This week’s recommended reading: Girl to City, Amy Rigby’s just-published memoir of the two decades that took her from newly arrived art student in 1970s New York to divorced single mom and creator of the acclaimed debut album Diary of a Mod Housewife. (Disclosure, I guess: I edited an early version of one chapter for the Village Voice last year.) I picked up my copy last week at the launch of Rigby’s fall book tour, and whether you love her music or her long-running blog (guilty as charged on both counts) or enjoy tales of CBGB-era proto-gentrifying New York or coming-of-age-stories about women balancing self-doubt and determination or just a perfectly turned punchline, I highly recommend it: Like her best songs, it made me laugh and cry and think, often at the same time, and that’s all I can ask for in great art.
But first, read this news roundup post, because man, is there a lot of news to be rounded up:
- Three days after evicting the indie minor-league baseball Kansas City T-Bones from their stadium for nonpayment of rent, the city of Kansas City, Kansas welcomed new owners of the team with a new lease that will provide $1 million in tax money to help pay for $1.5 million in stadium upgrades. If this doesn’t quite feel like tough negotiating to you, does it make you feel better that the new team president is promising to bring shuffleboard, pickleball, sand volleyball, and bocce ball to the stadium as well? Can anyone truly put a price on getting to watch professional (?) pickleball?
- Most of the $30 million the Los Angeles Angels have spent on stadium “maintenance” over the last seven years actually went to building a new scoreboard, which has sports economist Roger Noll worried that the team is skimping on actual upkeep of the building as it negotiates a new lease. Also, the long-hidden appraisal of the Angel Stadium parking lots that team owner Arte Moreno wants development rights to has reportedly been leaked, but not to anyone who’s actually made it public, which isn’t really my idea of what “leaked” means.
- Still nobody is quite sure how much money St. Louis taxpayers will have to put up for a new MLS stadium, or for cost overruns that the city has promised to cover, or even where the stadium will be built. These are maybe things St. Louis might have wanted to work out before approving the funding plan, but it did land the city an MLS expansion franchise, and not everybody gets those. Not quite yet, anyway.
- The New York Islanders‘ new arena will reportedly include “smart jerseys” for sale that can change what player and number they feature, which seems not to have anything to do with the new arena per se? Regardless, I’m sure the Cincinnati Bengals will be demanding that county taxpayers pay for some soon enough.
- MLB TV ratings are up even though attendance is down, and MLS per-game attendance is down while TV ratings are up. One might be tempted to conclude that something is going on here other than MLB being a dying sport while MLS is the choice of a new generation, but far be it from me to ruin a good meme.
- Were you wanting an article whose headline reports that “new stadium buzzing is getting louder” for the Tampa Bay Rays when the only actual news in it is about a Rays stadium lobbying group shutting down? Florida Politics has got you covered!
- MLB is exploring ways to let investment funds buy minority shares in baseball teams, which I don’t fully understand the consequences of beyond “more potential buyers means you can charge more for shares,” but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that investment funds aren’t the best employers for workers and other living things.
- The XFL’s Dallas Renegades have released a schematic of how their football field in the Texas Rangers‘ old baseball stadium, and yeah, that seems about right.
- The Columbus Dispatch editorial board says it’s fine with the city’s soccer stadium costs having doubled — because who can put a price on keeping the Crew in town? — but just wishes someone in city government had mentioned it rather than forcing the paper’s reporters to go dig up secret documents, which was a lot of work, man.
- The New York Liberty are relocating to Brooklyn after two years in exile in Westchester after the team’s former owners, Madison Square Garden, moved the WNBA franchise there to make room for more lucrative concerts and such. This isn’t a huge surprise given that the Liberty’s new owner is also the new owner of the Brooklyn Nets and the arena, but as someone who will now be able to get to games via a 20-minute subway ride, I applaud corporate machinations finally working in my favor for once.
- With the Oakland A’s looking at building a waterfront stadium because fans dig waterfront stadiums, the Washington Post has investigated whether it’s really such a good idea to be building waterfront stadiums when sea level is projected to rise by several feet in coming decades thanks to the climate crisis. My favorite bit is where a University of Miami geologist does say that Miami is “not a long-term option” — not Miami’s stadium, mind you, but Miami itself, which should be a sobering notion for anyone concerned about the future, which of course is where we’re going to spend the rest of our lives.
