The other scam is that building arenas improves the local economy. This line comes up a lot when team owners are trying to secure government funding for their stadium.
But you’d be hard pressed to name a single arena that has done anything to improve the lives of people living or working near it.
Bread is cheap, but circuses cost money.
People don’t really understand numbers that large…he might as well have a said a “kajillion”…
Well, BC spent probably 9billion on the Vancouver 2010 winter olympics. (Although a big chunk of course went to infrastructure improvements such as the Sea to Sky highway etc, there were huge expenses such as a skating oval for the City of Richmond and a new skating rink and community centre - which replaced a perfectly adequate existing centre and rink. I doubt that the Olympics brought in anywhere near that much money to the economy.
And two years ago we replaced the roof on the BC place stadium at a cost of $500+ million of taxpayers money.
(which still cannot be retracted when it rains) and looks like a dead spider.
Have you been paying attention to bread prices? They’ve doubled in the past decade.
Speaking of “Wooooo, Niners!”, the new stadium in Santa Clara CA cost nearly a billion to build, after cost overruns, and the town, which only has 100,000 residents, came up with the land and a few hundred million in direct costs plus a bunch of potential future risk if the stadium isn’t making enough money or if the owners start whining about how the city’s going to have to upgrade the stadium to keep them from moving back to Candlestick.
Yeah, they’ve scored themselves a Superbowl a couple of years from now, and maybe it’ll help, but a lot of the people who stay in hotels won’t just be in Santa Clara itself, they’ll be in San Jose or anywhere else nearby they can get a room, and Santa Clara’s not that full of restaurants to get their business either. So it’ll be nice for the surrounding towns, but won’t help pay off the stadium as much as they’d like.
Just curious if NY or NJ paid dime one to get the Superbowl this year. I mean it’s fucking New York City, what would they have to build?
I’d be interested to read the straight story without the sarcasm and contempt.
Yah, but around here, they’ve made the loaves smaller to account for the higher price.
You can read about how great the Olympics and World Cup and Superduperbowl are anywhere. On nearly every medium, on nearly every channel.
Barring when somebody “we” don’t like is hosting the Olympics. Then you’ll get some negative stories about things that “we” wouldn’t do.
Why would you want to though?
You ought to hold your footy game at the MCG. We had 90,000 people there for the second day of a five day Cricket test just the other week, and we’ve only got 25 million people in the country.
You think the only choices are “contempt” and “superduper?” I think the facts would speak for themselves in a case like this.
Absolutely. Though, thinking about it, I wonder if/how much the building of the Skydome (sorry, now “Rogers Centre” but I don’t know anybody that calls it that) helped the immediate area around it in Toronto. I’m too young to really know what that area was like before the Dome was built (though considering all the new condos and stuff being built there over the last 10-15 years, I feel like it must have been fairly empty), but in my experience from the 3-4 years that I lived up the street, the restaurants in the area always did a fairly booming business any time there was a game or concert there. And I was living there when both the Jays and Argos were stinkin’ up the joint, barely able to pull in any crowds at all. I feel like the “local economy” benefits from building a stadium, though, are very local (as in, a handful of blocks, at most). Hardly worth the tens (or hundreds?) of millions of dollars that teams/corporations generally ask from the government to help build the stadiums.
The same is true for the Olympics, which is one of the reasons some people have called for a permanent home for them instead of a constant stream of white elephants
There is bound to be some local impact; even branded items bring in sales tax. But it is almost certainly not worth it on balance.
Yes, I was in Atlanta during their Olympics hosting gig and it was like greed central, with landlords throwing residents out because OMG we are going to shovel it in during these two weeks! and people who lived there being told to leave so there would be more space/more room on the highways for visitors. And then it came and none of those places rented for anything like what they said and I have little reason to believe that archery has become a big sport out there, but they sure do have a nice archery range.
San Francisco had the “very local area benefits” phenomenon when they built AT&T Park. There was one sports bar a few blocks away that had somehow slipped through the “friends of the mayor are supposed to buy up all the good properties and Alcoholic Beverages Commission licenses for sports bars before construction starts” policy.
But in fact the area from the park has benefited quite a bit as far as housing stock and tourism since then, a lot of it from zoning changes, but it’s pretty much all been yuppie housing, not high-density affordable housing taking advantage of nearby transit, though that’s somewhat mitigated by the short walking distances to the financial district and SoMa / Multimedia Gulch areas.
Baseball stadiums also have at least 81 games a year, plus the occasional special events. The activity around PacBell SBC AT&T on a game day is vibrant and palpable. Whereas football stadiums have one tenth the number of games and tend to be away from and insulated from urban centers, completely surrounded by parking lots; the neighborhood economy is only boosted to the extent that tailgaters forget to pack enough beer. Bayview/Hunters Point doesn’t seem to have benefited from Candlestick at all.
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