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Stop the presses: Rays stadium site search continues to search for stadium site

access_time personNeil deMause

Baseball’s winter meetings are on this week in Orlando, which means lots of opportunities for reporters to hobnob with team execs and fill column inches with whatever comes out of their mouths. So you probably could have predicted that Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times, who has made an art form of this or at least a job description, would be on hand, in this case giving Rays co-owner Ken Babby 13 full paragraphs to explain that the ownership group’s plans for a new stadium by 2029 are making progress, even if not in any particularly definable way:

“We are exploring sites. We are meeting with architects. We are meeting with public officials,” Babby told the Tampa Bay Times at Major League Baseball’s winter meetings. “We are conducting a lot of analysis on how you go about building a development in a ballpark that meet the criteria that we talked about (including a plot of at least 100 acres). We’re visiting a lot of other parks, a lot of other stadiums, understanding what’s possible with different structures.”…

“We discussed what we thought a construct of a public-private partnership could look like. And have really enjoyed our conversations with folks both in the city and the county, both sides of the bay. We’ve been really focused on building those relationships.”…

“We believe that to build a state-of-the-art development, it’s going to require at least that kind of acreage [that the Atlanta Braves got for their Battery project] and it’s also going to require a great public-private partnership. We’re going to do our part. We’re not out there looking for anything that’s unfair or unjust. We want to build something that is truly a win for the community. And that’s building a district, building a community, driving jobs, creating billions of dollars of economic impact.”

That’s a lot of positivity — building relationships! a win for the community! — but no details at all, beyond that the Rays owners are considering sites throughout the Tampa Bay area (which we knew) and are “fully focused on opening a new ballpark in April of 2029” but know that’s “an ambitious timeline.” Even the requirement that any stadium site come with enough space for a Battery-style development came with a hedge: “While it’s not the only site and dynamic that we love, it’s certainly been a wonderful blueprint.”

All of which is fine and to be expected: When a friendly reporter sticks a microphone in front of you and presses record, it’s a team owner’s job to natter on about how much momentum their proposed stadium project has, even if it doesn’t have a site or any money identified to pay for it. It’s a bigger question whether Topkin is doing his job by letting Babby say all this stuff unchallenged — the only other quotes in the story are from MLB commissioner Rob Manfred — but now that the Times is letting other reporters actually report the news, it’s a bit less egregious.

The bigger problem here is letting team owners set the news agenda in the first place. Yes, the Rays’ lease at Tropicana Field runs out after the 2028 season (originally 2027, but it got automatically extended after a hurricane blew the roof off and sent the Rays to a minor-league stadium in Tampa for a year), but as we’ve seen before, leases can be extended — and in fact, St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch has already expressed an interest in doing so for the Rays, saying “the bones of the Trop are super strong, so once we get the electronics and the roof done, the Rays could be there for a decade.” So there’s no real urgency here, especially when it’s not at all clear that a new stadium itself would do much for the Rays’ finances — a new stadium with a pile of public subsidies might, but then the problem you’re solving isn’t so much “Where can the Rays play?” as “How can the Rays owners increase their profits via taxpayer money?” For that, you might want to talk to some taxpayers, or at least some of their elected representatives, but none of those seemed to be hanging around the baseball Winter Meetings, so you’ll just have to guess what they think of all this, sorry!

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Friday roundup: Everybody needs a soccer stadium for a pillow

access_time personNeil deMause

Soccer! All the kids today are digging it! It’s the future! And also the past! Your city is nothing without a genuine, bona-fide, electrified, 10,000-seat soccer stadium, which is why Mesa is creating a “theme park district” to kick tax money back to a soccer stadium district that nobody wanted to give to the Arizona Coyotes but this is soccer, and Oklahoma City is spending $121 million on one so that Oklahomans can raise their fists to support of not nearly enough players spread out over way too much of the pitch, and MLS commissioner Don Garber says Vancouver had better give the Whitecaps a “better lease” or it’ll be “untenable” if you know what he means, and the co-chair of the Congressional Soccer Caucus — of course there’s a Congressional Soccer Caucus, get with the times, bruh — wants to allocate $50 million in federal tax money for cities to use for transit programs during big events like the (soccer) World Cup and the Olympics (one event: soccer)! Soccer!

