benefits don't turn out to be as they projected.

I'm a technical student at a regional-sized state college. A significant amount of money is charged to each student to pay for athletic scholarships, fund the sports teams to travel, spend time in exotic locations, and train in good facilities with paid coaches and physical trainers. I have a hard time squaring this expense as necessary for my education. Especially for a state school.

I've been an athlete and enjoyed being on travel teams, and those experiences helped me develop as a person, so I'm not saying sports arent useful training, but I have a hard time justifying the whole student body paying for those kids to run around.

Cities should not pay for many, many things. Sports are not some special irrational thing that humans do to the exclusion of all the other random things public entities fund.

This, yes.

Cities need to invest in community sport and facilities for community sport. Yes there is also an infrastructure or building aspect to this but not giant stadiums. That is families, kids, tens playing (add sport of your choice). Cities should support those clubs that do this kind of work which is often shouldered by volunteers.

Once it gets to stadiums that are used by clubs with payed players. It is a business and the business should pay for it.

> Teams will often threaten to leave their respective city trying to leverage new and expensive facilities in other places from their current cities.

We've seen this happen time and time again.

I wonder how viable government regulation around this would be, to effectively ban the concept of moving a sports club by making the barriers to moving so high that no one would ever want to do it unless the team was in genuine financial distress.

There have occasionally been (completely wishful) proposals in the U.S. to have a team's IP (the name, logos, record, etc, basically the whole team's 'identity') belong to a city or a public corporation representing the region they draw their fanbase from.

Not a sports fan, but it's strange how much local sports contribute to local culture in large western cities, seems to bring abundant entertainment to sports fans in my life that it's better to bias towards having stadiums than not. Having lived in multiple large Asian cities without developed major sport franchises, I do feel like life is different without it.

The bizarre thing about the US is that as far as indviduals are concerned "socialism" and government assistance are dirty words, but not when it relates for corporations.

So benefits that are absolutely standard like universal healthcare, employment protection, minimum holidays, parental leave etc. are very limited.

Meanwhile the government builds stadiums for commercial sports businesses, runs airports and harbours so that commercial airlines and shipping lines can use them, implements strict protectionist legislation even in industries which operate fine in other 1st world countries without such legislation, and local authorities offer massive tax breaks to try and attract companies.

Stadiums are a in the end just a marketing instrument for 2nd and 3rd tier cities to brand themselves and stay in the national or international news.

The alternative is spending money on image campaigns and other fluff marketing. Once you realize that every time a city is (positively) mentionen in news, it is "earned media", the whole calcuation shifts a lot around.

brand themselves and stay in the national or international news.

But to what end? Thanks to sport I know of lots of US cities like Green Bay, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Kansas City etc. that I might not otherwise ever have given any thought. But what is the next step after that? I'm certainly not going to holiday there because they have a pretty good (or used to be good) team I've heard of.

In the end once cities cover the basics have not that many opportunities to stay in the news with a somewhat positive impression.

The name recognition is not going to be the core decision point for someone to spend holidays there or relocate there.

But if you are relocating to a city and have three to choose from where non stands out in particular you might assume that the one with the stronger sports team is more vibrant or dynamic than the others.

Why not?

It’s up to the people of a city how much they want to spend and on what.

Sports happen to be very popular with a large group of people who aren’t interested in the rest of what a city spends on. You can have those people watching sports or you can have them complaining about the rest of the spending because they didn’t get their piece of the pie.

On the most recent election day in America, voters precisely decided not to pay for stadiums.

> Voters in Denver, Colorado, approved ballot measures on Tuesday authorizing the city government to issue bonds to spruce up parks, renovate homeless shelters, and upgrade public transit.

> They rejected just one portion of Mayor Michael Hancock's five-part, $450 million bond proposal: the one that would have directed $190 million of that borrowing toward the construction of a new multi-use stadium near the city's hip River North neighborhood. While the first four parts of Hancock's proposal won support from at least 60 percent of voters, 58 percent rejected the stadium subsidy, according to The Denver Post's election tracker.

