So! Much! News! But first, a quick pro tip for Facebook users: If you follow Field of Schemes on Facebook, remember to go to our page and like or otherwise react to a post every once in a while, or else Facebook will not show you Field of Schemes posts, because Facebook. This has been a public service announcement.
And now: News!
- San Diego’s arena plan isn’t the only one in hot water over the state Surplus Land Act that requires all government land transfers to prioritize affordable housing: The California Department of Housing and Community Development sent a letter to the city of Anaheim on April 28, it has just been discovered by the Los Angeles Times, warning that the city’s cut-rate sale of Angel Stadium land to Los Angeles Angels owner Arte Moreno “may be in violation” of state law. What happens next is super-unclear: The Times’ Bill Shaikin reports that the city could be assessed a fine of 30% of the sale price, which would depend on whether the sale price is considered to be just the $150 million in cash the city is getting or also the $170 million in parks and affordable housing that are being counted as credits toward Moreno’s purchase price. (Yes, Anaheim is claiming that it is meeting affordable-housing requirements by kicking back money to Moreno to build affordable housing. Think on that one for a minute.) The Voice of O.C.’s Spencer Custodio further reports that Anaheim City Attorney Rob Fabela says that the Surplus Land Act doesn’t apply because the city had already entered into an exclusive negotiating agreement before the act was passed — except that the council hadn’t voted to enter exclusive negotiations at that time. There’s also that lawsuit in the works over Anaheim having allegedly illegally negotiated the deal in secret, and yeah, a lot of plot twists could still go down here, do not leave the theater until the credits have finished rolling.
- The city of Calgary and the owners of the Flames have “paused” construction of a new arena to resolve a “budget difference,” but because the city council discussed the new measures behind closed doors before voting on them in public — never revealing publicly what they were voting on — there’s no way to tell exactly what is going on here. Mayor Naheed Nenshi said that “given materials cost, construction escalation, given some small changes to the program for the event centre, the costs have gone up,” but also that the question is about figuring out “what we want to build here while staying in the context of the previous agreement that the city had made. It’s not about the city pouring in a lot more money.” So that sounds like they’re talking about trimming some of the pricier elements to stay within budget? Where’s my Canadian-to-English (or maybe just politician-to-English) dictionary?
- Slightly more news this week on the plans to renovate Baltimore’s arena: Tim Leiweke’s Oak View Group and, for some reason, Kevin Durant, would partner on paying for $150 million in renovation costs, in exchange for which they would get mumble mumble something. Presumably Oak View would get to operate the place and collect revenues, but the Baltimore Development Corporation is negotiating this — it’s a theme! — in secret, so who the hell knows what all the details are at this point.
- NFL commissioner Roger Goodell did his favorite thing this week, warning that one of his league’s teams could move without a new stadium: “This is a really early stage to develop potentially an alternative,” Goodell told radio station 670 The Score on Wednesday regarding the Chicago Bears‘ bid to buy the Arlington Park racetrack site. (If MLB commissioner Rob Manfred knew how to perform this role, maybe poor Dave Kaval could shut his mouth for a moment and stop auditioning to be a supervillain.) Meanwhile, Arlington Heights endorsed a change to zoning that would allow a stadium to be built at the racetrack site, though zoning is the least of the problems when figuring out how to build a potentially $1 billion building. Finally, a recent poll of Chicago-area residents found that two-thirds would like to see the Bears move to the suburbs, though the fact that the poll results appeared in the suburban paper the Daily Herald and that the Herald’s story didn’t include much on methodology — aside from a quip from pollster Collin Corbett that “anyone who answered that they are a Packers fan were excluded, ‘because no one cares what they think,'” — maybe should lead one to take the results with a grain of salt.
- “There is no agreement to build a new stadium” for the Buffalo Bills, Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said this week, adding that he doesn’t see one happening anytime soon. Turns out that report that the Bills owners were ready to build a new stadium in Orchard Park was more a report that the Bills owners had hired Legends Entertainment to try to negotiate a stadium deal, which is many, many steps short of actually having a plan.
- I keep forgetting to link to some of the good reporting by Ben Becker of Action News Jax on how Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s stadium development plans could lead to huge flood-resiliency costs and how economist Victor Matheson said Khan’s projection of new hotel revenues contained “the single most embarrassing line I have seen in an economic impact statement,” so go read those and catch up on what you’ve been missing already!
Mayor Naheed Nenshi is living proof that no politician, ever, anywhere, should be trusted to consistently keep taxpayers’ interests foremost when it comes to stadium deals. (I guess Eric Greitens might have been the one exception, but he didn’t last long enough to prove me wrong).
#BillstoGreensboro is back on!
I just got caught up with the recent A’s stories, is there a price tag mentioned somewhere to say what building a new ball park at the Coliseum site that has the A’s committed to Howard Terminal? Every time I read a new update regarding them, I just imagine it would be half the cost and half the hassle to build beside the Coliseum and redevelop that area. There really can’t be that great a benefit to trying to build at Howard Terminal unless they’re able to keep some of the money they would receive for construction…or is this all a long con to get rights they don’t currently have at that site?