There are only a limited number of soccer teams, though (a number that is thought to exceed the number of Planck volumes in the observable universe), so some cities still must, sadly, spend public money on pro teams in other sports instead. Not that elected officials are sad, they seem downright psyched:

  • The Columbus Blue Jackets have gone from thinking about maybe asking for public arena renovation money from the state now that the Browns and Bengals are getting it to receiving $200 million in state money plus $25 million each from the city and county, all in the course of less than five months. “I think this is an incredibly important community asset, and we have an opportunity to advance this …. and ensure the future of the facility for the next 30 years,” arena authority director Ken Paul said; if you think the Blue Jackets owners are going to wait 30 years for their next grab at the brass subsidy ring, you can place your prop bet at the arena’s gambling kiosks.
  • Cleveland Browns fans are not psyched about having to pay personal seat license fees for tickets at the new Browns stadium. Many say they’ll give up their season tickets before paying for PSLs, and yeah, that’s what Bills fans said too, and now the Bills PSLs have almost sold out, though to be fair things may be different once Browns fans realize that buying Browns tickets obligates them to actually watch Browns games.
  • YouTube channel entrepreneur (?) Ashkan Karbasfrooshan says he has a plan for bringing the Expos back to Montreal, and “money is not the constraint.” Rather, doing so “requires capital, political alignment, real estate vision, a winning outlook, patience, and a lot of humility.” Note to Karbasfrooshan: “Capital” is another word for “money.” (You can look up “humility” while you have your dictionary open.) Rob Manfred did say recently that he might like a second Canadian team, but reportedly he meant Vancouver and not Montreal, if baseball is even going to expand at all, maybe Karbasfrooshan meant that money is not the only constraint, that tracks.
  • The Philadelphia 76ers and Flyers owners are still planning on building a new arena … maybe? They’re not saying anything publicly about any moves to get legislative approval, what on earth could they be waiting fo — “[Governor’s office spokesperson Kayla Anderson] didn’t address questions regarding the state’s role in the project and whether incentives or tax breaks will be involved,” oh I see, never mind then.
  • The Tampa Bay Rays‘ Tropicana Field is starting to look more like itself again, which is, to be clear, to be taken as a good thing. The brown and white alternating roof panels are expected to be all bleached white by the sun by opening day, at least, so it will still look like the dome that Rays fans have come to know and, I’m going to go with “love.”
  • No disrespect to sports barons, but they still can’t hold a candle to Amazon when it comes to wielding monopoly power to get rich at someone else’s expense. This week: Forcing school systems to use dynamic pricing solely so Amazon can charge the public more for supplies, presumably only because the infinity gauntlet is no longer available.
  • The Athletics of Nowhere In Particular have opened a new Las Vegas “interactive space” (read: room) where fans can view a scale model of their planned stadium, plus also enter an “Immersive Cube” (read: room with lots of video screens on the walls) where they can view what it will look like from the inside, if it’s ever finished, and it will be, team execs swear. Early reviews on social media from fans who probably didn’t get personally immersed are that the design is “garbage” and an “abomination” and “the f*** is this ugly thing?” Me, I’m wondering how the A’s architects managed such a distant upper deck at a stadium with only 33,000 seats, plus whether at the real stadium everyone who enters will have to remove their shoes like in the simulation.
  • Sad, soft caves for indoor sportsmen, check.
  • Ex-AEG/Oak View Group stadium developer Tim Leiweke won’t be going to jail for bid rigging after all — no, not because he’s necessarily not guilty, the other reason this happens these days.
  • New York Mets owner Steve Cohen is getting his stadium-side casino, saw that coming.
  • The 2026 Winter Olympics hockey arena in Milan is running behind schedule and has the wrong rink dimensions for international standards. Defector doesn’t report whether this will lead to it going over budget, but c’mon, you know how this movie ends.
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Cleveland city council approves deal to get at least something for dropping lawsuits over Browns move, still isn’t happy about it

access_time personNeil deMause

The Cleveland city council yesterday approved Mayor Justin Bibb’s deal to get Browns owner Jimmy Haslam to pay $100 million (sort of — more on that in a minute) to extricate himself from lawsuits and move to a new stadium in suburban Brook Park. After much grumbling by councilmembers, they voted 13-2 to approve Bibb’s agreement with a couple of changes:

