The debates in Oklahoma City over the wisdom of coughing over arena money while other pressing issues exist is painfully familiar to longtime Seattle residents.
This is one of the biggest taxpayer rip-offs in the country. Under the guise of the limited jobs it creates. Study after study proves what a rip-off it is. New York taxpayers are about to foot 1 billion so the Bills can keep coming up short of expectations.
The fact that it’s coming from the state and not the municipality is the truly wild part of the Buffalo stadium deal. It’s one thing if the money’s coming from the area because, even if they’re still atrocious “investments” when it comes to public funding, at least it’s still the people that will gain whatever benefits there are to be had from having a stadium and NFL team. The vast majority of NY state taxes come from NYC, though, and I feel damn confident saying that at least 99% of NYC residents are literally never going to see any benefit in the slightest. That’s next level fucked, IMO.
There’s very little musicians left who can draw crowds big enough to fill these places up. Especially in poor smaller markets. Then the NFL stadiums which are custom built for 8 home games a year.
I don’t know Chase Center in San Francisco doesn’t seem to have this issue. I know the income level there is higher than other places, but the tours don’t start and stop in SF so they must be filling arenas in other areas… no?
There are legitimately only 3 or 4 artists in the world with any possibility of filling a stadium right now. Unless you have Taylor Swift and Beyoncé coming regularly, there’s just no chance of a decent return.
Ehh. I’d say any of the following could still fill an NFL stadium:
Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Madonna, Britney Spears, Blackpink, The Weekend, Lizzo, reunion tours of NSYNC/Spice Girls/Backstreet Boys/U2/Guns n Roses/Metallica/Foo Fighters/One Direction, others I’m forgetting. But yes, most could not.
U2, Paul McCartney, and The Rolling Stones did notable stadium tours in the last decade or so I think. But yeah other than that it’s one-offs like when the dead did Fare Thee Well. I bet outside or major markets the NFL stadiums don’t get used for concerts more than like 3x a year on average.
Maybe in any given year a stadium would be used for a concert 3-4 times, but there’s definitely more than 4 acts that can fill stadiums. George Strait just did a sold out stadium tour this year.
Still not something the city/state should pay for.
Lumen Field in Seattle hosts the Seahawks and the Sounders. It does have concrete here and there. That being said Seattle is a sports city and can support NBA NFL MLB NHL MLS easily.
I am not sure if SoFI count as an average football stadium, but the event calendar of that place looks crazy. One of the few venue that actually earn its money
That’s because it’s NFL season and it’s actually getting used for football. Major concerts usually require preparations a week in advance to load everything in and build out a stage, etc…
NYC, LA, and Vegas (maybe Miami) are the only cities that get major entertainment attractions year round and have the demand for it. Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix are all close but they aren’t entertainment hubs like those first 3
I’m in PHX. We get the final four on rotation, college bowl games, we got both Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, CONCACAF soccer games, international friendlies. The stadium gets used.
Yeah, Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta is also a good candidate to say it was worth it. 8-9 NFL home games, 17 MLS plus any other tournament matches Atlanta United plays, at least 2 college football games per year with one of those being a New Years Six Bowl. Monster truck and motocross events are relatively common. I don’t remember if the DCI circuit still goes through Atlanta but I know the GA Dome used to host one of the last big competitions before finals. I know Elton John and Taylor Swift have both played there in the last couple of years.
Lumen Field is probably the exception that I can think off the top of my head. Currently, four professional sports franchises call it home: Seahawks, Sounders, Reign, Sea Dragons.
the base essential idea of taxes is that they are collected in one place and spent in another, money collected from one person provides a service for another
im not saying stadiums are a good investment just that its not “truly wild”, or “next level” that taxes collected from NYC go to a project in Buffalo, very much the same level that we’ve always been on
Dumbasses won’t even be able to host a Super Bowl either cause it’ll be open air! The whole point of the new stadiums is to get in the SB circuit. They’ll never host an outside SB in the winter in Buffalo.
NYC was about to ‘pay’ Amazon, the richest company in the world, 1.5 billion dollars to build HQ2, and when it failed, they just went and spent a billion of their own funds to hire the talent they wanted in the first place.
I really wish that we could have just let them move to Austin.
Buffalo is a wintry city with immense snowfall. It will never be the tourist destination a place like Vegas will be and the stadium never went to a vote.
