Friends don’t let friends read economic impact consulting reports

The clowning on the CSL International economic impact report claiming a pile of tax revenue benefits from a new Philadelphia 76ers arena continues today, this time in the pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The paper spoke to economists J.C. Bradbury and Geoffrey Propheter and real estate professor Arthur Acolin, and the resulting comments were about what you’d expect if you’ve ever spent five minutes talking to sports economists about CSL and its ilk:

“The study is completely useless,” said Geoffrey Propheter, a professor of public affairs at the University of Colorado-Denver and the author of Major League Sports and the Property Tax. “That’s not a commentary on if it’s done well or not. That’s just a commentary on economic impact studies.”

And:

J.C. Bradbury, an economist at Kennesaw State University, called the CSL report a “concocted PR document” and said the firm was “notorious for doing these for-hire projections for paying clients” that fly in the face of “academic consensus.”

“There is nothing credible here,” Bradbury said. “These are not rigorous studies of observed outcomes; they are fanciful forecasts of an imagined future.”

And:

[Propheter] pointed to a disclaimer at the beginning of the report, which states, “All information provided to us was not audited and was assumed to be correct based on our professional judgement and experience.”

“I always get a kick out of them,” Propheter said of those types of statements.

And:

Arthur Acolin, a real estate professor at the University of Washington who has studied the trajectory of Chinatowns in cities across the U.S. … found that the displacement of nearby businesses and residents caused by the arena project could cost as much as $908 million in lost tax revenue. (Like the Sixers, Acolin’s paper used nominal values, meaning the $908 million finding is comparable to the nearly $1.1 billion tax revenue gain reported by CSL.)

“As part of the public discussion, I was thinking about the people who are currently there and the businesses that are currently there,” he said. “Those neighborhoods on the margins of downtown are very vulnerable to changes. A small change in environment can make the difference of being in business and being out of business.”

None of this is surprising, but it’s all still useful to have in the pages of a major news site, since all too often actual economists only appear briefly at the end of articles laying out the consultants’ BS findings. (Points to the Inquirer for using an actual photo of the proposed arena site, too, rather than the team owner’s vaportecture renderings.) Which is the entire point of the BS findings: It’s not to try to come up with realistic cost-benefit figures for a stadium or arena project — CSL doesn’t reveal who worked on its Philadelphia report, but the lead officer for its Frisco office, which is credited for the report, is a guy with a bachelor’s degree in finance — but rather to flood the zone with fancy charts in hopes that no one will look too hard at whether any of it makes any damn sense. It’ll be a great day when actual economic studies get all the space they need in the newspapers, and sports team owners have to hold a bake sale to get anyone to read their bogus numbers.