  • The city will dedicate an extra $5 million of Haslam’s payments to neighborhood spending, bringing that total to $25 million over ten years.
  • Haslam will have to pay an extra $1 million if the Browns stay in their current stadium in 2030, and an additional $2 million on top of that if they are still there in 2031.

Adding in $30 million from Haslam for demolishing the old stadium, $20 million in payments to help redevelop the lakefront once the stadium is gone, and $25 million in cash for whatever the city wants to do with it, that gets the full deal to $100 million — though since a bunch of the payments will be over time, it’s only worth about $80 million in present value. Plus there’s the whole matter of the city agreeing to “support infrastructure plans related to road and air travel with respect to both the Brook Park stadium mixed-use project,” which Bibb’s office says doesn’t mean paying for the stadium, but which could mean bumping stadium road work projects to the head of the line. So we don’t know really what the city is getting in exchange for dropping its legal objections to the Browns moving, just that they’re getting something.

Bibb’s argument has been that something is better than nothing, and there was a strong chance the city would end up with nothing (other than a bunch of legal bills) if it hadn’t settled. That seems to have been the position taken by the councilmembers who voted to approve the deal — “This is not a vote that I am making with a smile on my face,” said councilman Charles Slife — while Mike Polonsek, one of the two no votes, declared, “My gut tells me this is not a good deal for the city of Cleveland.” In fact, everybody thinks it’s not a good deal for the city of Cleveland! It’s more a matter of whether this is the least bad deal Cleveland could get, which is unknowable without a time machine that would let us see how the lawsuits would have turned out. Either way it’s definitely not a great deal, and certainly not as good a deal as if the state hadn’t stacked the deck by offering Haslam $600 million to move from one part of the state to another, but this is the world that we live in.

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Friday roundup: This Is So Dumb edition

access_time personNeil deMause

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.
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Do the Yankees get $38m or $84m or what every year in tax breaks, and why is Hal Steinbrenner complaining about this?

access_time personNeil deMause

New York Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner was on a call with reporters on Monday when he started talking about how his team didn’t win a championship again last year despite the majors’ 4th-highest payroll, and how he’d prefer to have not won the championship with a lower payroll, but “we want to field a team we know could win a championship — or we believe could win a championship.”

(This is going to be a long post and involve way too much math, so let’s just stop here for a moment to appreciate that quote. It’s like if you distilled all of the impulses of every sports team owner to both demand a championship and demand not having to take responsibility for not winning a championship and demand not to have to pay for players good enough to win a championship, and then filtered it through, well, Hal Steinbrenner. 10 out of 10, no notes.)

One sportswriter then asked Steinbrenner why he was even talking about cutting payroll when the Yankees brought in $700 million in revenue last year — including $339.5 million in ticket and suite sales, enough to cover their entire payroll even without using the other $360 million in TV and concessions and sponsorship money — and Steinbrenner replied thusly:

“Everybody wants to talk about revenues. They need to talk about our expenses, including the $100 million expense to the City of New York that we have to pay every February 1, including the COVID year. … It all starts to add up in a hurry.”

That “$100 million expense to the City of New York” line caught the eye of Hell Gate’s Max Rivlin-Nadler, who recognized it as referring to the “payments in lieu of taxes” that Steinbrenner’s dad arranged to use to pay off his share of the new Yankee Stadium’s $2.3 billion construction cost back in 2009. And these aren’t really tax payments or in lieu of them: The Yankees owners just launder their stadium payments through the city in order to be able to use tax-exempt bonds, which saves them a couple hundred million bucks in interest payments. As Rivlin-Nadler wrote:

That “$100 million” actually refers to the around $84 million the Yankees are paying annually instead of taxes as part of their 2006 agreement with the City that eventually saw taxpayers shell out $1.186 billion in cash and tax breaks just to build the new Yankee Stadium, part of a stadium-freebie bonanza hammered out by the Bloomberg administration that at the time was derided as “financial incompetence,” due to ballooning costs and bailouts by the City during the construction.

