May 31, 2005
Private benjamins, R.I.P.
The Washington, D.C., city council looks to be on the verge of abandoning its private-financing plans for a Nationals stadium, having decided that such schemes as selling off future revenue streams to private investors wouldn't really save the city any money. Not to say I told you so, but jeez, people, what'd you expect?
Assuming the private-finance plan really is dead - councilmember Jack Evans declared recently, "Nothing's completely dead yet," which is certainly the sort of thing politicians are likely to say when something's dead - then presumably D.C. would go back to its $600 million public-finance plan, nearly 90% of which would come from public coffers. Or it could do something really crazy, like figure out a way to renovate RFK Stadium - but nah, that could never happen.
The "renovate RFK" idea doesn't seem feasible given the sort of ammenities (i.e. luxury boxes) or neighborhood development, MLB and the mayor want out of this deal.
Is there any solid research showing exactly how much of the "in-stadium" taxes will be money from outside DC that the district would not get otherwise? On BP, you speculated on this, explaning that a lot of this money is money that would have ended up in DC anyway. I'm not suggesting that your basic point is wrong, but I'd be interested to see the real numbers. The answer could be suprising one way or the other.
It seems that a baseball team, more than any other summer-time attraction, would bring money into the city that would stay in the burbs otherwis. For example, suburbanites like me watch movies in the suburbs, not it DC, the Wizards and Caps don't play in the summer and most locals know that summer is not a good time to see the Mall/Capitol Area attractions (crowded with tourists).
It also might be interesting to figure out a way to measure the stadium's impact on that side of town specifically. I think it is very safe to say that the overwhelming majority of Nats fans do not otherwise spend much money in the Anacostia area.
I'd love to see the real numbers on this, too, but unfortunately, they're hard to come by - consider that you'd need to know where every single Nats fan was coming from, what their spending patterns were like before, whether other people steered clear of D.C. on game nights to avoid the traffic, etc. If there are any economics grad students out there looking for a dissertation topic, though...
And as for Anacostia, yeah, a stadium would definitely relocate more spending there from elsewhere in the region. Though considering that it would be displacing gay nightclubs that, if nothing else, are open year-round (and pay sales and property taxes to the city treasury, unlike a stadium), I'm not sure how much benefit this would be.
If the artist's rederings are to be believed (and when has an artist's rendering ever steered us wrong?) the stadium would be the center-piece of a whole bunch of fancy new development, likely to include bars, restaurants, a marina and what not - more than compensating for the lost business of whatever gets knocked over in the process. I'm told this has worked out in Cleveland and San Francisco and the MCI Center does seem to have sparked a lot of that sort of development in downtown.
But they seem to have forgotten that that baseball is only played half the year. It seems like the more sensible location for a new stadium would be near MCI Center and the Convention Center, but I don't know where that would be, exactly.
