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.
