The new Braves stadium is dumb as hell.
I know it’s not new-new — it opened in 2017, which can’t be right, because I remember the previous park too well for the new one to be 5 years old already, unless something crazy happened like me aging and the ravages of time compressing recent years into a blur — but it’s new enough to call it “the new Braves stadium,” so the motion passes.
Their previous park, Turner Field, was perfectly fine. It wasn’t the Coliseum, with sewage backups, and it wasn’t Candlestick Park, with horrific cold and wind, and it wasn’t Dodger Stadium, kept whole through the blood sacrifice of virgins. It also wasn’t the best park in baseball, but it was a good place to go and watch a game.
Not good enough, said the Braves Give us a bunch of money to build a new stadium, away from the inner city and all its…residents. Cobb County did just that, bringing Atlanta Braves baseball to the suburbs, with promises of an economic boom.
The result? According to one study, basically nothing:
The findings indicate a net increase in taxable sales in the county; however, the magnitude of the effect is small and not statistically significant. Though net new spending is evident, approximately one-third of the project’s sales appear to derive from crowding out other local economic activity. In total, added tax collections fall well short of covering the public subsidies provided by Cobb.
For all that, taxpayers in Cobb County paid $350 million. The investment won’t pay for itself. Not ever. It’s just a giveaway to a wildly profitable corporation.
The new Rangers stadium is dumb as hell.
Opened two years ago, Globe Life Field replaced the not-that-old Ballpark In Arlington, which went through some other, less cool, names that we’re going to ignore. That park, from all accounts, was a very pleasant place to watch a game, but on the other hand, a new stadium would come with more luxury boxes, so the team’s hands were tied.
I haven’t been able to find any conclusive studies of the economic impact of the park — operating during COVID times means that the numbers are so unreliable as to be meaningless — though one study from an undergrad (in association with a faculty advisor) at the University of Dallas found that the odds were less than 10% of a positive outcome for the City of Arlington, and that the average loss the city would incur was around $80 million.
Taxpayers shelled out $500 million for that, by the way. And we can be pretty sure that that investment won’t pay for itself either.
And those two topics bring us to…you guessed it, the Buffalo Bills.
The new Bills stadium will cost a total of $1.4 billion, with $600 million of that coming from the state, and $250 million coming from the county.
That is an absolutely massive amount of money for a stadium which will see very few football games being played in it. In one year, the Bills will play, let’s say, 2 preseason home games, 9 regular season home games, and maybe a couple of playoff games. That’s it. That’s all they’ll do. Hundreds of millions of dollars going to a massively profitable business and the taxpayers will get nothing for it.
It’s sick, is what it is. Disgusting. Ridiculous. Unconscionable. Hundreds of millions of dollars that could go to people who need it, and instead it’s going to people who unequivocally don’t. All of it comes in the name of economic development, of course, with the small caveat being that, like we saw with Truist Park already, it doesn’t work.
Take this summary of recent thinking:
[Economists] often stress that estimations of the economic impact of sports stadiums are exaggerated because they fail to recognize opportunity costs. Consumers who spend money on sporting events would likely spend the money on other forms of entertainment, which has a similar economic impact.
Or this actual large-scale study of the economic value of stadiums:
Though findings have become more nuanced, recent analyses continue to confirm the decades-old consensus that the economic effects of professional sports teams and stadiums are limited. Even with added non-pecuniary social benefits from quality-of-life externalities and civic pride, welfare improvements from hosting teams tend to fall well short of covering public outlays.
These stadiums aren’t creating new money, in other words. They’re just sucking up money that would go somewhere else in town, or, at the very most, in the general area. Studies have shown this. Cities would be better of spending money on infrastructure or social services, which have actual long-term impacts, instead of arenas.
But that’s not what they’re incentivized to do. Mayors are terrified of being “The Buffalo mayor who lost the Buffalo Bills,” and so they will approve massive public investments to keep their sports teams, either ignoring or denying the evidence that it’s a bad idea for the city.
So the scam rolls on, time after time. I haven’t even mentioned the new Raiders stadium, also built with $750 million in public money, because why bother? As much as I personally enjoy sports, I don’t enjoy it when sports symbolize broken political and economic processes. I don’t want to think about how something I love and care about is, in a lot of ways, a malignant force in contemporary American life.
And yet, here we are. Every stadium deal for public money is a scam. That’s how it was in Atlanta, and in Arlington, and in Buffalo, and in Las Vegas, and when the Diamondbacks finally talk/threaten Phoenix into building them a new park, that’s how it will be there too.
These teams are owned by people who could either pay for the entirety of the parks themselves or get loans to pay for them, which they would pay off with the revenue from owning a monstrously profitable sports team. That’s exactly what the public should make them do. Instead, it’s welfare for billionaires. It’s not right. It’s not fair. It will definitely happen again.