Speaking of Vice Sports, Aaron Gordon has a good piece up on Liverpool F.C. getting approval last week to expand its stadium’s capacity by 14,000 seats, and how it did so by secretly buying up houses in the neighborhood around the stadium, leaving them to rot, then getting the Liverpool city council to approve tearing them down as an anti-blight measure:
As of last year, Liverpool F.C. owned 150 homes around their historic stadium, Anfield. Almost all of them were vacant. “There are thieves ripping the lead off people’s roofs,” Chris Coyle, whose mother lived among the vacants, told the Liverpool Echo at the time. This was just the tip of the iceberg: the Guardian reported that over the past decade, miscreants lit some of the blighted houses on fire, threw bricks at the few remaining residents, and in 2001 a woman using one of the vacant homes was murdered. In what one resident called “dereliction by design,” Liverpool was accused of buying properties just to let them rot, driving prices down and residents out so they could more cheaply expand Anfield.
Gordon acknowledges that it’s not clear whether this was the original plan or just a lucky outcome — as he puts it, “t would be far too generous to credit Liverpool with carrying out a nefarious, coordinated plot across three ownership groups when it demonstrated so much incompetence on and off the field.” Either way, though, it’s a new twist on stadium shenanigans — I’ve seen a lot of crazy tactics over the years, but this is the first time I’ve seen a pro sports team accused of blockbusting.
This is startling, appalling stuff.
At least here in America, teams and governments conspire to put the wrecking balls to houses and neighborhoods *immediately* after they seize them, instead of years and years to do so.
I’ve heard rumors that the Braves used similar tactics to keep restaurants from moving into the area around Turner Field. Their goal supposedly was to make sure patrons bought all their food and beer at the stadium, but it also would have contributed to the “there’s nothing around” narrative used to justify the flight to Cobb County.
I guess this is another definition of chutzpah
To be fair, LFC originally started buying houses around the ground in order to facilitate expansion. This was ‘several’ owners ago. They ended up buying up the ones they thought were reasonably priced, but naturally the remaining owners weren’t interested in selling for anything like that (particularly once LFC had purchased some of the others and were, presumably, fully committed).
I don’t know where to apportion blame on the vacancy issues, but clearly LFC wasn’t interested in becoming a residential landlord… their goal was always to buy up enough properties to allow for expansion. I’m neither defending nor impugning them for this, just sayin’…
If I had to put money on the question, I’d put it on the club not deliberately driving the neighbourhood into the ground, but not minding all that much that it seemed to have happened all the same. I would imagine they contacted the remaining homeowners a few times over the years to enquire as to whether they might be willing to sell “now”, but I’ve no idea if people were more or less inclined to take them up on their offers. As I understand it, the early offers were at or near market value for the homes they did buy.