Yesterday this site ran its first-ever subscriber-only content, which shouldn’t be that surprising being as that it’s only had subscribers per se for a few months now. If you want to read the whole interview with Kennesaw State University economist J.C. Bradbury, who is the author of not only some excellent studies of the Atlanta Braves stadium but also some hilarious tweets, you’ll want to become a monthly patron at any level and it will automagically unlock for you. If you just want some highlights, though, here you go:
On advances in economic research:
The earliest studies were focused on, “Hey, we put a team in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Let’s see how the Washington, D.C. metro area’s affected, including Virginia and Maryland and Washington, D.C.” And we basically found out there’s not much impact in that, so let’s go a little bit more local: “Hey, what happens in the neighborhood right around the stadium?” and “Hey, aren’t there some positive benefits just from being a major league city?” How can we quantify those?…
I’ve found more recently that people don’t seem to be aware that economists have studied that. They still seem to think, oh, you’re looking at these old studies. No! Economists have looked directly at zip codes right around stadiums. It’s pretty neat how intricate and detailed these studies have been.
On what studies show pro sports teams are worth to their communities solely in terms of how much residents value being a “big league city”:
If you’re talking about a stadium in which you have $1 billion being spent, perhaps you could justify a positive subsidy of maybe $100 million. I think that’s being very generous — I’m not saying that’s definitely what it is. But that’s nowhere close to $1 billion!
On talking to elected officials and business leaders about stadium math:
They absolutely do not want to hear that this is a bad idea. And they cling to it in ways that you cannot imagine: This has to be good because I want it to be good…
A former county commissioner, Bob Ott, always chimes in and says, “He’s not even looking at the data, the data shows the property values have increased!” And I’m like, “I’m directly looking at that!” It’s like they don’t want to hear it, and the response is just to say the same thing maybe louder or more angry.
On tax breaks for film production:
The numbers are terrible. It’s kind of funny: I like to say that politicians love jocks and movie stars, and they’re the ones who are able to get the subsidies.
The upshot: Economists — not just Bradbury, though Bradbury has done a lot of it, especially of late — have looked at sports and development in all sorts of different ways and in great detail, and while there are certainly some economic and quality-of-life benefits to having a sports team, they are worth way less than the public dollars being squandered on constantly building and rebuilding stadiums and arenas. (And the benefits of other subsidies, like underwriting the costs of movie shoots, are even more dismal.) This is not what elected officials largely want to hear, though, so they will tie themselves in logical knots to insist that what all evidence shows to be true is not true, while what stadium lobbyists claim without evidence to be true is totally true, they surely wouldn’t lie about a thing like that just to serve the clients who are paying them!
Okay, that’s enough of the first hit being free. Subscribe (at least for a month) to read the whole thing and also get some entertainingly weird tchotchkes in the mail! Thanks!
Is there any relatively-easy-to-understand research on the success of stadiums that are mostly or entirely privately funded? How do those teams do, etc? That would be a useful contrast to all of this.