Rivlin-Nadler, who I used to work with at the Village Voice, and I then kibitzed over email a bit about his initial assessment of how much in tax breaks Steinbrenner is pocketing, with me pointing out that the city Independent Budget Office had estimated the total future value of that tax break as $416.6 million, in 2009 dollars. After some recalculations, he went with Sports Business Journal’s conclusion that the Yankees got tax breaks of $122 million in 2024, and paid $84 million in PILOTs, amounting to a net tax benefit of $38 million a year.

See the problem yet? Those PILOTs don’t go to the city general fund like normal property taxes do — the city Industrial Development Agency just uses them to pay off the bonds for the stadium. So either the full $122 million a year needs to be counted as a tax break, or $38 million is a tax subsidy and the rest is a subsidy by the city in paying off the stadium debt. But either way it amounts to the same thing: $122 million a year in subsidies by virtue of the stadium not paying property taxes.

Except there’s an additional problem on top of this: How did the IDA calculate how much the Steinbrenners would have been paying property taxes if they paid them? The agency could use the property’s official assessment, sure — but it turns out that’s a fiction too, as the city jacked up the stadium’s tax assessment so that the Steinbrenners could shell out $84 million a year and still claim that these were equivalent to “generally applicable tax” payments. (Only generally applicable taxes can be used for tax-exempt bonds, for reasons that have to do with the 1986 Tax Reform Act and we really don’t have to go into now, but there’s an explanation here if you’re curious.)

So the “$100 million expense to the city” that Hal Steinbrenner is whingeing about is actually $84 million that he’s spending on his own stadium costs, plus $38 million in additional “tax breaks” that are only tax breaks because he needed to pretend he’s getting that much in tax breaks in order to pretend that he’s paying taxes. It couldn’t be clearer!

To try to get to the bottom of all this, I contacted Geoffrey Propheter, the University of Colorado Denver economist who wrote the book on property taxes and stadiums, and who before that worked at the Independent Budget Office that had previously come up with those initial tax break projections. Propheter replied that the last time he calculated the value of the Yankees’ tax break — using the value of other comparable properties, thus ducking any issues with those dodgy official assessments — was for his book in 2019, when he figured the Yankees’ total tax break as amounting to $730 million in 2020 dollars over 40 years. That would be $597 million in 2009 dollars, so only a slight increase from the IBO’s initial projection of $416.6 million, thanks to the stadium being worth more than anticipated. Though Propheter also cautions that values of newer sports venues opened since 2019 could make the tax breaks worth even more.

If you’re like me, you’ve long since given up hoping for an exact tax break figure and are just begging for all the numbers to stop. The overall takeaways, at least, are clear: 1) The Steinbrenners are saving more than $700 million by not having to pay property taxes on their stadium; 2) Hal griping about having to still spend $84 million a year on the construction costs of his family’s own stadium that they insisted they needed so they could have “a five-star hotel with a ballfield in the middle” is close to the definition of chutzpah. Which means Rivlin-Nadler’s concluding question remains right on: “Is now really the precise moment that Hal Steinbrenner, who mostly spends his time in Florida, wants to complain about the deal that has helped his team become worth $8.2 billion, at last count?” You already know the answer to that: Sports owners gonna sports owner.

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Friday roundup: Denver mayor says he’ll fight to the death to give George Lucas’s wife $170m for a soccer stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

I had a birthday this week, and nothing says “Yes, you’ve been writing this blog since you were 32 years old and you’re apparently going to have to keep at it well into old age, you got a problem with that?” than becoming a Field of Schemes supporter! There are both one-time and recurring payment options, many of which give you the chance to get one of just ten remaining copies of this Vaportecture art print before they’re gone forever, so act now!