- And speaking of Miami, please enjoy this moment in the Miami city commission’s continuing debates over Inter Miami‘s new stadium in which a city commissioner said to Miami’s mayor, “Let me call you Lord Mayor, so you get even happier!” I’m truly going to miss Florida when it’s gone.
The Miami mention assumes that the models that forecast sea level rises in units of feet over the next century are riddled with assumptions and agendas. None of the models from the 80’s that forecast Miami and NYC to be under water 10 years ago seem to have been accurate.
Go ahead and buy your beachfront real estate. The people who want to govern based on instituting climate change economic restrictions are.
There were no models from the ’80s that forecast Miami and NYC as being underwater ten years ago.
Any projections for sea level rise are going to have large error bars given that we’re, you know, conducting an unprecedented experiment with the fate of the entire world. But sea level rise is proceeding exactly as expected:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/21/the-siege-of-miami
I guess the Obomo’s’ will be asking for their money back as it relates to their new $15 million dollar hole in the water on Martha’s Vineyard.
My understanding of the best current science is something like 1-3 feet in 100 years (the current projected pace is ~1ft/100yr, so this is factoring in further missteps (which look likely)), significantly more in the 500-2000 year range as the warmed oceans thermally expand.
But it is all highly contingent in a variety of ways. We don’t understand the systems super well, and probably even more difficult is predicting our own future behavior. We will still be warming the globe 50 years from now,? How about 200 years from now? Will we be sequestering greenhouse gas, or otherwise engineering solutions? Who knows?
It is trying to predict where a ship is going to end up when you don’t know how fast it can go, what the sea conditions are, and most importantly what orders the bridge is going to give.
I would take the under pretty heavily on 3ft of rise from 2000-2100. And it just isn’t clear what is going on with sea level is really that important on timescales much beyond that. And say 2ft of rise while an expensive and annoying problem, is just not a big deal over that timeframe. Have you seen say the Jacksonville waterfront? There is a whole “boardwalk” that is under the river level intentionally. And things like the Giants stadium can easily handle a couple feet of sea level rise.
There is all this desire to build up really striking examples for what are actually statistical and incremental problems.
Lets say sports stadiums might need to spend $500 million on flooding mitigation nationally on an average annual basis in 2050 instead of $350 million. Is that noteworthy?
Kindly please explain to industries ranging from Arctic shipping to agricultural insurance that you know better than they do on climate change and all of their future business decisions are clearly part of some left-wing plot.
Also, the superrich who have more money than you could imagine are quite fine with enjoying a waterfront property for a few years, then either cashing out with insurance money when it becomes unusable or just taking the write-down. It’s the sort of thing you can do when your networth starts at 8 or 9 figures and only goes up. They own multiple properties, which is also why so many seem keen on owning mountainside compounds in New Zealand or Alaska as well.
Someone help me. I’m drowning in…………the unrealistic fantasies of those that believe in man having the ability to impact client in a negative way. Did you know that there is climate change on mars? How will giving tax payer funded employees more of my money “reduce” the negative effects of so called, climate change? Will the globalist overlords who are receiving the mammon allow for daily audits to make sure the money is being applied into atmosphere to reduce the affects? Why does the answer to climate involve socialism? The devotion to this unrealistic and archaic sorcery is strong on this board Obi-Wan.
FoS: Come for the stadium Ponzi schemes, stay for the unhinged rants denying that climate change exists and is bad.
I mean, what you call sorcery I call evidence-based science, but to each their own. Troll better.
One word for the Oakland stadium planners: pontoons.
Hey Neil
Just donated. Hopefully you’ll see my email. Hopefully donation time comes around a few times a year.
Thanks so much! And I hope everyone realizes that even if I only ask for donations every few months, that “Support This Site” link above is active 365 days a year…
What am I going to do with 365 refrigerator magnets?