Meanwhile most professors are on one-year rolling contracts that can be cut at any moment - especially in the humanities. The main reason I did not go into a Masters and a Doctorate, even though I really wanted to, is that all my professors and advisors told me how tough it is to find a stable job, even with PhDs from prestigious as hell universities.
But hey, I’m glad Coach Dickhead makes 20m a year from public money.
The fact that my state school (Rutgers) gets ~140m a year, and can expect taxpayers and tuition to cover any loses they garner doing that, to cosplay a D1 football school is nuts. Half the school is Indian and asian and couldn’t give less of a shit about football - give us like 1% of that budget for a funded cricket team and we’d demolish.
Hahahahaha wait til you learn who’s not paying any or paying extremely low property taxes in your city. Hint: any big corporation that recently moved there, private high schools, colleges, golf courses, malls, etc.
There was something posted on reddit that the state budget cut almost the same amount from social services, some mother kid program.
The republicans would say but the mom could get a job there! Yeah, slinging hot dogs or cleaning toilets, the pay of which is the whole reason she’s using social services
Could you explain your stance a little bit more in depth? I would think building a state of the art arena that your city owns would attract more people to Oklahoma City and therefore provide great benefits to the city.
Michael Leeds professor of Economics at Temple looked at Chicago. He said a baseball stadium in Chicago (a good example because of number of games) showed the same economic impact as a department store. Football is worse because less games. Would a city fund a billion dollar department store through taxes? Probably not. They have found that most of the economic benefit goes to the owners. You can Google this and there are a lot of studies.
I am a sports fan. And I certainly don’t think public funding of stadiums will ever stop. In fact, it’s getting more expensive. I just don’t agree with it. There are plenty of other things to fund with tax dollars that will improve livability. And for instance, the owners of the Bills are worth 5 billion. Why can’t they fund it? There are owners that privately fund.
Right but have you looked more in depth into these studies? Just because someone is professor of something doesn’t mean people aren’t paying them money to say what other people want to hear. I mean just literally think about what you said to me you are comparing a Billion-dollar stadium to a department store. I have never taken an economics class but I’d be willing to wager a hefty bet that this stadium would have a far greater impact than a department store.
But I believe it would bring an economic boom it’s not about necessarily getting direct value out of a stadium. It’s about getting super wealthy people to want to invest in the future of OKC. The best way to do that is to get them near the city and want to be around it, therefore nothing attracts the wealthy like a state-of-the-art arena.
The data for it’s economic impact is murky, but part of that is because it’s hard to quantify. They’re an economic multiplier. Depending on the city it will have differing levels of impact across a multitude of businesses. But part of the intangibles are creating a brand identity for the city. In your example it also makes Buffalo a bigger travel destination. I’m a lot more likely to travel to Buffalo to visit Niagara Falls and catch a Bills game than I am to travel there to only do one of those things.
I wouldn’t say Buffalo getting a new stadium makes them a bigger travel destination. If anything, Buffalo’s new stadium shows how much of an absolute waste these publicly funded stadiums are.
Niagara Falls has the majority of its visitors come in the spring and summer which is outside of when the Bills play so you aren’t really getting any dual tourism benefits. The new Buffalo stadium is also open air which most likely rules it out of getting any major entertainment events like concerts during the winter. And for Buffalo as a city it will always play second fiddle to Toronto for a tourist destination so a new stadium doesn’t really push the needle for more people to vacation in upstate NY and not stay in Toronto.
Like you said, professional sports can bring a lot of intangible benefits for a city such as brand identity or lumping them into infrastructure improvements. However, the $850 million public contribution NY is giving towards building a stadium could easily be used for other infrastructure improvements that would economically improve Buffalo.
Counterpoint is I’ve heard of Buffalo and part of that reason is because of the Bills. People gravitate towards latching onto sports team and it makes them feel invested in them and their city. I have no connection with either city but if I get a job offer to move to Buffalo, NY or to Bismarck, ND you damn well know which one I’m picking. It’s a level of prestige it gives a city. If they have a sports team I know they’re going to be a moderately okay place to live with things to do.
Also $850 million spread out over 20 million New Yorkers is a bit different than $900 million spread out across 4 million Oklahomans.