Or just keep on reading and commenting, honestly, that at least makes me feel like this entire project has been worth something, even if the central problem it has detailed shows no sign of slowing down. I remain inspired by the Straight Dope‘s tagline “Fighting Ignorance Since 1973 (It’s Taking Longer Than We Thought),” though the fact that the Straight Dope stopped publishing in 2018 without declaring victory over ignorance is sobering, admittedly.

Anyway, onward!

  • Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has heard the NWSL expansion Denver Summit owners’ threat to pursue a “parallel path” in unspecified neighboring cities at the same time as trying to win over a city council not crazy about handing them maybe $170 million in cash and tax breaks, and he knows just how to respond: by offering to do whatever it takes to get Summit co-owner (and Broncos co-owner, and wife of billionaire George Lucas) Mellody Hobson to build in his city. “Over my dead body will I let the Broncos stadium leave Denver,” said Johnston on Wednesday. “Over my dead body am I going to let the Summit stadium leave Denver. We want that site to be here.” Noooooo, that’s not at all how you haggle, you’re doing it all wrong! It remains to be seen whether the Denver city council will take up Johnston on his “dead body” offer.
  • Residents of Kansas’s Johnson County are “seething” over the possibility of the Kansas City Royals building a stadium there, according to the Kansas City Star, though the Star also reports that a poll found 53% of residents support the idea and 40% oppose it. But also 40% of respondents said the Royals should stay put at Kauffman Stadium vs. 26% who wanted them to move to Kansas, a good seethe is so hard to find these days.
  • How did New York Mets owner Steve Cohen take his plans to build a casino next to his stadium from distant longshot to likely winner? One part, two local anti-casino activists write in the New York Daily News, involved hiring two community board members (one now the councilmember-elect for the district) as consultants, while also holding fundraisers for the local state assemblymember. The main reason for Cohen’s success may still be that the state senator who was his main opponent also turned out to be the most disliked person in Albany, but throwing money around to local officials couldn’t have hurt, either.
  • Buffalo Bills fans appear to have given up and bought the hated personal seat licenses required to get tickets at the new publicly funded stadium scheduled to open next year, with nearly 90% of the PSLs reportedly having sold. All of the $250 million in proceeds so far will go toward paying Bills owner and superyacht captain Terry Pegula’s $1 billion in stadium expenses, none of it toward paying New York state and Erie County taxpayers’ $1 billion in stadium expenses, because standard business practice something something.
  • It’s still not clear where Athletics owner John Fisher will find the $1.4 billion he needs to build an entire ballpark in Las Vegas, but he’s certainly building something: Construction crews started pouring concrete for the lower deck this week. There’s been no word when he’ll hit the $100 million spending mark that will allow him to access $380 million in public money, let alone what he’ll do once that money runs out as well, but if nothing else Fisher is committing to the bit.
  • The owners of Sacramento Republic F.C. have only just started building their new soccer stadium, and they’re already seeking permission to expand it from 12,000 to 20,000 seats, just in case they ever want to.
  • Asked how new Tampa Bay Rays owner Patrick Zalupski is doing at coming up with plans for a new stadium, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred somehow managed to say, “With respect to the go-forward issue, Patrick and his group are hard at work getting the lay of the land in the Tampa Bay region to find out what their options are.” Language is always evolving, and Manfred is truly an inspiration in breaking new ground about where it will go in the future, or as he would say, the go-forward time.
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Spurs arena subsidy could reach $1.3B, setting new NBA record for taxpayer money

access_time personNeil deMause

One of the standard items in the stadium campaign playbook is “moving the goalposts” — setting a target for public funding, then once you get it, asking for more on top. It’s a tactic that goes back well before the sports subsidy boom of the last 40 years, at least to New York highway czar Robert Moses, whose go-to move was to use all his available funds to launch a contruction project, then go back to the government for more because what good is half a bridge?