> ...

> Meanwhile, 65 percent of voters in Augusta, Georgia, rejected a similar bond issue that would have seen the city take on debt to fund the construction of a $235 million stadium for a yet-to-be-determined future occupant (possibly a minor league hockey team). The cost of the new stadium was projected to add about $100 to the average property tax bill in the city—all to create "a handful of new permanent jobs," according to The Augusta Chronicle. Who wouldn't vote for that?

> But voters in Augusta might not have the final say on whether their wallets get raided for the project. Brad Usry, vice chairman of the county authority that would run the new stadium, told the Chronicle last month that a "no" vote would "only delay the project so the authority can find other means of funding it."

> So voters were asked to give their approval for the stadium project, but rejecting it apparently doesn't count? Cool democracy you have there, Augusta.

https://reason.com/2021/11/05/voters-dont-want-to-pay-for-yo...

On the other hand, it seems like this deal with the Buffalo Bills is being decided by the governor, rather than a public referendum.

How many cities allow their citizens to vote on these subsidies for stadiums? If they're so popular, they should easily pass. Problem is, when it comes time to negotiate the deal, both the owner of the team and the city politicians are sitting on the same side of the table and there's no one sitting on the other side representing the people. Sometimes the mayor/county commissioner gets voted out in the next election but by then, the local government is locked into a deal that lasts 30+ years. It was never up to the people of the city.

Vote for a direct democracy then… amend the constitution, state constitution, etc.

Many cities have votes on these things. The city I left didn’t fund stadiums, but wasted money on all sorts of other crap.

You can always vote with your feet. You don’t have to pay for a stadium if you don’t want to.

Seems like the issue is the fig leaf of stadium financing being about jobs and new small businesses and all that good stuff.

It would be nice if there was more transparency ("Buffalo will pay for the stadium because we know you live the Bills one million times more than all your elected officials put together") or if cities banded together against paying these bribes but that's life.

I did really like the ideas for federal level reforms, but one component the author missed is that a stadium has workforce with a fairly unique composition. If you replace it with an office park or museum will they need dozens of hot dog and beer vendors, a massive athletic training staff, a landscaping staff, outdoor lighting technicians, etc? These are working class or middle class people who will be scrambling for a limited job pool. Getting rid of 100 janitors and adding 100 web developers has a cost to it, because it will require 200 people to either move or retrain.

Somewhat agreed. A city can want lots of things few people use. I'm sure the plenty of people don't take advantage of Central Park or Golden Gate Park yet they are paid for by the government.

Further, stadiums are often used for more than just sports. They're a venue for concerts, fireworks shows, and many other things.

Central Park and Golden Gate Park are open to the public every day and don't require you to pay to get in. If I could walk in to a taxpayer funded stadium to play a game with some friends for free or nearly free (as I can with small neighborhood sports fields) then maybe I'd have a slightly different opinion of them.

Why doesn't the city buy lavish buildings for other wildly profitable businesses? Professional sports don't need our tax money, they merely want it. If sports enthusiasts want to contribute money to the football stadium fund, they are free to.

They do. Arts, industry, ports, hospitals, schools, prisons, etc.

People who buy things like season tickets pay for most of the rest of the money the city wastes, why not get some back?

> Why not?

Because if a sports stadium was, you know, profitable then there would be businesses tripping over themselves to build them with private money. Instead, it becomes a big lobbying game where a bunch of bigshots all skim money from everybody.

The Chargers were a great bad example with idiocies like not televising a game locally if the tickets didn't sell out and the city having to backstop some number of tickets. San Diego finally managed to kick them to the curb and good riddance.

I no fan of Los Angeles, but I'm sorry that Dean Spanos and his cronies infested LA after we kicked him out.

> Why not?

Because it's a poor use of public funds to directly subsidize private profit of one particular company/team.

