Columnist Harry Jaffe of the Washington Examiner (owner: AEG sports billionaire Philip Anschutz) reports that not only do the Nationals have the best record in baseball at the moment — not entirely unexpected, thanks to their wealth of young pitching — but even more unexpected, “the team’s new baseball stadium, so maligned at its inception, is paying for itself and throwing off extra cash“:
Critics who branded the stadium a boondoggle when construction began in 2006 have been proved wrong. They predicted the stadium along the Anacostia River would drain the city’s coffers and sit alone amid an urban wasteland. To the contrary, the ballpark has been a boon — to the city and the blighted Southeast neighborhood.
Oh, has it now? Jaffe’s main evidence is that the city owes $32 million a year on the $585 million it borrowed to pay for Nationals Park, and “revenues from taxes, fees and rent have brought in more than $50 million every year.” Except that as the bulk of that is via taxes, it’s not so much “paying for itself” as “being paid off faster than we expected, thanks to our tax projections being too conservative.” Which is nice and all, but doesn’t make the ballpark a good idea any more than it was a good idea to buy a yacht with gold-plated toilets just because you got a big Christmas bonus that’ll help pay it off faster.
The rest of the article is mostly effusive cheerleading (“You can’t even calculate the benefits if the World Series were here”) from D.C. councilmember Jack Evans, who you’ll remember as the guy who wanted to build a Redskins stadium so badly that he called their 13-year-old one “aging.” It would have been nice for Jaffe to contact at least one of the critics who called the stadium a boondoggle to see if they’d changed their minds — look, there’s a list of them right here — but maybe the Examiner doesn’t have the budget for more than two local phone calls per article.
DC’s baseball stadium is such an article of faith for DC journalists and politicians that no one can really have a serious conversation about it.
The main problem is that nobody can see why land near metro stations in the hottest real estate market in the US might be attractive even without a baseball stadium. Or why the movement of a couple big employers (i.e. Department of Transportation) might have a greater “impact” on the neighborhood every week than a baseball team that plays 80 times a year. Development has been moving slowly from north to south in SE for several years, and I just don’t see how you ring that up to a baseball stadium.
Now journalists are getting fired up about building a DC United stadium (“no public money, except…) even farther from the Metro. No doubt a stadium used for its primary tenant 17 times a year will be revolutionary.
Also ignored is the increase in federal spending since the ’08 collapse that has helped turn D.C. Into a boomtown. I’d think that’s a big reason that the collections from the business taxes that are used to pay off stadium bonds are higher than expected.
I wouldn’t say that nobody talks about how it really didn’t have an impact (http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/15793/near-southeast-rebirth-started-before-the-nats-came-along/), but the presence of the stadium is way overblown. Hell, I live 4 blocks from the stadium and other than the insistence of renaming the Metro station Navy Yard-Ballbark, I don’t think I’d even notice it was here.
I fully agree with you–I lived in the neighborhood until earlier this year, and I always had the sensation of driving by a really large warehouse.
You are right–lots of people know the real deal, but well reasoned commentary based on evidence doesn’t do much for the Washington Post sports page or local pols. Jack Evans doesn’t feel as good about himself when he says “the development of SE DC is the fortunate outcome of improved transportation, private and public sector development, and a growing number of young professionals who want to live in the city.”
Giving stadiums credit for neighborhood booms that they followed, not led, is an old, old story. There’s a great chart out there somewhere of construction starts in Denver’s LoDo neighborhood: It goes straight up until Coors Field is built, then levels off. But you’ll still see tons of people giving the stadium credit for “revitalizing” the neighborhood.
Right you are about Neil about people getting confused about ballparks revitalizing neighborhoods. South of Market in SF was going to be booming with or w/o a stadium–that was obvious to me by the early ’90s.
What’s really funny is commentators stating that there was nothing to do in SF until the stadium was built.