San Antonio Spurs Peter Holt is proving to be a master goalpost-mover, piecing together a series of different taxpayer funding asks while hoping no one will do the math to see what it adds up to:

  • In August, he got the San Antonio city council to approve funneling $489 million worth of future property and sales taxes to a new arena as part of his “Project Marvel” downtown development.
  • In November, he spent at least $7 million on a successful referendum campaign to win $311 million in future Bexar County hotel and car rental taxes to be used for the arena project. (Note: I’ve been reporting that this is $311 million paid out over 30 years, which would only cover about $150 million in current arena costs, because that’s what much of the reporting has said; other reporting and some documents, however, imply that the county would pony up $311 million now, and pay it off with significantly more money over time. The ballot language itself, frustratingly, doesn’t say which it is. I’m continuing to research this, please drop a line if you can provide any concrete confirmation.)
  • Next up, he has another proposed ballot measure set for a vote next May, this time to sell city bonds to provide $250 million in road upgrades so that people can actually get to the arena that they are paying to help build with both their city and county taxes. (This would only be the “first phase” of the traffic work; somewhere, Robert Moses is smiling.)

The only risk of going back to the well so many times is that eventually, people may catch on that you’re starting to talk about real money. And that may be happening to Holt, as the San Antonio Express-News is hinting that San Antonio voters may not like being seen as a bottomless well:

Those improvements — including highway ramps, intersection work and new parking spaces — will likely eat up a sizable chunk of the bond program that will go to San Antonio voters. That means less money for neighborhood projects, which could make the bond a harder sell to voters who already weren’t on board with the downtown arena plan.

(The May vote also would only be for city residents, which could be significant as the November vote was pushed over the top by some wealthy suburban districts.)

The San Antonio Current went into more detail on all this last week, reporting that UT-San Antonio political science professor Jon Taylor thinks that voters could be turned off not just by being asked for repeated bond issues for the arena project, but by a potentially worsening economy:

“One of the biggest problems they face is that we do not know how bad this economy is going to get between now and May,” Taylor said. “How are you going to be able to sell voters on a half-billion-dollar bond proposal that will raise taxes or cost the city money in the face of likely city budget deficits? Will the mayor be on board with it?”…

“The things that get hit first [in a recession] are tourism and conventions,” Taylor said. “So, the prospects of getting a bond passed and convincing people that in a recessionary economy this is a good thing to do — instead of being more prudent with taxpayer money — is a hard sell and an uphill climb.”

If you noticed that Taylor said “half-billion-dollar bond proposal,” that wasn’t a typo: Next May’s ballot measure may actually be for $500 million, as the San Antonio Water System’s chilling plant may need to be relocated to make way for a new hotel that would be part of the project. That would bring the total public subsidy to somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.3 billion, or almost exactly what the arena itself will cost to build. That would also be by far the largest arena subsidy in history, all to replace a venue that is the 11th-newest in the NBA, in a city already dealing with staffing cuts to balance its budget. That indeed sounds like a hard sell — Holt should probably dig under the sofa cushions now for a few million dollars to spend on campaign ads next spring, just in case.

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Would Mamdani aide’s plan to limit stadium food prices cause ticket prices to rise? The answer may surprise Matt Yglesias

access_time personNeil deMause

New York City, you may have heard, has a new mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, who is currently working with his transition team to assemble a staff for when he takes office in January. While most of his team is made up of city political lifers, its co-chair is a somewhat unconventional choice: Lina Khan, who as Joe Biden’s chair of the Federal Trade Commission worked to find new ways to use antitrust law to rein in the power of big corporations. And as atomic news unit redesigners Semafor reported last week, one of her targets for New York, according to “people familiar with the transition,” will be “sports stadiums charging nosebleed prices for concessions.”

Semafor’s grasp on sports metaphor notwithstanding — “nosebleed” typically refers to how high seats are above the ground, not how much they cost — this is a reasonable enough goal, if maybe not the most important one to New Yorkers in making the city affordable. (Semafor did add that the Mamdani administration also plans to police hospitals that overcharge for drugs and companies that violate a new state law requiring transparency about algorithmic pricing.) And, citing no sources at all this time, the article said Khan has identified one old city law that prohibits “unconscionable” business practices as a potential route to banning the $8 pretzel.

