121–130 of 296 posts
I cringe when I see SF bringing the Warriors to town. Why not use the space for housing? It’s not like Cincinnati where you need Sports attractions to draw people to the area. Having a Sports Team May help local restaurants, but I would think so would more houses. When there are so many homeless people, the housing stock is more important than a stadium.
I cringe when I see SF bringing the Warriors to town. Why not use the space for housing? It’s not like Cincinnati where you need Sports attractions to draw people to the area. Having a Sports Team May help local restaurants, but I would think so would more houses. When there are so many homeless people, the housing stock is more important than a stadium.
Apparently, San Franciscans think housing inhibits quality of life. Talking to a few people for here it’s as though the most important thing about the city is having a nice sunlight during the day, and being able to see some of the sky without looking upwards, not unimportant things like poverty or having properly funded service workers.
Perhaps cities could charge teams for the use of the cities name.
" Stadiums add little or nothing to the local economy." I think that AT&T Stadium (Arlington, TX) may be a good example of one that's helped. One article from 2015 says "WrestleMania — the Super Bowl of pro wrestling — is coming to Arlington’s AT&T Stadium in April, and it could pack a financial wallop for local businesses." The new Rangers stadium nearby has benefited, and so has nearby Six Flags & Hurricane Harbor.…
" Stadiums add little or nothing to the local economy." I think that AT&T Stadium (Arlington, TX) may be a good example of one that's helped. One article from 2015 says "WrestleMania — the Super Bowl of pro wrestling — is coming to Arlington’s AT&T Stadium in April, and it could pack a financial wallop for local businesses." The new Rangers stadium nearby has benefited, and so has nearby Six Flags & Hurricane Harbor.…
Was that because of the stadium, though? You have to look at the big picture of lots of different cases, rather than just looking at one example, to avoid the correlation == causation trap. The other thing to look at would be, "what if we injected that money into the economy some other way, rather than into subsidizing a stadium?" It's possible that investing in, say, robust public transit would have an even greater…
Not in Arlington. It's a driving city between Ft. Worth and Dallas. No one is going to go visit Arlington because of robust public transit. They'd at best drive through to get to the Cowboys or Rangers games.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, allow the government to construct sports stadiums. The government can then make it free for any sports team to use (though preferential treatment of any one team has to be prevented), and since it's a public building any revenue generated from ticket sales goes towards operating the building, with leftovers going back to the government (just like libaries, museums etc). There's nothing really wrong with that. N…
There is something really wrong with that. The government is taking on concerns outside its core responsibilities. Sports are non-critical entertainment and that's something the government should not be creating. We can discuss regulations, zoning, and other ways government could be involved, but a lot of people don't use these stadiums, and I'm sure they'd prefer their tax money and gov resources be spent on more cr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apparently, San Franciscans think housing inhibits quality of life. Talking to a few people for here it’s as though the most important thing about the city is having a nice sunlight during the day, and being able to see some of the sky without looking upwards, not unimportant things like poverty or having properly funded service workers.
Sounds like you've been talking to people who don't like their real estate values going down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
There is no question that public stadium subsidies are almost always a bad investment. However these type of articles never take into consideration that people generally like sports teams and want them to stay in the same region. It also isn't just people who attend the games or businesses around the stadium. A local sports team, unlike nearly any other private business, provides a huge but unknown amount of utility…
TL;DR - It is more complicated than "sports stadiums = bad" but these discussions rarely get deeper than that. Additionally, the detractors often don't understand that these things are basically urban pacification projects. The argument has been made that having a place where the mayor sits down with a businessman on one side and a bricklayer on the other, where everybody has temporarily set aside their differences i…
Probably the thing that annoys me most about these deals is how one-sided the tenancy is. For example, an NFL team can play eight games a year in a publicly financed stadium, but if a game doesn't "sell out", then the local broadcast is blacked out. AFAIK only the NFL does this, but that's probably a function of the number/timing of games more than anything else.