Major sports organizations and franchises are rich enough to handle their own expenses, they don't actually need public help. They'll take it if they can get it, of course, because why wouldn't they? It's free money! But we're under no obligation to give it to them.

In Europe, the pro soccer teams either own their stadium or pay rent. And where would FC Barcelona move to. Paris??

the latest episode of the economist "checks and balance" US politics podcast touches on what cities in decline can do to try to turn things around:

> Since the founding of America, its people and its economy have moved steadily westwards and, later, southwards. Recently, people and businesses have flocked to Sun Belt states, while cities in America’s old industrial heartland are struggling. What makes American cities boom and bust?

they give the example of Pittsburgh investing in "Eds and Meds" -- education and healthcare -- to regrow the city's economy after the decline of steel manufacturing

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/checks-and-balance-cit...

On a similar note, the newest video from NotJustBikes focuses on what makes these cities (in)solvent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

I completely agree with this statement, but the core behind this argument is about the essence of taxation as a whole: nobody should be forced, with violence or threat of violence, to pay for something he doesn't want to consume.

It doesn't matter if it's a stadium, a hospital or a subway.

In Cincinnati we got conned into this. We now have poor people paying for a stadium. People are still bitching about the fiasco 20 years later and a lot of people actively avoid living in the county so they do not have to pay the "stadium" taxes. It is a really bad deal.

This is happening in Northern Virginia right now. The state is going to create a control structure for a private city, provide unlimited debt funding, and lose significant tax revenues for decades to come. And for what? Bad football and more temporary food service/retail jobs?

The same applies to Amazon warehouses.

Do cities pay for Amazon Warehouses?

I guess it would be comparable to countries trying to attract businesses by giving them tax breaks?

As far as I can tell it’s a fairly regular occurrence.

https://fortune.com/2020/08/23/amazon-coronavirus-taxes-loca...

I would guess, as I said, that towns simply compete for the business by making them an attractive offer. For example even when selling the ground for the warehouse towns could give Amazon a cheaper price while hoping for more future income in taxes. Presumably that would apply to other companies as well.

The bit about "paying to destroy mainstreet" is of course nonsense. Amazon's business would exist either way.

Can we please stay on topic.

This article is about the US, all the references and the article it self point to that.

Do not rope in international cities where sporting events have different impacts and are potentially funded differently. Thank you. :)

The article cites Buffalo as paying for the stadium, but isn't the public portion ($1B) coming from New York State and not the city itself?

The stadium isn't even located in the city of Buffalo but well outside of it.

My sense is that a large fraction of the population has a deep emotional need for "manly men" sports teams which they can easily identify with (whether local professional teams, teams at the college they attended, or maybe teams local to where they grew up). Greedy team owners know this, and also that a few phrases like "economic benefits" and "or we'll move to $new_city" serve both to sway the gullible (who buy the economic arguments) and to push the insecurity / fear buttons in the people with emotional needs for a local team.

If ~nobody is mentioning, let alone discussing, the actual priorities of a large fraction of the voters, then rational public policy outcomes may prove rather rare.

Why shouldn’t the government serve voters’ emotional needs?

No reason it shouldn't...and say so right up front - "Our fine citizens wanted a new playground in this neighborhood, so the City spending $playground_cost and building one for them!".

The combination of brazen lies about costs, and deep "nobody mentions that" motivations are the big problem with the stadiums.

Check out Field of Schemes, the journalist there covers this news in depth...

https://www.fieldofschemes.com/

I can see the city paying for the stadium so that they can use it for a variety of events and purposes. They need to start charging the large revenue generating sports more.

It's really unfortunate that the extremely intelligent and self-filtering (via upvotes) nature of HN doesn't have an impact on policy-choices. :(

The stadiums are rarely profitable. If there is no public funding, then stadiums would exist only in very few places. As far as I know majority of the stadiums in Europe are also own by municipalities.

Also are cities really investing in something better?