Here are two things you missed:
F1 race at Hard Rock Stadium:
https://racer.com/2019/10/16/miami-f1-race-at-hard-rock-agreed-needs-county-approval/
Six Flags moving headquarters to Texas Rangers former office space at Globe Life Park:
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/2019/10/15/six-flags-eyes-headquarters-move-to-texas-rangers-centerfield-office-space/
F Six Flags! Bring back Astroworld!! Sorry my rage me be misdirected.
“…shuffleboard, pickleball, sand volleyball, and bocce ball ”
So my first reaction was: what the heck is pickleball?
My second reaction was to DuckDuckGo it.
My third reaction was: what the frack?
My fourth reaction was: no cornhole?
Professional cornhole may be too rich for their blood
Irrespective of what any model says, Southern Florida is slowly sinking, and global sea level rises only form part of the problem. Most of the water wells in Homestead and South in Monroe County are not usable any more due to sea water ingress. Most of Florida is at risk of becoming unsustainable as a location for humans in the next 20-30 years.
While skeptics and deniers argue “how much”, reality is speaking.
It is telling that climate change skeptics and/or deniers like to talk about “inaccurate models” of the 80s rather than the 2-4″ of salt water that runs down the streets in parts of Miami during even ordinary high tides these days.
And no, that hasn’t “always happened”.
A time lapse sat photo of what has happened to southern Louisiana in the last 40 years is stark evidence… unless the observer is a flat earther who is convinced that satellites cannot orbit a non-round planet and gravity is really just a theory.
Southern Louisiana is mostly like that because of flood-prevention projects that have the Mississippi shooting all its sediment off the edge of the continental shelf, instead of refreshing the coastline.
Miami Beach is mostly sea level rise, though land subsidence isn’t helping.
In another decade, sea level rise that isn’t climate-related will be a quaint memory. So building anything for the long term near sea level – hell, building anything at all in flood zones unless it’s on stilts – is pretty much nuts.
Regarding the comment about rising ocean levels and waterfront stadiums: when oceans rise enough to start flooding stadiums, your response will not be about what a bad idea the stadium was but “Oh my god! We’re all going to die!”
…And meanwhile, MLB wants to eliminate a quarter of all minor-league clubs.
I can’t comment on the merits of professional pickleball.
But, anyone who hasn’t seen the Pro Bocce World Tour presented by Matlock Reruns is missing out on a lot. Those old men can be pretty viscious.
Hey Neil,
Do you plan on writing about the proposed PBA by MLB that would reduce 40+ MiLB teams, move clubs up and down in their affiliation, form a “Dream League,” and force minor league clubs to shoulder more of the cost? It appears that the state of facilities is a major stated impetus by MLB, and I’d love to hear your perspective on it.
https://www.baseballamerica.com/stories/mlb-floats-proposal-that-would-eliminate-42-minor-league-teams/
Yes, probably Monday.
Thanks. I’ve wondered what language is in stadium lease agreements about the level or league a team must be at. It could have ramifications for future pro/rel in MLS, which a lot have argued is the endgame of all this expansion.
Guys who “own” an MLS team (or whatever verb they use now) after paying $200 million are not going to be interested in the sporting coolness of relegation as a way to sell tickets. Not going to happen.
MLS will do what all leagues do. Demand new stadiums up front whenever possible, and threaten to leave when the stadium isn’t new enough.
Realistically, no city is going to evict a team just because it’s moved to a lower tier, even if their lease says they could.
As for MLS, I agree that pro/rel is extremely unlikely, unless maybe you’re talking about an MLS A and MLS B league. At which point a lease probably wouldn’t be stringently written enough to matter anyway.
Oh, I didn’t think a city would evict, but a lower-tier or unaffiliated club will ostensibly be pulling in less revenue and unable to make payments. Minor league parks were already a dubious investment, now cities may take a total bath on them.
Right, but then what good does having a requirement on a lease do? If MLB or MiLB pulls a team, it’s not like the city can sue, since those entities aren’t on the lease.
I guess I’ll log off before I’m ensconced in 1970’s era coming ice age fairytales or better yet, log off before I’m doused in 1980’s “acid rain” spooky stories. Toodles.
