The Knoxville News has been hot on the “new $65 million-ish stadium for the Tennessee Smokies would be great for Knoxville” tip for a while now, but columnist Katherine Whitehead kicked it over the top yesterday with her column on how a new downtown baseball stadium would be a huge boon for downtown restaurants and bars. After declaring herself “a relatively new baseball fan” (the last time she attended a game before this past week, apparently, was in fourth grade), she nonetheless feels comfortable in declaring that having places to go out to eat and drink before and after games would pour new consumer spending into the area around the proposed stadium:
As someone who already spends a lot of time downtown, I could easily convince my friends to join me for food trucks at South Knoxville breweries and drinks on Gay Street rooftops before walking to the baseball stadium. Afterwards, crowds of people would pour out of the game in search of nightcaps and late night grub, giving downtown bars and restaurants plenty of opportunities to bring in business. It’s a win-win for everyone.
This is one of the big arguments for stadium subsidies: It will create more new spending than just in a stadium! And it’s something fairly easy for economists to measure, since all you have to do is look at sales tax receipts for the area around a stadium, or for a city as a whole, and see if they go up, down, or sideways. And economists have done this, so many times that it’s now hard for them to get research money to keep doing so because it’s considered settled science, and time and again have found that there’s no measurable uptick in spending when a city gets a new stadium or arena, or even a new team.
How is this possible? Surely, as Whitehead notes, people going to sporting events will spend tons of money before and after games outside the stadium, right? Isn’t that just how going to see sports works?
The answer is no, not generally — and the problem is, basically, bandwidth. A sporting event is a firehose of people pouring into a neighborhood, usually right after work, and then back out again about three hours later in a rush to get home. Getting them all to sit down and have a drink or a meal sounds like a great idea in theory, but it’s not so great in practice, as one St. Louis restaurateur told me years ago about the then-Rams stadium for an article that never appeared in print because the magazine in question folded right after I’d filed the story:
St. Louis restaurateur Pablo Weiss opened his KitchenK near the St. Louis Rams’ Edward Jones Dome in 2004. “I am a five-minute walk from the stadium, and I am closed on Sunday,” he says. “The games start at noon, so there’s a very short window beforehand, and a lot of people tailgate. After the game, people tend to move on and go home, and the few people left are primarily intoxicated, loud people, which is not a prime business model.”
You can hear similar things from a Brooklyn restaurant owner, in my book The Brooklyn Wars, which has a whole section on the development of the new Nets arena:
Not that capturing an arena audience that only arrives in three-hour bursts is easy, [Patsy’s pizzeria co-owner Joe Juliano] explained: “You have 100 seats, they all want to be fed in one hour. our pizza only takes a minute and a half to cook — that helps.” His partner, the Bensonhurst-born Anton Reja, put down his cigar to chime in: “Between this one, the corner, what’s happening over there, you got six thousand families coming into the neighborhood. But this is not working for everybody. People who are coming to see the game but going to eat, they don’t want to go four blocks away. They want to go fast.”
Stories like these help explain why, when you visit any stadium or arena, you’ll see largely the same thing: A narrow strip of fast-food-oriented shops and sports bars right across the street, and then nothing once you get a block or two away. Unless, that is, you’re in a neighborhood that has 365-days-a-year foot traffic already — but then the sports venue is at best the thin icing on a large existing cake, not a way to generate substantial business on its own.
Plus, you have the old substitution effect problem — even if people are eating dinner out before games, is that dinner money some of them would have spent elsewhere in the city in the absence of a stadium — and the question of whether Knoxville could spend $65 million in a way that would do more for local bar and restaurant owners than firing 10,000 baseball fans at them out of cannon 60 nights a year. Now that might be a “win-win for everyone,” though probably with the exception of the well-connected local rich guy who owns the Smokies, so yeah, best not to mention that in the paper.
“Viva, Viva Las Vegas.” ( Elvis). I believe this will be the new A’s theme song.
NdM. Aren’t you being a little overly optimistic? The Smokies attendance has never averaged more than 5,000 a game. I don’t really think you need a cannon to fire 5,000 fans into downtown Knoxville. A squirt gun, maybe.
Year Total Gm APG
2019 280,708 65 4,319
2018 308,069 66 4,668
2017 313,796 63 4,981
2016 293,694 68 4,319
2015 277,606 63 4,406
2014 283,038 69 4,102
2013 244,984 64 3,828
2012 251,112 67 3,748
2011 265,341 67 3,960
2010 262,415 68 3,859
2009 260,153 68 3,825
2008 250,209 6? 3,879
2007 258,121 69 3,741
2006 255,906 69 3,682
2005 241,163 70 3,445
2004 253,756 67 3,787
2003 256,597 66 3,888
2002 268,033 70 3,829
2001 266,037 69 3,856
2000 256,141 69 3,712
1999 119,571 67 1,785 (Knoxville)
1998 123,686 68 1,819 (Knoxville)
Oh Dave, think you need a cuppa Joe before posting a comment. Knoxville isn’t Las Vegas. If it were, Dave Kaval would be winging his way to Tennessee right now.
Anecdotal experience. My city is home to a well-run AAA franchise playing in a swell urban ball park dating to the 1990s that draws crowds of 5,000-10,000 70 games a season. In the immediate vicinity of the park, refurbished tobacco warehouses on the one side, newish brick commercial on the other, a few eateries have lasted, many have come and gone, and the restaurant/bar space closest to the ball park, but 50 feet from one of two entrances to the yard, can’t keep a tenant. Meanwhile, the myriad restaurants/bars in the downtown core a couple of blocks away over the railroad tracks hop, game or no game.
I hope the same thing with occur with Turner Field. It was only one or two places near the stadium no other places opened up so what baseball has done with the new stadiums is created their own phony neighborhoods and restaurants ala’ the Braves new stadium.