That’s nonsense. When there are only 8 or 9 home games a year, and the overwhelming majority of tickets go to season ticket holders who live locally and tailgate in the parking lot, the overall economic multiplier impact is negligible. Study after study debunks that claim. Meanwhile you have a giant concrete ring surrounded by an enormous asphalt circle of parking lots, all empty for at least 340 days of the year. A football stadfium is not not only a bad thing to subsidize, it is just a bad use of land, especially high value land in the center of a city or along a river. Subsidizing a football stadium with public money is madness - most cities are better off without football stadiums even if they are built entirely by the teams themselves.
This is not so true for basketball arenas. Many more games, the arena is useful for concerts, conventions, circuses, etc., and if you minimize the parking lots, people will spend money in the local restaurants before the game. Billionaires should still build their own basketball arenas, but throwing some money there is not as ridiculous as a football stadium.
That’s a really good point, there are numerous concerts and other events held at most NBA stadiums. Just off the top of my head this year at Gainbridge Fieldhouse they had WWE Fast Lane, a number of concerts, Indiana Fever games, and girls and boys high school finals.
Sacramento’s new arena kind of saves downtown Sac. It’s now wonderful and I’m not sure it would have been without that stadium being the lifeblood of the city
And on top of this they’re doing international and neutral games, lowering then number of games at the stadium. Not a thing yet in the NBA (outside of preseason) but it will be. Why does the city never get a percent ownership in the team at least?
the “brings in local jobs” argument only makes sense when you consider that most political terms are 2 or 4 years. The opportunity to immediately “add” 1000+ construction jobs for 18 months is relatively easy compared to building up sustainable long-term industries.
And the minimum wage jobs for working concessions and security/ushering it brings during the season is not really something to celebrate as a great return on investment. Besides, those jobs also already exist at the current stadium/arena.
Plus there’s no long term jobs gained because all of the day of game staff would also work at the old stadium. And that’s 9-10 days tops per year. So “part-time” work that equal 3% of the entire year lol
Every single time a private company engages in a compromise with the supposed government it is a poor idea for the populace. A single entity has chosen to go against the majority. So ask yourself why you ever have a private corporation.
It’s not a ripoff every study is done after the fact of a franchise being in the community for years. Its effects can’t be measured on an economic basis because its business is limited to itself. Its value is based of a social and cultural aspect. When OKC was trying to get companies like Boeing, Amazon and other Tech companies in the medical field they were worried about coming there because they had nothing to attract youth and young people to move or come here. They were worried about Brain Drain( when Young college graduates leave an area). Since the Thunder have came in 2008 the amount of companies and population has increased to where OKC used to be in the top 40 in population to now where in the 20s. This study has been done by OKC Chamber of commerce and Oklahoma City their effect is a collateral effect and not a direct effect. There hasn’t been a study of a city that hasn’t had a franchise to getting one. One thing that is certain is that every place that has complained about paying for a new arena and lost a franchise always pays for a new one to get back another franchise facts.
The Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce put out a study that promotes Oklahoma City? Okay. I can point to multiple studies by University of Michigan, Brookings Institute, and on and on that says the economic benefits are not realized. If you want to argue that it makes a city more appealing, maybe. However, when a team leaves people generally find something else to do. You are talking about a minuscule percentage of a population that fits into an arena. Just because people desire a sports franchise, like Baltimore bringing back football, doesn’t necessarily mean it equates to better economics. That can be tracked. And it has been shown to not economically benefit areas all that much.
They’re doing the same thing here in Jacksonville for the Jaguars. Instead of putting money towards education, infrastructure, or our decaying downtown taxpayers will instead pay a billion dollars for a “stadium of the future” for a mediocre ass football team that hasn’t won shit in the almost 30 years that they’ve existed. They’re arguably the most irrelevant franchise in all of North American pro sports and they’ve become a bottom tier organization under Khan’s ownership yet they have the audacity to ask us to split the bill lmao.
This is one of the biggest taxpayer rip-offs in the country. Under the guise of the limited jobs it creates. Study after study proves what a rip-off it is. New York taxpayers are about to foot 1 billion so the Bills can keep coming up short of expectations.
