Author Archives: Neil deMause

Last call to support Field of Schemes if you want fridge magnets before they’re gone!

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As part of my new plan to survive the ongoing slow death of journalism, I’m going to be reminding readers quarterly instead of semiannually that you can support Field of Schemes by becoming Field of Schemes Supporters! (This doesn’t mean I’m asking any of you individually for any more money — the donation levels remain the same, $25 per year at the basic level, $100 if you can spare it and want bonus stuff like banner ads — just that I’m posting these reminders more frequently for anyone who may have missed the last one.) And I actually have good reason to be posting about it today, because I have urgent news, which is that the supply of FoS refrigerator magnets is running perilously low:

Eyeballing what’s left in the stacks on my desk — it’s really tough to count magnets, they’re magnets, they stick together — I’d say I have maybe 20 sets left, after which there will be no more reprints. (I may design a second set with different Stadium Grubbers Do The Most Amazing Things facts, but that remains to be seen, and in any case those would be different, not these.) So if you want to commemorate on your fridge the Texas Rangers‘ demand for a half-billion-dollar stadium so they could have air-conditioning or the Milwaukee Bucks‘ magic basketball — or got a pair of magnets already but want to complete your collection — act now! Or, well, soon, anyway.

In fact, I’ll even add a bonus incentive: If I can get ten new or renewing FoS Supporters by the end of January, I’ll post here a full-length article that’s been sitting on my hard drive waiting for a home ever since the demise of Deadspin. (It’s not huge breaking news, but it is informative and entertaining.) Plus, you will receive my undying appreciation for supporting the work I do here! That won’t stick to your fridge, though.

Thanks,

N


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Ilitches offer Detroit quarter-acre of vacant lots to make up for Red Wings arena being surrounded by vacant lots

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This article in the Detroit News on developments surrounding development surrounding the Red Wings and Pistons arena requires a bit of unraveling to get to the bottom of, so bear with me for a minute:

Once upon a time, a city named Detroit gave the local pizza barons $261.5 million in city and state funds plus $50 million in free land to build a new hockey arena, then another $34.5 million to the local basketball team to move into the new arena, then $74 million more to build themselves two parking garages, a pizza company headquarters, and a Google office with all of 100 workers that’s actually inside the arena itself. All this was in hopes the arena would spur lots of additional development, but in reality it’s surrounded by vacant lots, lots and lots of lots.

The pizza barons felt bad about this, possibly because they’d agreed in their deal with the city to already start developing this land two years ago. (The Detroit News article is silent on whether there were established penalties in place for missing this deadline; a Crain’s Detroit article from last month says the Ilitch family was “in violation” of the 2013 agreement to start construction by the end of 2017, but not what the consequences of this were.) So they came up with a new plan: Buy another three years of time to come up with a plan — making them five years late in total — by giving the city two pieces of vacant land totaling a quarter of an acre:

The Brush Park lot that may become a city park is at 242 Watson. It’s 0.172 acres. The Ilitch-linked entity bought it for $3,000 in 2009. It is currently valued at $390,000, according to property tax records.

The other property that may become a park is a 0.065-acre  lot at 3118 Fourth. The land is valued at $111,600, according to property tax records.

So that’s $500,000 in vacant land in exchange for a three-year extension on meeting the requirements of a deal that got the Ilitches $385.5 million in cash and land. You can sort of see why Detroit is handing them more rope — city officials want the promised development, and the Ilitches are their best hope for making it happen — but you can also see where this will be the exact same case three years from now, meaning the Ilitches can always offer up another 100-by-100-foot lot (that’s how big a quarter of an acre is) then if they still don’t feel like building anything.

All of which is a excellent cautionary tale about handing over control of your city’s land, plus hundreds of millions of dollars in arena money, to a single developer in hopes that they’ll make it bloom, especially if you have no Plan B for what to do if they decide, “Enh, the real estate market isn’t hot enough this decade.” A spokesperson for Mayor Mike Duggan told the News that the latest deal includes “potential penalties” if the Ilitches blow off the new deadline, including possibly having the city retake ownership of the property that was sold to the Ilitches as part of the arena deal — that’s something of a hammer, anyway, but even so it will have allowed the Ilitches to control most of downtown and hold it hostage to their own business whims for nearly a decade, which isn’t really the best way to get people interested in moving to your hollowed-out city. And there were almost certainly more effective ways to spend that $385.5 million — but then, those ways weren’t being pushed by the local pizza baron, and that’s what makes all the difference.

