Slow news week thanks to the holiday, but there were still a few items of note:
- Milwaukee Bucks president Peter Feigin thinks his new publicly funded arena will help fight segregation because it’ll have a public plaza. The Chicago Tribune notes that the Bucks owners once released a strongly worded statement of support for one of their players after he was tased by Milwaukee police, so … nope, I don’t get the connection either, unless this reporter was assigned to cover Feigin and couldn’t find much else to say about his bizarro statement, so just googled “Milwaukee and race and basketball” and dumped the results into a Word file.
- The Sacramento Kings owners are going to use computers at their arena to mine cryptocurrency for charity, which mostly serves as an excuse for the team to issue a press release mentioning themselves in the same sentence as blockchain, because we know that’s a thing. Too bad the earth is going to burn as a result, but everything’s a tradeoff, right?
- Ybor City, where the Tampa Bay Rays want to build their new stadium (price and funding still TBD), has been tabbed as a federal “economic opportunity zone,” meaning developers can use it as a short-term tax shelter for profits that are reinvested into the area. The program is way too complicated for me to calculate at the moment just how much U.S. taxpayers would end up paying toward a Rays stadium, but suffice to say it’s one more piece of the funding puzzle that team owner Stuart Sternberg doesn’t have to worry about himself.
- Speaking of the Rays, they’ve announced they’ll release new renderings of their stadium plans next Tuesday, which I guess makes this announcement itself vaporvaportecture?
- The Atlanta Falcons pedestrian bridge that will now cost Atlanta residents $23 million is going to glow! And who can put a price on that, really?
- Since it was a slow stadium news week, here’s a bonus article on how Nevada giving $1.4 billion to Tesla to open a battery factory there is looking to be a disaster, with the state ending up losing its entire budget surplus while new workers attracted to the area have driven up rents and increased local government’s police, fire, and schools costs, leaving residents with a higher cost of living and fewer services. One unemployed local who was forced to move into a motel room listed for the Guardian things she now considered unaffordable luxuries: “Ice cream. Bacon. A movie ticket.” It’s a fun weekend beach read!
Reno/Sparks/Carson City faces added pressure, too, from people leaving the SF Bay Area. Property values in that region seem very reasonable when you’re leaving a 1,500 square foot house in the Bay Area you just sold for $1.3M; you have way more than enough to pay in cash for a house in Sparks.
Sacramento is the first stop for retirees looking to leave SF, and Reno isn’t far behind. That’s driving up prices and killing supply there too, in addition to this gigantic subsidy.
Ybor City….any new stadium there better have a section where I can smoke a freshly rolled cigar by some old world Cuban…..
I read the article on Nevada and the gigantic battery factory and I didn’t see a disaster at all. In fact, it sounds like if you offered the same jobs deal to a bunch of other states they would leap at it. I saw it as an article focused on the negative costs of truly rapid economic growth, especially when the tax breaks fueling that growth mean local tax receipts are static while costs from growth soar. “A disaster” would have been if the factory turned out to be the equivalent of a monorail to nowhere.
A disaster can also be when each job costs over $400,000 to produce, such as is the case with FoxConn and Wisconsin, where Wisconsin hope that by losing $61M/year, it’ll attract other business who want to be close to FoxConn. I’d wager that second part won’t happen, and this is just going to cost Wisconsin $61M/year.