The fact that it’s coming from the state and not the municipality is the truly wild part of the Buffalo stadium deal. It’s one thing if the money’s coming from the area because, even if they’re still atrocious “investments” when it comes to public funding, at least it’s still the people that will gain whatever benefits there are to be had from having a stadium and NFL team. The vast majority of NY state taxes come from NYC, though, and I feel damn confident saying that at least 99% of NYC residents are literally never going to see any benefit in the slightest. That’s next level fucked, IMO.
people were pissed at aoc for refusing to fund a new amazon lol
I would be thrilled if 0 tax dollars went to a new Bills stadium.
There’s very little musicians left who can draw crowds big enough to fill these places up. Especially in poor smaller markets. Then the NFL stadiums which are custom built for 8 home games a year.
I don’t know Chase Center in San Francisco doesn’t seem to have this issue. I know the income level there is higher than other places, but the tours don’t start and stop in SF so they must be filling arenas in other areas… no?
This is the number one issue for me.
How many days a year is the average football stadium in use? The answer is “not nearly enough for it to be worth public resources”
The basketball stadiums do have artists that can fill them up but a football stadium is like Michael Jackson in his prime level seating.
There are legitimately only 3 or 4 artists in the world with any possibility of filling a stadium right now. Unless you have Taylor Swift and Beyoncé coming regularly, there’s just no chance of a decent return.
Ehh. I’d say any of the following could still fill an NFL stadium:
Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Madonna, Britney Spears, Blackpink, The Weekend, Lizzo, reunion tours of NSYNC/Spice Girls/Backstreet Boys/U2/Guns n Roses/Metallica/Foo Fighters/One Direction, others I’m forgetting. But yes, most could not.
And like 5-10 country artists, too.
Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Bad Bunny, and aging classic rock acts doing a “final tour”. And those last ones are gonna start to get few and far between
U2, Paul McCartney, and The Rolling Stones did notable stadium tours in the last decade or so I think. But yeah other than that it’s one-offs like when the dead did Fare Thee Well. I bet outside or major markets the NFL stadiums don’t get used for concerts more than like 3x a year on average.
Was about to chip in with a David Gilmore - Roger Waters suggestion
Maybe in any given year a stadium would be used for a concert 3-4 times, but there’s definitely more than 4 acts that can fill stadiums. George Strait just did a sold out stadium tour this year.
Still not something the city/state should pay for.
That’s the standard and the stadium doesn’t even come close to paying itself back
Which will be really hard to see again due to the pollution of the medium with the internet.
Beyonce and Taylor Swift are the only two that can
Lumen Field in Seattle hosts the Seahawks and the Sounders. It does have concrete here and there. That being said Seattle is a sports city and can support NBA NFL MLB NHL MLS easily.
I am not sure if SoFI count as an average football stadium, but the event calendar of that place looks crazy. One of the few venue that actually earn its money
https://www.sofistadium.com/upcoming-events/
Is it? Unless there’s another calendar that I’m missing something, it just looks like 2 NFL teams
That’s because it’s NFL season and it’s actually getting used for football. Major concerts usually require preparations a week in advance to load everything in and build out a stage, etc…
Most stadiums don’t have two NFL teams.
NYC, LA, and Vegas (maybe Miami) are the only cities that get major entertainment attractions year round and have the demand for it. Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix are all close but they aren’t entertainment hubs like those first 3
I’m in PHX. We get the final four on rotation, college bowl games, we got both Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, CONCACAF soccer games, international friendlies. The stadium gets used.
It being in Los Angeles removes it from average football stadium contention.
LA is probably the #1 city in the world for music events so it makes sense?
being in LA County goes along way
Yeah, Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta is also a good candidate to say it was worth it. 8-9 NFL home games, 17 MLS plus any other tournament matches Atlanta United plays, at least 2 college football games per year with one of those being a New Years Six Bowl. Monster truck and motocross events are relatively common. I don’t remember if the DCI circuit still goes through Atlanta but I know the GA Dome used to host one of the last big competitions before finals. I know Elton John and Taylor Swift have both played there in the last couple of years.
Lumen Field is probably the exception that I can think off the top of my head. Currently, four professional sports franchises call it home: Seahawks, Sounders, Reign, Sea Dragons.
I used to have season tickets to the Seahawks and Sounders. I was at the stadium at least 28 weeks a year for over a decade.
It’s also seen a decent amount of concert use too.
8 games a year unless one of your home games is moved to Europe or Mexico.
Also preseason and maybe playoffs.