Friday roundup: Phoenix to maybe get soccer stadium/robot factory, Raiders roof is delayed, Def Leppard and Hamilton face off over who’s old and smelly

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Happy Friday! I have no meta-commentary to add this week, but hopefully when you have Def Leppard getting into a flamewar with Canadian elected officials over arena smells, you need no prelude:

  • The Salt River Pima-Maricopa reservation, long rumored as the possible site of a Phoenix Rising F.C. soccer stadium, has released an image of a proposed “$4 billion sports, technology and entertainment district” that indeed seems to show a soccer stadium, though honestly it looks a little small just from the rendering. There’s also an amazing image of people testing out robots and what looks like robot dogs, which surely will be the growth industry of the rest of the century, because I bet robot dogs don’t have an enormous carbon footprint or anything.
  • The Las Vegas Raiders are now projecting $478 million in personal seat license sales for their new stadium, up from an initial projection of $250 million. (All this money will go to defray Raiders owner Mark Davis’s costs, not the state of Nevada’s, because why would revenues from a publicly funded stadium go to the public? That’s crazy talk!) Unfortunately, the stadium might not be ready on time thanks to its roof behind months behind schedule, which could cause damage to the already-built parts of the stadium if it rains, but all those Raiders fans in Vegas (or people in Vegas anticipating selling their seats to out-of-towners who’ve come to see their home teams on road trips) will surely be patient after shelling out as much as $75,000 for PSLs.
  • Charlotte is still up for giving Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper $110 million to renovate his NFL stadium to make it more amenable to hosting an MLS franchise, but may want Tepper to agree to a lease extension first. Given that the last time Charlotte gave the Panthers money for stadium upgrades it was $87.5 million for a six-year extension, the city could maybe keep the team in town through 2027 this way. At this point, it might have been cheaper for the city just to buy the Panthers outright, thus guaranteeing the team stays in town while not only avoiding all these continual renovation fees but also getting to collect all that NFL revenue for itself. (Ha ha ha, just kidding, the NFL outlawed that years ago, no doubt partly to avoid anyone from trying exactly this scenario.)
  • The Atlanta Braves‘ stadium got a new name thanks to a bank merger, and the bank got lots of free publicity when news outlets wrote about the new name, but hell if I’m going to participate in that, so google it if you really must know.
  • A Virginia state delegate wants to reboot Virginia Beach’s failed arena plans by setting up a state-run authority to attempt to build a new arena somewhere in the Hampton Roads region, which includes both Virginia Beach and Norfolk. “The hardest part is the financing mechanism behind it,” said Norfolk interim economic development director Jared Chalk, which, yeah, no kidding.
  • Denver is helping build a new rodeo arena, and as a Denverite subhead notes, “The city says it won’t reveal how much taxpayers could be on the hook for because that would be bad for taxpayers.”
  • Kalamazoo is maybe building a $110 million arena to host concerts and something called “rocket football,” which I’m not even going to google because it would almost certainly be a disappointment compared to what I’m imagining.
  • Anaheim is considering rebating $180 million (maybe, I’m going by what one councilmember said) in future tax revenues to hotel developers so that Los Angeles Angels and Anaheim Ducks players will stay in them? Don’t the Angels and Ducks players own houses locally? What is even happening?
  • And finally, what you’ve all been waiting for: A video from last summer has surfaced showing Def Leppard lead singer Joe Elliott complaining that Hamilton, Ontario’s arena is “old” and “stinks like a 10,000 asses stink,” to which Hamilton councillor Jason Farr replied that Def Leppard is “also old and stinks.” Clearly one of them needs to be torn down and entirely replaced! It worked for Foreigner!

Hamilton votes down $130m junior-hockey arena as “giving money away” to a rich dude

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When last we checked in on the Hamilton Bulldogs, the (I’m going to get this right this time, I swear) junior hockey team’s owner was demanding a smaller stadium or else he’d leave town, and the city council was on board with considering building a “right-sized” arena for as much as $130 million to replace the city’s existing one. So I honestly had to blink a couple of times to be sure I was really reading today’s news that the council has voted down the plan as stupid and a waste of public money:

Councillors voted 11 to 3 against participating with Hamilton Bulldogs owner Michael Andlauer in a development at the mountain mall…

A report presented by authors Glen Norton and Ryan McHugh from the economic development and planning department (EDPD) … recommended “no further action be taken” in terms of moving forward with the project, citing cost and location as issues as well as the potential “negative perception” associated with downsizing to a capacity of fewer than 10,000 seats…

[Mayor Fred Eisenberger] defended the city’s current downtown arena and suggested further investment in FirstOntario Centre as a more feasible option.

