Soccer Dad

Beware of stadiums bearing prosperity

In lauding the Supreme Court's recent Kelo decision despite the fact that ". . . the result . . . is quite unjust," the editors of the Washington Post assert in "Eminent Latitude" that the decision was correct.

The trouble is that there is no good way to distinguish New London's use of eminent domain from assertions of the power that local governments depend on all the time for worthy projects. Railroads, stadiums, inner-city redevelopment plans and land reform efforts all have involved taking land from one owner for the apparently private use of another.

The gist of this argument is that those projects cited in the second sentence are worthy. I won't address the others but stadiums are not worthy. Stadiums are giveaways to rich team owners at taxpayer expense. Yes I root for my local teams and even support them a bit. But that doesn't mean that the efforts involved in retaining or attracting them was proper.
Baltimore's stadiums are owned by the Maryland Stadium Authority, which, in turn leases the stadiums to the teams for their games. The leases are extremely generous to the team owner and almost certainly won't repay the state for its outlay in a reasonable amount of time. (When the state built the Ravens' stadium the rent for Oriole Park and Camden Yards was reduced to match the sweetheart deal the state was giving to Art Modell. This was a break to a guy, Peter Angelos, who was about to score $1 billion for his work in the state's tobacco lawsuit! Though the award was reduced; Angelos hardly needed the rent relief. It should never have been written into the stadium lease.)
And of course whether or not it's a giveaway do stadiums really help a city's or region's economic future? The answer is apparently, "no.":

A subsidized sports stadium will shift economic development away from manufacturing and toward the service economy. Moreover, a stadium probably will not generate a net increase in the number of jobs in the service sector. It is likely that new business start-ups in the stadium neighborhood will be negated by business failures in other areas of the city.

Posted by SoccerDad at June 26, 2005 09:13 AM | TrackBack