I think the one or two preseason games make up the difference /s
When I lived in NY the cable company would advertise that they had all NY sports teams, which included the NJ Nets and not the Bills
all the new amsterdam sports teams
Catch a game at Ebbets Field, and afterwards we can check out one of those new talkies
more like head down to the wall (street) and trade some wampum for beaver pelts if you know what i’m sayin’
We downstaters already subsidize upstate enough, let Western NY pay for their own fucking stadium.
I mean they are the only team that plays in New York so maybe it’s not a big ask.
I can tell you that most nyc citizen would not give a shit if they left.
It’s especially funny when you consider that the Jets and Giants, who really do represent NYC, play in a privately funded stadium
Hello I pay NYC taxes and the Bills can go fuck themselves
The Bills should not be very high on your list of reasons to be angry at NYC or the taxes you pay there lol
the base essential idea of taxes is that they are collected in one place and spent in another, money collected from one person provides a service for another
im not saying stadiums are a good investment just that its not “truly wild”, or “next level” that taxes collected from NYC go to a project in Buffalo, very much the same level that we’ve always been on
Kathy Hochul, the NY governor, is a Democrat who is up for re election soon. She is from Buffalo and doesn’t give a shit about downstate
Dumbasses won’t even be able to host a Super Bowl either cause it’ll be open air! The whole point of the new stadiums is to get in the SB circuit. They’ll never host an outside SB in the winter in Buffalo.
Imagine paying what it costs to live in NYC and watching a bunch of idiots use your money to jump through a table at their brand new stadium.
And it still doesn’t have a roof so they can keep playing 1 game a year in Ford Field
Remember Amazon HQ2? Most waste of government resources in a probably a generation
I remember they threatened to leave NYC and then just hired even more people since.
Huh?
They did pull the planned HQ2 from NYC. They added a fulfillment center with like 1,500 jobs instead.
That’s about 1/10th of the jobs lost from HQ2 pulling out.
The HQ2 in Virginia has about 10x as many jobs as that already, and plans to double them over the next decade.
They also bought a building from we-work for 1 billion dollars instead.
NYC was about to ‘pay’ Amazon, the richest company in the world, 1.5 billion dollars to build HQ2, and when it failed, they just went and spent a billion of their own funds to hire the talent they wanted in the first place.
I really wish that we could have just let them move to Austin.
Buffalo is a wintry city with immense snowfall. It will never be the tourist destination a place like Vegas will be and the stadium never went to a vote.
Democrats love giving billionaires money for their stadiums for some reason.
The bigger scam is publicly funded colleges getting massive stadiums for like 8 games per year.
Meanwhile most professors are on one-year rolling contracts that can be cut at any moment - especially in the humanities. The main reason I did not go into a Masters and a Doctorate, even though I really wanted to, is that all my professors and advisors told me how tough it is to find a stable job, even with PhDs from prestigious as hell universities.
But hey, I’m glad Coach Dickhead makes 20m a year from public money.
Yes, but they don’t get to move the team for any reason whatsoever, and they rarely, if ever, get new stadiums.
The fact that my state school (Rutgers) gets ~140m a year, and can expect taxpayers and tuition to cover any loses they garner doing that, to cosplay a D1 football school is nuts. Half the school is Indian and asian and couldn’t give less of a shit about football - give us like 1% of that budget for a funded cricket team and we’d demolish.
The issue would be finding other NCAA Schools to play cricket against
It would be affirmative action for south asians just like squash and crew is affirmative action for WASPs.
… and lax and swimming…
Maybe they can start with Princeton.
Sounds like a national championship to me!
I suppose. Aren’t those stadiums built by private donations?
Hahahahaha wait til you learn who’s not paying any or paying extremely low property taxes in your city. Hint: any big corporation that recently moved there, private high schools, colleges, golf courses, malls, etc.
Not like I don’t know companies get tax breaks. Not really news. Also doesn’t make the main example the right thing to do.
There was something posted on reddit that the state budget cut almost the same amount from social services, some mother kid program.
The republicans would say but the mom could get a job there! Yeah, slinging hot dogs or cleaning toilets, the pay of which is the whole reason she’s using social services
Could you explain your stance a little bit more in depth? I would think building a state of the art arena that your city owns would attract more people to Oklahoma City and therefore provide great benefits to the city.