“But to continue to disparage a facility that is actually probably as good a facility as any that are around other than in size, I think is a little disingenuous,” said Eisenberger…

“It really comes down to the feasibility and whether or not we can afford it and what kind of asset are we going to get at the end of the day?” said [Coun. Brenda] Johnson. “We’re not getting an asset. We’re just giving money away to a private investor who’s going to benefit.”

Okay, so admittedly Andlauer had significantly blue-skied the city by lowballing maintenance and operations costs on a new arena and the price tag of building parking garages, and was trying to stick the public with three-quarters of the costs of his new building — that’s just what sports team owners do! For city analysts to actually notice, and then city officials to read the analysts’ report and vote a plan down as a result, is extremely unusual, and makes me think we’ve somehow passed into an alternate dimension where decisions are made based on common sense and not keeping the local very rich guy happy.

As for what happens now, Andlauer already moved an AHL team out of town two years ago, then moved it again two years later, so clearly he’s willing to pack up the moving vans in order to punctuate his hissy fits. On the other hand, Hamilton is in a virtual tie with Quebec City for the largest city in Canada without an NHL team, so Andlauer might not find greener pastures quite so easily, and if he does, you have to imagine somebody else would interested in locating a team in Hamilton if he leaves. Sure, he or they could always try to demand upgrades to the current arena as part of any deal — and the mayor did leave the door open for that, so Hamilton taxpayers aren’t totally out of the woods yet. But still, it’s nice every once in a while to see some elected officials willing to say publicly when the local sports team owner is wearing no clothes.

Cost overruns, tax breaks could inflate Calgary’s public cost of Flames arena to $250m or more

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The city of Calgary has finally revealed some of its legal contracts with the Flames governing the team’s new arena — six months after voting on it, because that’s totally how democratic oversight is supposed to work — and the highlights include:

  • As previously reported, the city will pay $275 million toward construction, plus financing charges and the cost of demolishing the old Saddledome (previously reported at $12.4 million), while receiving $250,000 a year for 10 years in naming-rights fees, plus 2% of all ticket sales, capped at $3 million a year for the first five years. Last time I crunched the numbers on this I came up with a net total of $212.9 million in public costs; given that the ticket tax payments will be significantly backloaded toward the end of the lease, the base cost to the city is probably more like $230 million or so.
  • Not as previously reported, the city will be on the hook for any insurance premiums above what the team would pay if the arena weren’t in a flood plain, and will have to cover 50% to 67% of any construction cost overruns, depending on future negotiations.
  • The Flames owners won’t be property taxes, but instead will make payments in lieu of taxes in the amount of
    Yep, they omitted the actual payment amount, citing a section of Alberta’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act that exempts from public disclosure laws information that would be “harmful to business interests of a third party,” though the very next section says the exemption doesn’t apply if “the information relates to a non-arm’s length transaction between a public body and another party,” so hopefully we’ll see some lawsuits to get that number revealed.

The total cost is impossible to say without knowing how much of a tax break the team is getting or how much cost overruns could be, but suffice to say we’re probably looking at more than $250 million now, which is a whole hell of a lot more than the $47 million net loss the arena’s backers touted to get the deal approved by the city council.

Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi says he’s not concerned about cost overruns because the Calgary Municipal Land Corp. “is the project manager on that project, they know how to build stuff on budget and on time”; all those who are reassured by this, please raise your hands. Now, all those who are wondering when Naheed Nenshi was replaced by an alien shapeshifter, please raise your hands. Keep ’em up, I’m still counting…

Saskatoon to maybe build $175m arena to save local businesses “millions,” this is surely great fiscal management

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Saskatoon city officials have been talking about building a new downtown arena for years now, and for years now I’ve been relegating it to the small bullet points in Friday roundups, because it’s such an amorphous plan (the dollar figures have wavered between $175 million and $375 million) and because Saskatoon’s arena doesn’t even have a major pro sports team playing there, just the Blades (junior hockey) and Rush (lacrosse) and Rattlers (minor-league basketball). But that all ends today, and not just because Global News chose the report on this with the irresistible headline “Saskatoon city councillors want fewer homicides, new arena in 2020.”