Oakland lost both Raiders and Warriors. It seems like Oakland spend that money on pension benefits of city employees. And they started laying off teachers. If you ask me: if you cannot spend money on schools (or anything useful) build a stadium.

But this is politic: stadiums are easy target but do know that city will probably mismanage the money any way.

If you can't spend the money on anything useful, let the taxpayer keep their money.

Sure - but as a taxpayer of Oakland what one can do? I was with them when they said “no money for Raiders”. They mismanaged the money anyhow and one cannot elect anybody else because they need to be democrats.

I’m just explaining how dynamic goes here: the cities will be still be funding stadiums because electorate will not trust them when they say “we will spend on x”.

In the UK very few stadiums are publicly funded. This can be done. I'd prefer my city mismanage my money into nurses hands than into a stadium.

Everyone has known this for decades but does it anyways.

Easy way to score political points and get votes.

Peak populism.

IIRC Seattle recently refused to do it.

Seattle still doesn't have a basketball team because they refused to pay for a stadium. That's exactly why teams are able to extort cities over stadium funding.

There need to be strings attached where the owner is forced to set aside a portion of annual profits as an investment to future stadium construction.

No. Just don't pay public money for these things. If they leave, they leave. Don't let pro sports teams and their fans extort everyone else.

I think we should go the other way and nationalize all major sports leagues and teams, because they really are an integral part of a community.

Cities paying to attract sports teams is simply democracy. A lot of people like watching sports and having local professional sports teams. But the number of professional sports teams is limited. Not every city can be an NFL city, and many people are proud that their city is an NFL city. In a city like Los Angeles or San Francisco it might not be so important, but in a smaller city, for a Cincinnati politician to take an anti-Bengals stance would be political suicide. It is never primarily about the "jobs created".

Ridiculous. Refusing to pay out public money for private profit isn't "anti-" anything. If Disney demands you give them a billion dollars to make a movie about your city, refusing that demand doesn't make you "anti-Disney." It just makes you sane.

> A lot of people like watching sports

I don't think that that is true anymore. It used to be, but sports is competing for eyeballs with all the other entertainment out there.

Yeah, sure, sports had a large audience when people did not have games, instant messaging, social sites, Netflix, AmzPrime, Hulu and more in the palm of their hands.

Basically, sports is in competition with all the other forms of entertainment. I'm looking around my circle of friends, family and acquaintances, and the only ones who are interested are:

1. Those with children on some team in school, and then they're only interested in that particular sport, and only when their children's teams are playing.

2. The older folk who were supporters all their lives, and will continue being supporters.

3. The people betting on matches.

I know of only one family that actually is into sport, and regularly follows all the soccer and/or cricket matches that come around. The others have cancelled their sat-tv and just use netflix, amz-prime and the internet for entertainment.

> I don't think that that is true anymore. It used to be, but sports is competing for eyeballs with all the other entertainment out there.

In 2021, 95 of the top 100 most-watched TV broadcasts in the US were sports. More people watched the Raiders play on Thanksgiving than watched the presidential inauguration.

1. https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Journal/Issues/2022/01...

But we aren't comparing presidential inaugurations with the superbowl, we're comparing stadium visitors with the draw of netflix, social media, games, etc.

Sure, the final event of a season always has a large number of viewers (1 in 3, according to your stats), just like any other special event, but

a) We aren't looking at only the outliers (I would guess an average soapie episode has more viewers than an average match)

b) A single sporting event that has $FOO million viewers does not mean that $FOO million people are following the sport. My experience is that there are large media campaigns to get people to tune in for the large events. They tune out again once the event is over.

>Cities should not pay for new stadiums

There is for every city to decide if funding some private business is in the interest of its inhabitants or not.

Or they can, but should keep all the concessions, branding, etc. profits.