Michael Leeds professor of Economics at Temple looked at Chicago. He said a baseball stadium in Chicago (a good example because of number of games) showed the same economic impact as a department store. Football is worse because less games. Would a city fund a billion dollar department store through taxes? Probably not. They have found that most of the economic benefit goes to the owners. You can Google this and there are a lot of studies.
I am a sports fan. And I certainly don’t think public funding of stadiums will ever stop. In fact, it’s getting more expensive. I just don’t agree with it. There are plenty of other things to fund with tax dollars that will improve livability. And for instance, the owners of the Bills are worth 5 billion. Why can’t they fund it? There are owners that privately fund.
Right but have you looked more in depth into these studies? Just because someone is professor of something doesn’t mean people aren’t paying them money to say what other people want to hear. I mean just literally think about what you said to me you are comparing a Billion-dollar stadium to a department store. I have never taken an economics class but I’d be willing to wager a hefty bet that this stadium would have a far greater impact than a department store.
Again, I am not against stadiums or sports. The argument to build them based on them bringing an economic boom to an area is disingenuous.
But I believe it would bring an economic boom it’s not about necessarily getting direct value out of a stadium. It’s about getting super wealthy people to want to invest in the future of OKC. The best way to do that is to get them near the city and want to be around it, therefore nothing attracts the wealthy like a state-of-the-art arena.
There are studies that say the opposite. That’s all I can tell you.
The data for it’s economic impact is murky, but part of that is because it’s hard to quantify. They’re an economic multiplier. Depending on the city it will have differing levels of impact across a multitude of businesses. But part of the intangibles are creating a brand identity for the city. In your example it also makes Buffalo a bigger travel destination. I’m a lot more likely to travel to Buffalo to visit Niagara Falls and catch a Bills game than I am to travel there to only do one of those things.
I wouldn’t say Buffalo getting a new stadium makes them a bigger travel destination. If anything, Buffalo’s new stadium shows how much of an absolute waste these publicly funded stadiums are.
Niagara Falls has the majority of its visitors come in the spring and summer which is outside of when the Bills play so you aren’t really getting any dual tourism benefits. The new Buffalo stadium is also open air which most likely rules it out of getting any major entertainment events like concerts during the winter. And for Buffalo as a city it will always play second fiddle to Toronto for a tourist destination so a new stadium doesn’t really push the needle for more people to vacation in upstate NY and not stay in Toronto.
Like you said, professional sports can bring a lot of intangible benefits for a city such as brand identity or lumping them into infrastructure improvements. However, the $850 million public contribution NY is giving towards building a stadium could easily be used for other infrastructure improvements that would economically improve Buffalo.
That’s a fair argument.
Counterpoint is I’ve heard of Buffalo and part of that reason is because of the Bills. People gravitate towards latching onto sports team and it makes them feel invested in them and their city. I have no connection with either city but if I get a job offer to move to Buffalo, NY or to Bismarck, ND you damn well know which one I’m picking. It’s a level of prestige it gives a city. If they have a sports team I know they’re going to be a moderately okay place to live with things to do.
Also $850 million spread out over 20 million New Yorkers is a bit different than $900 million spread out across 4 million Oklahomans.
That’s nonsense. When there are only 8 or 9 home games a year, and the overwhelming majority of tickets go to season ticket holders who live locally and tailgate in the parking lot, the overall economic multiplier impact is negligible. Study after study debunks that claim. Meanwhile you have a giant concrete ring surrounded by an enormous asphalt circle of parking lots, all empty for at least 340 days of the year. A football stadfium is not not only a bad thing to subsidize, it is just a bad use of land, especially high value land in the center of a city or along a river. Subsidizing a football stadium with public money is madness - most cities are better off without football stadiums even if they are built entirely by the teams themselves.
This is not so true for basketball arenas. Many more games, the arena is useful for concerts, conventions, circuses, etc., and if you minimize the parking lots, people will spend money in the local restaurants before the game. Billionaires should still build their own basketball arenas, but throwing some money there is not as ridiculous as a football stadium.
That’s a really good point, there are numerous concerts and other events held at most NBA stadiums. Just off the top of my head this year at Gainbridge Fieldhouse they had WWE Fast Lane, a number of concerts, Indiana Fever games, and girls and boys high school finals.
