For U.S. Thanksgiving week, let’s take a moment to give thanks for the continuing gift of having lots of stupid to laugh and point at. We are truly in the golden age of laughing and pointing, which is … good? Better than nothing? All that separates us from spiraling into despair?
Whichever, this was a very good week for stupid, please enjoy a heaping helping:
- Detroit City F.C. is set to get $88 million in property tax breaks for its planned $193 million stadium after the Detroit city council voted to give it the green light. “The stadium is expected to generate $25 million in annual economic impact for the area,” reports WXYZ-TV, no source given or needed, nobody would just make up a number like that, right?
- The Dallas News has explored how cities in the Dallas area could spend money on a new Stars arena, and came up with “grants” and “loans” and “tax breaks,” that’s pretty much the way cities spend money, yes. Possible sources of the funding include pulling funding from regional mass transit and giving it to the Stars, or tax increment financing, or borrowing the money and paying it off by some means undisclosed in the article. At least economist Nola Agha shows up to give her evaluation of some of the possible options — TIFs, she notes, are “popular because [they’re] relatively hidden, meaning the taxpayers don’t have to know that a city is using property tax and giving it back to a developer,” which is really as much indictment as endorsement.
- The Chicago Architecture Center assembling a team of “business executives, civic leaders, urban planners, architects and others” to spend three months seeing how stadiums can be a “Win/Win” is pretty dumb given that the premise assumes there’s a way to do so. For the resulting report to then conclude that “instead of treating stadiums as
standalone facilities requiring public support, we propose thinking about them as anchors for thriving neighborhoods” without establishing whether stadiums are good anchors for thriving neighborhoods — they’re not — is, well, you know. - New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is looking to spend $200 million on Albany “revitalization” with part of that going toward a $75 million minor-league soccer stadium, but nobody’s saying how much. “I don’t understand the secrecy,” said a former staffer for the state’s Empire State Development agency who is trying to research the soccer project. “I think it would be good to have a public discussion about this.” So far the local development authority, Capitalize Albany, has responded by repeatedly denying Freedom of Information requests for information, with a spokesperson adding that “we expect there to be many opportunities for public input” once officials decide what they tell the public they can have input on.
- Denver held a public event to see what residents think of plans for a new Broncos stadium (projected public cost: at least $140 million and likely a lot more) as expressed entirely through colored stickers and Post-It notes, because that’s just how democracy goes now.
- The owners of the Union Omaha USL League One team can’t build a new 6,500-seat soccer stadium until they get kickbacks of state sales tax money that are being “bottlenecked” by Gov. Jim Pillen, that sounds awfully judgy, Nebraska Examiner. Pillen did get to say that he sees his job as to “look out for ALL taxpayers, not give subsidies to lobbyist and politician-supported special projects which could not move forward without them,” but Omaha Mayor John Ewing says spending tax money on a soccer stadium would be “great,” surely not just because it would be state tax money that wouldn’t affect his city budget.
- Hamilton, Ontario’s arena just got a $300 million renovation, conducted by operators Oak View Group but aided by an unspecified amount of tax breaks, but the truly dumb part is the CBC headline that specifies the rehabbed arena’s opening concert as being by “Beatles, Wings artist Paul McCartney,” just in case readers weren’t sure which Paul McCartney they meant.
- The prize for the dumbest headline of the week, though, has to go to Secret Los Angeles for its “California’s SoFi Stadium Is The Fifth Most Iconic Stadium To Host The 2026 World Cup.” That’s meaningless enough, but add in that the “iconic status” scores were compiled by a ticket broker using factors from capacity to measuring “each stadium’s roof using Google Earth to get a Golden Ratio score,” and we have a winner! Please select the trophy of your choosing.
Only in Texas (okay, maybe Florida) would they suggest giving public transit money to a private sports enterprise.
Article implies there’s a massive trend moving franchises to the suburbs. It sounds like a copy/paste from 1979. Let’s look:
NFL – only Cleveland looks like it applies. BUF and TEN are next to current stadiums. WAS is moving back to city.
MLB – Atlanta (poster child for suburbs) Texas (next door to previous)
NHL/NBA – Islanders kind of count. Philly is next door to previous). Calling Inglewood a suburb is a stretch.
Far from a trend.
The real trend is teams want more control over the land around their stadiums, sometimes this means moves to the suburbs, but the orioles stayed where they are and get to develop a parking lot.
Calling So-Fi the 5th most iconic World Cup Stadium is how LA likes too talk about things. Back in 1996/1997 I was a credit analyst and I got an investor packet for this restaurant chain called Koo Koo Roo. They included a chart in which they showed with pride that they were the “14th fastest growing publicly traded company in LA.” We laughed about it for months
“America’s Favorite Banana Milk.”
https://thumbs.worthpoint.com/zoom/images1/1/0416/16/beer-frame-magazine-punk-zine-lot_1_552312b79973816f7a79dcf29533c383.jpg
Capitalize Albany? Are they run by the Ferengi or something?
Either that or by militant copy editors.
“Fifth most iconic….”
What garbage. No stadium has hosted the 2026 World Cup yet, so at best this is premature.
Having said that, I can definitively prove that whatever FIFA demands they call the Kroenke Sports Palace in 2026 is NOT the fifth most iconic facility that will host games of WC2026:
Here it is:
https://youtu.be/GTkHmzY0POU
Go ahead, try to refute this evidence. I dare you.
As a Beaver, (Oregon State variety), I approve of this message.
I am sad to report that we live in an era when a high proportion of the general public does not know who Paul McCartney is (or was, depending on your commitment to conspiracy theories…)
The good news is that you can still catch The Who live in concert.
I believe they (both remaining original members) are presently gearing up for the 50th Anniversary tour of their 1982 farewell tour. I’m not sure what it says about the band (or humanity) that the two who survived are also the ones who got into fistfights with some regularity.
Out of the $88 million in tax breaks, $74.2 million is for brownfield tax recapture over 30 years. So the present value is much less and tax breaks for redeveloping brownfields is pretty normal regardless of if its planned use.
DCFC already bought the land at distressed prices, though (presumably – they didn’t actually reveal the purchase price), meaning they’ll be getting improved land for free, on top of the share of tax breaks they’ll get to use to build parking garages and the like. Even if that’s a “pretty normal” subsidy for Detroit, it’s still a subsidy.
(None of which has anything to do with the $25m/year LOLprojection, in any case.)
Outside of the downtown core which Dan Gilbert decided to buy up and remake as his legacy (and he’s done a great job at it) its not like there is a stampede for land in Detroit. Who was lining up for that property if not for DCFC? Even GM’s soon-to-be former headquarters is being downsized because there isn’t enough demand to fill it. So just about anyone would have gotten money to build there. As opposed to letting it sit and rot for decades like the Packard Plant
Minor league soccer grounds are the new casinos. Discuss.
Here’s the full rankings of the Iconic stadiums. Methodology here is really stupid
https://cw33.com/sports/att-stadium-revealed-as-the-most-iconic-stadium-to-host-the-2026-world-cup/