At the very least don't subsidize the parking lot

One need only look in my own backyard and the ongoing struggle between the Pegula's (https://www.psentertainment.com/) billions and the post Ralph Wilson era in ownership of the NFL team in Buffalo, NY - the Buffalo Bills. They are located out in Orchard Park ("OP" in these parts), NY and before Wilson died, he negotiated a long term non-move clause in the Bills from OP to keep his legacy intact for as long as he could.

Fast forward 10 (ish) years to 2022 the floated value of a new stadium is looking to be between 1.4-1.8B to mirror the other stadiums build in the state in NYC (can't off hand remember which ones are new). The average is about 1.6% paid out of local / state taxes, while it seems (perception) that the state is willing to pay an unprecedented 25-50% of the new stadium from local coffers.

I'm not sure if anyone has looked around, but in the last two years I think the population dropped by 300K in NYS and Upstate (everything East of Rochester) and Western New York (everything Rochester and west) has been dying slowly.

I think Buffalo has seen a mediocre rise back to glory under the "Billion to Buffalo" under Cuomo's governance, but tons of that left the state with Tesla's Riverbend plant and honestly real failure to deliver on its promises. The rest went to our startup and industrial technology companies with sprinkles into our medical institutions (our real meat and po-tats around these parts).

The problem is - we have no money. Taxes are high (without blaming a party, but a culture problem in NYS) and social programs are abused. Billions in the pocket of the wealthy need to be spent and the local pockets need to contribute to their profits vs. being blead for them.

Really hate living in a state that just hates business like we do here, but .. this what you get. Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo will all eventually fail on some level because of the continued regime's need to keep the status going.

Someone really needs to speak truth to power, or its going to crush our country economically as capitalism is more oligarch feeling than Representative Democracy.

Light grey text on a white background? I was interested in the content but cannot force my eyes to endure the strain of reading the article due to its inaccessibility.

Readability is dead.

John Oliver did a Last Week Tonight on exactly this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xcwJt4bcnXs

This is one of those issues where I have a clear logical stance but an opposite emotional stance. I've tried so hard to be against /any/ kind of stadium subsidies. At the college level, at the national level, at the high school level. I've tried. Honestly, I don't watch sports, I don't care about sports, I wish teachers got paid more, I wish students had more programs, I wish we had more money for infrastructure and so on and so on. I've tried with every fiber of my being to be against these stadiums being subsidized. And I read some of their citations, like this one: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sports-jobs-taxes-are-new...

And I couldn't agree more with a lot of it. I think the "What Can Be Done?" section is really good. I think there should be federal incentives for forcing cities to work together on their contracts with these sports teams to make their deals more fair. I don't know how that would work?

But, for example, one of the downsides listed in the article is that most of the jobs created by the stadium are low-paying jobs. Not just the construction work itself but maintaining the stadium. Janitors, cashiers, mechanics, etc. But that's not an issue /with the stadium itself/ that's an issue with ALL of the country itself. It's not like the stadium not being there is going to give janitors higher paying jobs. Whether they work low-paying and hardly livable jobs for the stadium or for a contractor that has deals with Google doesn't make a difference. It's al ow paying job that can't sustain a living wage. That's not on the stadium. That's not on the city making a deal with NFL. That's an irrelevant point. If you want to make those 10,000 stadium jobs better for the community, don't choose to NOT put a stadium there. Choose to increase the quality of life for the residents of the city.

But, I think what taints my perspective more than anything is being from Chicago and having lived in Texas. I know of people that are proud of being Chicagoans, that love going to Wrigleyville, that love being from the North/South based on what team they follow. I know of people in Texas that are proud of their town because of how good their football team was. I know of people who went to A&M because of its sports teams. I know of people who travel there specifically to watch a game. I've seen content from their Fightin' Texas Aggie Band that's made me feel inspired.

I think part of it IS economic and I know I'm biased towards success stories. But I do think there absolutely is an emotional component to it. And if you think a government shouldn't be making emotional decisions, that's totally fine. I don't disagree with you at all. I wish I could agree with you harder, actually. I just can't put myself completely in the camp of "cities should not pay for new stadiums."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com