No, the real kicker is this:

[Saskatoon councillor Randy] Donauer compared the SaskTel Centre to a used car, saying a responsible steward needs to plan for its replacement. He also said that concert promoters had told council that the SaskTel Centre is missing amenities which would keep attracting A-list talent to the city.

He said local businesses would lose out on “millions” of dollars if entertainers went to another venue in another city.

First off: Used cars have lots of moving parts that tend to break, while stadiums are mostly steel that can last effectively forever if protected from corrosion, so this is a terrible, terrible analogy. But more importantly, here we have an elected official saying, presumably with a straight face (Global News didn’t include video of Donauer’s comments), that his city needs to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new arena because otherwise local businesses would lose millions of dollars if Paul McCartney and Barbra Streisand kept on skipping stopping in Saskatoon.

I am not an expert on Canadian finance, but I’m pretty sure hundreds of millions of Canadian dollars are still hundreds of times more than millions of Canadian dollars, so, you know, even if you see the main job of city governments is to prop up local businesses’ profits, maybe there would be cheaper ways to help Saskatoon businesses than building a whole new arena? Maybe?

Right now it looks like the Saskatoon council is only going to work on identifying a site for an arena in 2020, with any actual money to be allocated down the road, possibly because the city is already almost at its debt limit. So there’s still a long ways to go before anything gets decided, which will hopefully give Donauer a bit more time to learn about how money works.

Worcester adds $20m more in tax money to baseball stadium because it forgot how gravity works

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The Worcester Red Sox stadium project has always been on the pricey side as minor-league baseball stadiums go, both in terms of projected construction cost ($90 million) and projected public subsidy (around $100 million — yep, the builders were set to get more in tax kickbacks and infrastructure funds than they actually spent on construction — so news that it’s facing significant cost overruns is not really what anyone needed to hear:

Construction costs for Polar Park have increased by $9.5 million over initial estimates, while costs to acquire the properties needed for the ballpark, relocate businesses and prepare the site for development have run roughly $20 million more than what was anticipated.

That has prompted city officials to negotiate changes to the agreements with the ballclub that will be playing at Polar Park starting in 2021 and for the private development that will be built as part of the overall $240 million redevelopment of the Kelley Square/Canal District area.

These “negotiated changes” are that the team will cover the $9.5 million in increased construction costs, while the city will cover the $20 million in added land acquisition and site prep costs. Part of the team’s costs (according to the city manager’s report that starts on page 59 here) will be covered by a doubling of the 50-cent ticket fee that was planned for WooSox games; the city’s costs will be funded by increasing the size of the tax increment financing district where future rises in property tax revenues will be siphoned off and used to pay for land acquisition costs.

Worcester city manager Edward M. Augustus Jr. told the Worcester Telegram that the stadium “will continue to pay for itself” and that no “existing” taxpayer money will be diverted to pay for it, which is a clever bit of wordplay to get around the fact that $20 million in future tax money that would have gone to the city will now instead go to site prep costs — and if tax revenues don’t rise as much as expected, Worcester will absolutely have to dip into existing funds to cover the shortfall.

The best part of all this, though, is Augustus’s explanation for why the city’s site costs have risen so much:

“Due to a number of unknown factors, particularly related to business relocation costs, and the need for a more complicated retaining wall system resulting from the steep grade of the site, those costs total $20.69 million,” Augustus said.

I’m sorry, did you say “the steep grade of the site”? You mean despite years of planning, nobody noticed until now that the site is on a hill, and that when you cut into a hill you need to build retaining walls to keep the hill from falling on your new stadium? Clearly this was an unknown and unforeseeable factor, and not an example of lowballing projected costs so that local elected officials (and one economist, though not most) could think it was a better deal!

Friday roundup: New stadium demands in Calgary, 90% shortfall in promised Raiders jobs, corporate subsidies found (yet again) to do squat-all to create jobs

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Happy Friday! Is Australia still on fire? (Checks.) Cool, I’m sure we’ll be ready to pay attention to that again as soon as there are some more images of adorable thirsty koalas.

