December 16, 2005
Another one bites the dust
Did NBA arenas of the late 1980s suffer from planned obsolescence or what? The Miami Arena set the modern record for shortest shelf life for a major sports facility, succumbing to replacement in 1998 at the ripe old age of 10; the Charlotte Coliseum barely lasted much longer. And now chair of Milwaukee's Bradley Center, Ulice Payne, Jr., says the city needs to replace that 17-year-old arena or risk losing the Bucks: "There's not much more juice left in this orange." Payne insists a new arena can be built, as the Bradley Center was, through private donations; others are skeptical, Wisconsin Center District board chair Franklyn Gimbel noting: "There doesn't seem to be a collection of folks to write giant checks to augment the needs of developing a new arena."
IIRC, Ulice Payne was also on the board of the Brewers when they were conning the state of Wisconsin to build Miller Park.
He's an old hack in Milwaukee, he may know a lot of people, but I suspect that Milwaukee is a lot smarter now than they were when the Miller Park snow job took place.
Posted by LeftWingCracker on December 16, 2005 05:36 PM
Anyone else get the feeling that the Miami Arena was purposely built to be obsolete ASAP ? I certainly get the feeling after watching hockey games involving the New York Rangers play at the facility over the years. However the Miama Arena was much louder than the current Panthers arena which was built in the as far as the outskirts can take you model.
Posted by Bertell Ollman on December 17, 2005 02:07 PM
What I don't get is the source of all the inflation that is driving cities to rebuild basketball arenas after only a few years. For example, the Milwaukee Bucks had a payroll of $16 million only ten years ago. Now their payroll is $60 million. So, 10 years ago the team average for the 12 players was 1.5 million per year. Today, only ten years later, the average per player is 5 million. I want a job like that.
So where is the economic force coming from to create these huge costs of operation for the owners and the cities? Is it demand driven? Is the product that much better? Or is it the sports equivalent of the arms race, kind of a Mutually Assured Destruction? What's up? Are we so much more in need of distraction these days that these top notch basketball players' wages have been driven up so far in so short a time?
Players' wages go up. So,then there's the need to create more revenue. Then there's the need to ask taxpayers to build new stadiums to create more revenue. This whole mess just seems like viscious circle to me. How do you stop it?
You have it backwards: Sports team owners have "demand" for revenue regardless of how much they're paying their players. (There's no such thing as enough profit.) But all those arenas that opened in the '80s and '90s drove revenues through the roof, giving teams that much more to throw at players. Add in that the NBA is much more popular now than when the Bradley Center and its ilk were first designed in the mid-'80s, and owners are doubly hungry to knock them down in favor of newfangled constructions with enough club seats to sate a 21st-century market. The vicious circle is not so much rising payroll costs as the keeping up with the Joneses effect.
Posted by Neil on December 18, 2005 11:11 PM