Stop funding pro sports stadiums with taxpayer money

This has been happening for a long time. Over a decade ago this publication (in its previous form) in one of our first stories examined the shadiness around moving the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn. It is a story of taxpayer swindling, crony capitalists getting paid, poor people being kicked out of their homes, and just general urban corruption. And, sadly, though the Nets deal was pretty bad it is also pretty typical.

For some reason the billionaires who own these pro sports teams think that the people who live wherever their team happens to be planted (for the time being) should foot the bill for their team’s stadium. If the taxpayers say “no” the billionaire then threatens to move the team to someplace else. Politicians start to get nervous and put the press on. Then the funding comes through somehow. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat.

People often support these deals because they are told that stadiums bring revenue into a city and are engines of economic activity. Generally speaking however, this is incorrect.

(From Real Clear Markets)

Proponents of stadium subsidy deals often point to studies made with the express purpose of promoting the deal in question — studies that often rely on wildly inflated estimates to make the deal appear more economically beneficial than it is. More sober analyses tend to find that the impact of sports teams on local economies is the equivalent of a rounding error.

For instance, one Temple University economist found that if every major sports team left Chicago — and Chicago has two baseball teams, a basketball team, a football team, and a hockey team — it would alter Chicago’s economy by less than 1 percent. This economist went on to conclude that a baseball stadium’s economic impact is “roughly equal to a mid-size department store,” while football stadiums were even less valuable. Taxpayers are hardly clamoring to subsidize a new T.J. Maxx in their city.

OK maybe it’s more like a Macy’s than a T.J. Maxx but you get the point.

The above snippet comes from an RCM piece on the Oklahoma City Thunder, which was successful in getting the The Big Friendly to pay for the team’s upgraded digs.

Something similar is happening just up the road from your editor in Arlington Virginia. Here Governor Youngkin (usually a pretty sober politician who is not generally crony friendly) is behind a sweetheart deal that would move the Washington Capitals and the Washington Wizards from DC to Virginia.

"Wizards, Capitals Virginia deal could be 'biggest taxpayer stadium subsidy' ever"