There was a long article by Eliot Brown in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal on stadium subsidies, which you probably can’t read because it’s paywalled, but it gives a good rundown on the basics. (Cities give up piles of dough, economists say it’s not worth it.) I just wanted to single out, though, one jaw-dropping quote from New York Yankees president Randy Levine in the middle of the piece about the team’s new stadium:
The team and city officials said it employs 1,600 more people than the old facility and brought new parks to a poor neighborhood. “Since Yankee Stadium was built, it has lived up to what it said,” Yankees President Randy Levine said.
This for a stadium that left a poor neighborhood without any parks at all for six years, that arguably didn’t even replace all the existing parkland it displaced as required by law, and that team execs promised would use “no public subsidies” and which ended up using more public subsidies than any stadium in U.S. history. Maybe Levine deserves his own plaque in the grandstanding Hall of Fame.
So Randy Levine says that the new smaller Yankee Stadium (capacity of 49,642) employs 1,600 more people than old larger Yankee Stadium (capacity of 56,936). Say what? How can the new park be so much more inefficient?
There are a lot more steakhouses in the new one. Still, I’m pretty sure that figure isn’t anything close to full-time equivalent jobs.
“….wins Nobel Prize for Chutzpah.”
I lol’ed.
The genius of George lives on…. if you need 1500 stadium employees (just for arguments sake) per game and you fire every one after each game you have created….. 121,500 jobs.
I mean they are one day term jobs, but still…
Why should sports industry types be less inclined to be infected with the same self-serving lunacy that has reached epidemic proportions in the ruling class from locals to the highest of offices?
As long as sheep-ole keep spending or voting mindlessly to empower these types to indulge in their worlds of fantasy at our expense.