Sacramento’s new arena kind of saves downtown Sac. It’s now wonderful and I’m not sure it would have been without that stadium being the lifeblood of the city
Yeah it’s really the only thing downtown has going for it at all.
Capital One Arena in DC (then the MCI Center…and then Verizon Center aka The Phone Booth) revitalized that portion of DC as well.
Yes but that is used for more than 8 games and the occasional monster truck show.
And monster truck shows are kind of a ripoff anyway. You end up paying for a whole seat when you only need the edge.
Billionaires telling the cities we’ll pay you in exposure!
And on top of this they’re doing international and neutral games, lowering then number of games at the stadium. Not a thing yet in the NBA (outside of preseason) but it will be. Why does the city never get a percent ownership in the team at least?
this is always my point, sure tax payers will pay for 51% of the new stadium, just sign over 51% ownership done deal
They do the same shit for Amazon warehouses. Build here and pay no taxes, oh and we’ll help you build it!
Just what we need in 2023, $15 hr jobs to bolster the economy.
the “brings in local jobs” argument only makes sense when you consider that most political terms are 2 or 4 years. The opportunity to immediately “add” 1000+ construction jobs for 18 months is relatively easy compared to building up sustainable long-term industries.
And the minimum wage jobs for working concessions and security/ushering it brings during the season is not really something to celebrate as a great return on investment. Besides, those jobs also already exist at the current stadium/arena.
And just in time for the team to want a newer stadium.
Plus there’s no long term jobs gained because all of the day of game staff would also work at the old stadium. And that’s 9-10 days tops per year. So “part-time” work that equal 3% of the entire year lol
This isn’t really what bringing in jobs is about. It’s for the area around the stadium, such as bars and restaurants
And as unbiased economists continue to prove for the last 20 years, your claim is time and time again proven false.
Thats fucking bullshit
Look at Jersey
Jersey gives 2 NFL teams massive tax breaks but neither team wants to claim Jersey as its home
Those studies don’t account for our feelings!!!
At least it is New York though. Brutal when it is some timy ass state with a fraction of the GDP equivalent, of a major city.
But still, how many schools upstate could that 1 billion + guarantee funds for? Super fucked up.
Billionaire ticks on the back of the US economy.
no one realistically expects anything from the bills
It’s not just sports teams. Big companies do this too. They get tax breaks and cash incentives. It should just be outlawed.
Every single time a private company engages in a compromise with the supposed government it is a poor idea for the populace. A single entity has chosen to go against the majority. So ask yourself why you ever have a private corporation.
It’s not a ripoff every study is done after the fact of a franchise being in the community for years. Its effects can’t be measured on an economic basis because its business is limited to itself. Its value is based of a social and cultural aspect. When OKC was trying to get companies like Boeing, Amazon and other Tech companies in the medical field they were worried about coming there because they had nothing to attract youth and young people to move or come here. They were worried about Brain Drain( when Young college graduates leave an area). Since the Thunder have came in 2008 the amount of companies and population has increased to where OKC used to be in the top 40 in population to now where in the 20s. This study has been done by OKC Chamber of commerce and Oklahoma City their effect is a collateral effect and not a direct effect. There hasn’t been a study of a city that hasn’t had a franchise to getting one. One thing that is certain is that every place that has complained about paying for a new arena and lost a franchise always pays for a new one to get back another franchise facts.
The Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce put out a study that promotes Oklahoma City? Okay. I can point to multiple studies by University of Michigan, Brookings Institute, and on and on that says the economic benefits are not realized. If you want to argue that it makes a city more appealing, maybe. However, when a team leaves people generally find something else to do. You are talking about a minuscule percentage of a population that fits into an arena. Just because people desire a sports franchise, like Baltimore bringing back football, doesn’t necessarily mean it equates to better economics. That can be tracked. And it has been shown to not economically benefit areas all that much.
They’re doing the same thing here in Jacksonville for the Jaguars. Instead of putting money towards education, infrastructure, or our decaying downtown taxpayers will instead pay a billion dollars for a “stadium of the future” for a mediocre ass football team that hasn’t won shit in the almost 30 years that they’ve existed. They’re arguably the most irrelevant franchise in all of North American pro sports and they’ve become a bottom tier organization under Khan’s ownership yet they have the audacity to ask us to split the bill lmao.