In the meantime, news on some slightly less apocalyptic slow-moving catastrophes:

  • CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie says the Calgary Stampeders deserve “a state-of-the-art, beautiful stadium” but he’ll “take my queues [sic, seriously, Montreal Gazette, you’re supposed to be an English-language paper]” from team execs for when “they think it’s time for me to be a guy who makes a little noise and tries to stimulate a positive discussion.” Yep, that’s a sports league commissioner’s job! Why a new stadium is Calgary’s job and not the Stampeders owners’ job is less clear, but given that the team owners did such a good job at extracting public money for an arena for the Flames (which they also own), you know they’re going to be jonesing for a sequel. (In fact, a Stampeders stadium was originally part of the Flames plan before Mayor Naheed Nenshi rejected it as too expensive and only would approve the Flames part, so maybe this is just a case of a team owner deciding it’s easier to get sports projects approved in serial rather than in parallel.)
  • It’s now been 100 days since Nashville Mayor John Cooper called a halt to Nashville S.C.‘s stadium construction, and Cooper is still not answering questions about when it may resume. Previous indications were that he’s refusing to issue demolition permits in order to renegotiate who’ll pay for cost overruns, but it would be kind of cool if he’s just realized that he can take advantage of MLS having approved a Nashville expansion franchise before everything was signed off on regarding public stadium subsidies by just declining to build the stadium and keeping the team. (Nashville S.C. will have to play in a 21-year-old NFL stadium until then, boo hoo.)
  • Las Vegas Raiders stadium proponents promised it would create 18,700 construction jobs, and now it’s only creating 1,655 jobs, and the stadium boosters say this doesn’t count off-site workers like “support staff at construction companies, architects and engineers, and equipment and service suppliers,” but really it’s more about how most of those 18,700 jobs were never full-time anyway. At least state senator Aaron Ford can sleep at night knowing he didn’t deny a single construction worker a job; guess he isn’t kept up by thinking of any of the people who were denied jobs by virtue of the state of Nevada having $750 million less to spend on other things.
  • 161st Street Business Improvement Director Cary Goodman has a plan for a new NYC F.C. stadium in the Bronx to benefit the local community by having it be owned by the local community, so that “when naming rights are sold, when broadcast fees are collected, when merchandising agreements are made, or when sponsorships and suites are sold, revenue would pour into the [community-owned] corporation and be distributed as dividends accordingly.” This sounds great, except that broadcast fees don’t go to a stadium, they go to the team that plays in a stadium, and also things like sponsorships and suites and naming rights are exactly the kind of revenues that the NYC F.C. owners would be building a stadium in order to collect, so it’s pretty unlikely they’d agree to hand it over to Bronx residents. We really gotta get over the misconception that stadiums make money, people; playing in stadiums that somebody else built for you is where the real profit is, and don’t anyone forget it.
  • Reporters in Kansas City are still asking Royals owner John Sherman if he’d like a downtown baseball stadium, and Sherman is still saying sure, man. (See what I did there? Huh? Huh?) This article also features a quote about how great a downtown ballpark would be from an executive vice president of Vantrust Real Estate, which owns lots of downtown properties; it must be nice to be rich and get to have your Christmas present wish lists printed on local journalism sites as if they’re news.
  • A new study of business tax incentives found that state and local governments spend $30 billion a year on them, with no measurable effect on job growth. Also, most of the benefits flow to a relatively small number of large firms (good luck getting a tax break for your pizzeria), and some states spend more on corporate tax breaks than they collect in corporate taxes, with five (Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming) spending an average of $44 per resident on tax breaks even though they have collect no state corporate income tax at all. (The biggest spenders on a per-capita basis: Michigan, West Virginia, New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire.) Surely local elected officials will now take a hard look at the cost of these subsidies and ha ha, no, even when tax breaks are proven failures it takes decades before anyone might notice and do anything about them, so don’t hold your breath that anyone is going to see the light just because of one more study, at least not unless it’s accompanied by angry mobs with pitchforks.

Wichita may spend way more than $75m on stadium development, but local news has no interest in telling you

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The Wichita city council passed its 2%-sales-tax-surcharge district yesterday, in an “emergency declaration” to allow the tax to kick in starting in April, when the new Wind Surge Triple-A baseball stadium it will help fund is set to open. Show of hands, Wichita news outlets, which among you explained why it was an emergency, what the projected $13 million in tax revenue over 22 years will fund, or what would have happened if the tax district hadn’t passed?