Perhaps the Panthers move to Greensboro, they’re not happy with their “old” stadium, and it’s probably in their territory anyway. Charlotte better come up with some money fast or they’ll lose their team!
“The single most embarrassing line” is particularly amusing. But it’s not embarrassing to the Jaguars or the group that did the study. Because if they wish hard enough it just might come true!
Why won’t everyone just take them at their word and give them their money already. They commissioned a study with a fancy cover page, after all.
And they bring the promise of sports joy to the city. (*actual sports joy may vary)
That should be enough!!
…Oh the sarcasm…
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/10/31
Was worried our hero Victor “Luke Skywalker” Matheson was turning to the dark side.
https://www.fieldofschemes.com/2021/03/08/17192/world-cup-could-bring-hundreds-of-millions-in-spending-to-u-s-but-thats-not-actually-that-great-an-explainer/
So relieved am I!
Question for Victor? I went on a 3 month vacation to Mexico (think World Cup).
Did my spending boost Mexico’s economy, the cities where I stayed? Absolutely.
However, it was still discretionary spending (I’ll give you food consumption). That spending wasn’t occurring back in Northern California.
So the question is, how big do you draw the circle? A city, a county, a state or province, a region, a country, a continent or the planet.
Unless it’s primary spending, have you really created any tangible economic or other benefits? Isn’t primary spending an indicator of economic or other benefits? For example, I enjoyed Chivas Liga MX match at Estadio Akron so much, I bought a condo and moved to Guadalajara. Of course my condo would be as close as possible to the stadium. For a homeowner and sports fanatic it’s always the most factor to take into consideration!
Isn’t my move an indicator of economic and other benefits, as my primary spending has now moved and shifted to Guadalajara (If the A’s build a new HT ballpark, I know the first thing I plan to do is sell my home and purchase a condo as close as possible to the new A’s stadium #MaxSarcasm). The creation of permanent jobs, not temporary stadium construction or employment, might be another (how to measure is beyond my skill sets. Disclaimer, I’m not a sports economist. An accountant who took one Economics course in college).
True story: I became a Browns fan as a kid despite having no ties to Cleveland. I was a fan for 15 years before I ever set foot in the State of Ohio. I bought season tickets when the new stadium opened and went out for games a couple of times a year for the next few years. After a few years an opportunity to move to Cleveland presented itself (through a person I met at a tailgate party) and I wound up moving there. So the scenario you described did play out. I do know of other cases where people discovered Cleveland entirely because of going there for games and eventually decided to move there. I got to know a lot of the people who sat around me in the stadium and many of them didn’t live in the Cleveland area but owned season tickets and came in for games. Also whenever we played a team within driving distance in any sport we had thousands of people in town. Walk around downtown when the Cavs or Indians played a team from Chicago, Toronto, Detroit, etc there were thousands of people. I don’t know how any of this is captured in economic data unless you are able to track every dollar spent in Cleveland and where the person is from.
I also know when it comes to picking cities I would consider moving to, unless I am very desperate I don’t consider cities that don’t have a professional sports scene. I just wouldn’t enjoy living in a place where I couldn’t go to a game every so often. I don’t know how many other people there are like that but I know that its not zero.
“I don’t know how any of this is captured in economic data unless you are able to track every dollar spent in Cleveland and where the person is from.”
The best way is to wait until there’s a strike or lockout that cancels part of a sports season but doesn’t affect the rest of the country, and see what happens to the local economy. The answer has always been “not much.”
As for people moving to cities because they have sports teams, that would be expected to show up in comparative growth and income data, and it doesn’t. Portland, Oregon is a great counterexample here: hugely popular for people to move to, despite not having MLB, NFL, or NHL teams.
The NFL hasn’t had a work stoppage since the 80s, MLB was 1995, hockey was 2012 and I believe the NBA was 2013. So again the data is hard to find. So if you take a case where 2,000 people from Toronto go to Cleveland when the Raptors are playing (that’s my estimate from seeing how many people were wearing Raptors gear and how much cheering I heard when the Raptors scored when I was at a game in Cleveland) unless you can track the spending of all 2K of them you can’t accurately track how much that one game generated.
Also, its important to differentiate between larger and smaller cities. NYC lost 2 MLB teams and was just fine and LA didn’t miss the NFL when the Raiders and Rams left (heck its barely noticed getting NFL teams back), but if you’re a midsized city its different. Other than the auto show why would you ever visit Detroit other than either for a game or to do a research on economic decay?
Regarding Portland, the have an NBA team that sells out regularly MLS as well as 2 Pac-12 programs, with the Oregon Ducks being an almost-professional program.
Good thing we’re probably going to have an MLB work stoppage in 2022! We need it for the data points.
The other way to do it is to look at cities that gained or lost teams, and compare spending before and after. There have been many studies like this, including some that have tried to weed out which cities did better or worse, and there is massive evidence that the economic benefit of having a sports team is so negligible as to be indistinguishable from zero:
https://www.fieldofschemes.com/2018/07/09/13911/fos-20-geoffrey-propheter-on-what-we-know-about-stadium-impact-and-what-we-should-study-next/
I’d like to see the Detroit Art Museum.