One of the older documents on this site is the New York Yankees and Mets stadium costs spreadsheet, which was gradually compiled over the course of several years as it became clear how the complicated financing deals would work for the $2.3 billion Yankee Stadium and $800 million Citi Field that opened in 2009. The numbers bounced around for a while, then finally settled down at nearly $1.2 billion in taxpayer money for the Yankees owners, and $614 million for the Mets owners, where they’ve stayed for more than a decade.
Now, though, it may be time for an update, because as The City (the news website) reports, there’s a fresh figure for how much the city (the city) has gotten stiffed on the new parking garages that were built for the new Yankees stadium:
More than two years after the city Parks Department threatened to boot a Bronx parking lot operator from city-leased land due to its astronomical debts, the operator has accumulated still more unpaid rent and other funds due to the city — with the total now topping $162 million, new financial records show…
In 2021 alone, Bronx Parking Development Company LLC — a nonprofit created to receive the tax-exempt city bonds and oversee construction and management of the parking facilities — accumulated another $17.2 million on its bill for unpaid rent, payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT), and interest due to the city.
The nonprofit is also falling short on payments owed to investors on the $237 million in bonds that were issued by the city’s Industrial Development Agency in 2007 as part of a major project to rebuild Yankee Stadium and the area around it.
That’s a lot of words and nine-figure numbers, so let’s recap: When New York City agreed to tear down the original Yankee Stadium and build a new one in a public park across the street, part of the draw for then-owner George Steinbrenner was that he would get extra parking spaces, particularly in two new garages built on additional public parkland. (Local residents eventually got some new park space back on the old stadium site, but it took a while.) The state of New York kicked in $70 million toward the garage cost, but the rest was supposed to be financed by those IDA bonds, which would be paid off by a nonprofit shell corporation out of new parking revenues.
This worked out spectacularly badly. Nobody, it turned out, wanted to pay $25 to park at the new garages, especially with much cheaper parking available at the nearby Gateway Mall (yet another city-subsidized project, ironically) and tons of public transit, including a new Metro-North commuter rail station that was also part of the new stadium project. Almost as soon as the new stadium garages opened, they were in default on both their bond payments and their rent payments to the city, and they’ve never paid a dime toward either in the decade since.
So, how much of a bag are taxpayer left holding? The bond default, even though it’s on city bonds, is one bondholders look to be stuck with paying for: If you’re one of the investors who thought “City-backed bonds for a baseball stadium garage, that’s a safe place to park my retirement money,” your money is gone now and you ain’t getting it back, sorry.
That leaves the rent payments, which were supposed to be at least $2.3 million a year (for a 99-year lease!) to pay off a $43 million (in 2009 dollars) slice of the city’s $691 million share of the Yankees project cost. If there turned out to be more rent money, the city would get that as a windfall; fortunately I never put that in my spreadsheet, because any rent surplus turned out to be doubly imaginary. That $162 million cited by The City, then, not only needs to be translated back into 2009 dollars, but also includes a mix of money that the city was counting on to pay part of its costs and money that the city was dreaming it would one day get to use for something else that would actually benefit residents.
Enough with all these numbers, you are by now shouting at your screen, how much does this add to the public cost of this monstrosity? The answer is: $43 million. That’s what the garage company was supposed to be paying into the project, and now we can safely assume will never ever be paid into the project, and which should now be shifted into the “city” column, which I will do as soon as I can dig up the ancient Excel spreadsheet that I used to make that stadium costs PDF. (I actually explained this all here way back in 2010 when it first looked like the garages might not be working out that well.)
Even if the stated public price tag of the Yankees stadium doesn’t go up by all that much, though — from $1.19 billion to $1.23 billion, roughly — that doesn’t change the fact that the Steinbrenners pulled off a remarkable feat of fobbing off costs onto Not Me: They created a convoluted financing plan that they promised would be paid for by parking fees, then when the whole scheme collapsed walked away saying “Oh well, not our problem.” This should be a lesson in two things: always read the fine print in stadium contracts, because there could be hidden costs lurking; and the final subsidy costs of sports venues are always subject to change, and the direction is never down.