  • KWCH-TV: “Mayor Jeff Longwell said it was necessary to pass the 2% sales tax this year. ‘So we can start collecting that tax to potentially use what its intended for which was described today to pay off various different bonds the ballpark, the amenities that are going to be down there,’ he said. Longwell’s last day in office as mayor is next Monday.” No help there, though the non-bylined story certainly implies that the “emergency” was that the mayor wanted to get this done before ending his lame-duck term.
  • KFDI-FM: “The revenue generated from the district will be used to help with the design and construction of the stadium, utilities, parking and improvements along the river corridor, as well as surrounding development on the west bank.” Except the stadium has already been designed and will be almost done with construction by April, so what’s the rush, KFDI reporter George Lawson?
  • Wichita Eagle: “Money from the sales tax hike and the increase in property taxes generated by the new development will be split between the city government and the private-sector developers. The city will get the first $10 million to help offset the cost of the new $75 million ball park. The developers will get the next $30 million to help pay for their project costs. Anything above that $40 million will be split 50-50 between the city and the developers.” So some of the money (from both sales taxes and property taxes) will go to pay for stadium costs, and the rest to subsidize surrounding development — that’s actually potentially a lot more than just the $75 million in stadium subsidies that’s previously been discussed, but it’s hard to tell without projections of how much tax revenue is at stake here, which Eagle reporters Dion Lefler and Chance Swaim don’t provide.

You know, I do my best here to report on and analyze these deals from my apartment in Brooklyn, but ultimately I’m reliant on journalists in local communities to do the initial reporting, since I don’t have the time and resources to do the legwork on basic facts of a stadium plan. In this case, I actually called and emailed the Wichita city council’s press liaison, plus emailed a city councilmember who is a friend of a FoS reader — neither has gotten any response so far, so I’m in the dark as you are on this. (We do know that the stadium is getting $40 million in STAR bonds — essentially sales tax increment financing, where any increase in state sales-tax revenue in the area gets kicked back to the stadium rather than going to public coffers — but the sales-tax surcharge is on top of that.)

Many journalists tend to shy away from running stories that say “Here’s what elected officials claim, but we don’t know if it’s true,” either because they fear it would make them look unduly skeptical or because they don’t take the time to ask the right questions or because they are afraid of challenging assertions that no one else is — but, you know, those are all things that are literally their job. When they don’t do it, we’re left with “Wichita is taking a bunch of tax money, we’re not sure how much, and giving it to somebody for something,” which is not a great way to hold elected officials accountable. Unfortunately, there aren’t too many ways to hold journalists accountable, other than publicly shaming them, so: Hey, Wichita newspeople, you can’t journalism your way out of a paper bag! That’ll show ’em.

Pawtucket soccer developers announce plans to seek Trump tax breaks for stadiums in Baltimore, Cleveland, and more

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The story of the $45 million Pawtucket minor-league soccer stadium seeking upwards of $70 million in tax breaks and the story that the United Soccer League is seeking to leverage Trump’s Opportunity Zone tax-break districts for more stadiums just had a baby, and it is this:

Fortuitous Partners Brett Johnson and Berke Bakay announced that they are looking to do developments in Baltimore, Cleveland, and other cities around the country…

Johnson during the interview said that Fortuitous Partners is also looking at Baltimore, MD; Cleveland, OH; and other cities for their opportunity zone driven sports complex model.

Opportunity zones, as I’ve written before, sound simple but get fiendishly complex in their details. On the surface, they’re just like other tax-subsidized districts like “enterprise zones” and “empowerment zones,” where developers get a tax break for building in “disadvantaged” areas, which is theoretically supposed to help the disadvantaged residents. (A report by Good Jobs First notes that the results of those earlier subsidy zones have been “not encouraging,” with little in the way of new economic activity and even less in the way of new jobs for locals.)

But the tax break that an opportunity zone earns a developer is a weird one: You get exempted from paying capital gains tax, but only on businesses that are owned by a “qualified opportunity fund,” meaning developers (or soccer teams) would likely need to set up a new shell corporation to own whatever it was they wanted to dodge taxes on. How that works, and what the IRS will let investors get away with, is still being figured out — the Trump administration implemented opportunity zones without really figuring out first how they would work, which is kind of turning into its brand — but clearly these Fortuitous folks think they know how to do it, or at least are trying to get dibs on lots of opportunity zone land for soccer stadiums and then will figure out the details later. Baltimore and Cleveland journalists, you might want to get on this, if there are any of you left.