Life in these Untidy States: Stadium--The Abridged Edition

[athelind]

I guess I can boil down my last post into a couple of simple questions:

Does investing public money into building a stadium actually yield a net economic benefit to the community?

If so, does it actually provide more of a benefit than investing the same public money into, say, public transit or public utilities*?

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*Note that Santa Clara is one of the few municipalities in Northern California that has its own, independent power generation facilities, and thus is not a serf to PG&E; as a result, they're one of the targets of Proposition 16, officially named the "Right To Vote Act", but generally recognized as the "PG&E Power Grab" or "Monopoly Preservation Act".

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Comments

[perlandria.livejournal.com]

You! Mr Posty McPosty! Are you kidnappable to KOR Karaoke at the King of Club's bar tonight anywhere from 9:30 PM to Midnight. We have a car. We can totally lure you into it with candy.

[moonfires.livejournal.com]

Overall, no.

[moult.livejournal.com]

Tangentially:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/10217817.stm

'Local people love it. Even those who live in shacks in Matsafeni village right next to it love their new "giraffe stadium". But they would also like to have mains water and electricity - and proper housing. And a tar road ... Mbombela council promised the people of Matsafeni that the building of the stadium would be matched by improvements to the village. But nothing happened.'

[pseudomanitou.livejournal.com]

Benefit to the community... only within the inner city where the new sports building is built.

This kind of thing can revitalize an inner city -- bringing people outside the city limits inside to spend money, prop up new restaurants, hotels, etc.

Now, in the long run, this can make the inner city more appealing to businesses looking for a city structure office location.

But it all depends on so many factors. Maybe the team sucks constantly and has trouble selling tickets. Maybe the only businesses that pop up are strip clubs and sports bars that release drunks into the streets. Maybe the businesses that are attracted in are unethical or become too large so that the community finds itself entirely dependent on the company doing well. It's a gamble.

But for some cities, it's pretty much a given that it will increase tourism and spending.

Did something similar in Minneapolis. It helped, but once you cross into a certain area, property taxes triple. This is why I don't a condo north of I-94 :P

[divabeq.livejournal.com]

I both live in and work for the city of Arlington, TX (where they just built the new Dallas Cowboy's Stadium) and my answer is an emphatic "no". I have a fairly intimate knowledge of the budget of the city both before and after a stadium is built. Before the stadium, we received raises and since, we have not, nor will we get cost of living raises this year. In addition to the tax breaks to the stadium and immense cost of construction for this kind of a project, there are infrastructure improvements that have to be made that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. New water towers and water and sewer lines, new streets, street lights, signs, increased police presence... it goes on and on.

In addition to our recent experience with the newly built Cowboys' stadium, we had a similar experience some years ago with the construction of the Ballpark at Arlington (the Texas Rangers' baseball stadium). Just about the time that stadium outlived its tax breaks, we started a second one. And the whole idea of it revitalizing other local businesses like restaurants and hotels, the fact is that games/events cause so much traffic that people would rather go to further away from the stadium itself to eat and sleep after. Furthermore, many of the studies I read (in the run up to the stadium being built) suggest that tourism is not actually good for the people who live in a community.

[r-caton.livejournal.com]

One word -
OLYMPICS.

And after?

Lok at the crap at Wembley and White City...
White City is just improving (maybe) now, the 'Lympies were 1908 and 1948