Schlomie,
Don’t forget how the 90’s era ozone depletion was going to radiate all of us. Doomsday has always been a good seller tax raising operation. Anyway if anyone wants to debate global climate change, ask China and India to scale down their smoke-spewing operations first. Yeah, that’s what I thought. Not gonna happen. But of course the USA is the bad guy even in its own country. UGHHHHH!
Actually, our GHG emissions are more than 2.5 times China’s and nearly 10 times India’s on a per capita basis.
https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emissions
Asia now leads both Europe and North America in sulfur dioxide emissions though.
https://ourworldindata.org/air-pollution
But then, you two were probably amongst the group claiming that EPA sulfur dioxide emission limits would wreck our economy in the 1980s, right? Instead they allowed many companies to develop a side business selling the extracted sulfur in fertilizers (among other things).
That’s for the acid rain comment, Schlomie. If you did a little research, you’d find that acid rain was slaughtering trees and poisoning wildlife in the 1970s and 80s. SO2 emission limits changed that, as the Global SO2 emission chart linked above shows. If you are really wondering where the acid rain went, a little research would show that North America used to have a total SO2 emission of some 30M metric tonnes per year. Now it’s down around 11M tonnes (despite having fully 25% more consumers).
Science works a lot better than politics does.
John,
Still didn’t answer me about how the ozone depletion would kill us all and how we the next ice age was upon us in the 70’s. See, science works both ways, too.
As for the 1980s, I was in middle school. I really didn’t know if emissions would wreck our economy as I was playing wiffleball or football on the sandlot. I do know that living in Jersey all the rain I was exposed too didn’t really do what it was claimed to do.
Google the ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). That was the 1980s. I don’t think there’s any excuse for not knowing that. The ozone layer is recovering thanks to reduced use of CFCs (there are still nations where they are sold and used, and they are still in use in North America in some industrial products… just not in every single household spray can).
The global cooling “phenomenon” was not widely believed even in the 1970s. Anyone who lived through the 1970s (certainly in North America) would know we had some really bad winters, but the “next ice age” talk was never more than shlock science.
The global cooling “phenomenon” that people speak is based on one magazine article that generated a lot of discussion in the 1970’s. It was never the largely consensus conclusion that scientists have about climate change today. Also, more importantly, it was observed, like climate change is today. If work outdoors in the mountain west, or live in Alaska; rapid climate change is observable. And, yes, climate change occurred on Mars, and there is no life. And, climate change occurs on Earth, but when it is rapid it has been fatal to most species. The goal is to avoid that.
NOT oberserved
Besides, if we cherry pick stats, I can use the World Health Organization’ list of most polluted cities. Seems like Asia is kicking our butt, but hey blame the US for everything that’s wrong in the world when it comes to pollution.
Don’t get me wrong we can do better, like not building anymore stadiums or arenas, but come on, China and India can also do better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-polluted_cities_by_particulate_matter_concentration
How is summary data on total pollution “cherry picking” stats?
It is the exact opposite of cherry picking data.
My guess is that if they did have freedom of speech in China they would complain about their environmental conditions. We still do have that freedom, so we can debate and try to win regulations that protect and improve our environment. Just like we complain and vote when our government spends too much on sports stadiums.
That’s fine John
I’m not going to argue
Keep believing man and the US can destroy or make the environment better if we just do this or that
It’s just aground the corner
But be careful cow farts might get us
It’s that kind of hubris that gets politicians and fans in trouble
They keep thinking the newest stadium is going to be an eternal economic boom
Btw sorry a seventh grader wasn’t up on cfcs
I was busy trying to get a new Yanker Stadium built
Sheesh
Imagine being so willfully ignorant that you denigrate facts and people who point to them as evidence to support an argument. It’s easy if you try.
Speaking of Miami being complete SOL, if you don’t consider that to be the case already (I do), here’s an excellent piece on the issue:
https://popula.com/2019/04/02/heaven-or-high-water/
“The scientists, economists, and environmentalists that are saying this stuff, they don’t realize what a wealthy area this is.”
I love America so much.
Then why isn’t the Netherlands flooded?
Because they have been the world’s best engineers of flood control measures for over a century.
Was that before or after the up flush toilet was invented?