Yesterday, though, Semafor followed up to report that “economists are fighting” on X over whether trying to reduce prices is even a good idea, with noted scholars like philosophy major Matt Yglesias arguing that “Price controls for in-stadium beer so that sober sports fan pay higher ticket prices to generate cross-subsidy for drunks is a very bad idea!!” while Columbia law professor Tim Wu replied, “This is just dumb and shows a failure to understand buyers.”

Like those two, I am also not an economist, and odds are neither are you, but we can think this through easily enough. One main reason food and drink prices at sporting events are so high is monopoly power: If you want a beer at a game, you have to buy it at a concession stand, you can’t run across the street to pick up a cheaper one at a bodega. (You can bring in your own pretzel to Mets and Yankees games, but not to Knicks and Rangers and Nets and Liberty games.) So sports fans have to make a decision before attending a game: Am I going to eat and drink beforehand and/or stuff my pockets with contraband granola bars and alcohol gummies, or am I going to factor in the cost of a trip to the concession stand before deciding whether to go to a game?

Matt Yglesias, being Matt Yglesias, doesn’t specify why he thinks “sober sports fans” will pay higher ticket prices if concessions prices are lowered — it’s possible that he thinks that sports team owners have a big number written on a whiteboard somewhere of how much money they need to bring in, and if they can’t get it from gouging on hot dogs, they’ll get it by jacking up ticket prices. If so, that’s easily enough answered: I wrote a whole book chapter about how that’s not how ticket prices work, either in theory or empirically, since team owners will always jack them up as far as they can regardless of what other money they have coming in (or going out).

If, however, Yglesias means that sports fans would celebrate the end of the $17 beer by using some of their savings to buy more expensive tickets, thus allowing team owners to jack up prices, sure, maybe? As much as sports fans also don’t have a whiteboard somewhere with their game budget written on it, as a sample size of one, I know that I have absolutely factored food costs into ticket-buying decisions: In particular, I’ve started skipping concerts when I didn’t want to pay a table food and drink minimum on top of the ticket price, especially when $18 will only get me a small plate of figs and goat cheese.

So, yes, it’s possible bringing down concession prices would allow team owners to raise ticket prices some. (It doesn’t appear that anyone has done an empirical study of this; I’m still digging.) Whether you think that’s a bad thing will largely depend on how you feel about price controls — economists generally hate them, on the grounds that they lead sellers to cut back on supply, though it’s less clear if team owners used to monopoly pricing would really start closing concession stands if forced to sell $5 beers. (Some teams have already voluntarily cut concession prices to get people to buy more food and drink, and possibly to spend more on tickets as well, it’s hard to tell from the limited examples.) And even if forcing teams to charge something closer to competitive market prices would put more money in fans’ pockets, allowing them to spend more on tickets if they want, that hardly seems like a burden — let alone a “subsidy” for fans who have the temerity to get hungry and thirsty.

Anyway, this is all for Mamdani and Khan and the corporation counsel to sort out, along with lots of other affordability promises the new mayor is going to have to figure out how to implement. In the meantime, bring in a turkey sandwich to your next baseball game, it’s allowed. In fact, maybe outlawing sports venue bans on outside food and drink would be something that everyone, economists included, could get behind? Undoing the K-shaped economy would probably do more to provide real affordability — $8 pretzels are also a byproduct of a society where $8 is no object for a significant minority — but one unconscionable system at a time.

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Why “the worst seat is closer to the field” is not necessarily a sign of a more intimate stadium

access_time personNeil deMause

Northwestern University is building a new $850 million football stadium, which is a crazy amount for a college football stadium, but it’s being mostly paid for by the local billionaire who wants his alma mater to have a new stadium, so at least there’s that. The billionaire’s son, however, is touting the upcoming stadium opening by saying that in reducing the seating capacity from 47,000 to 35,000, he’s helping fans by eliminating bad seats:

“The death of the nosebleeds, “the most expensive seat to build, the hardest seat to sell and has the lowest satisfaction,” [Pat] Ryan [Jr.] told USA TODAY Sports….

“We didn’t just reduce the number of seats. We actually reduced the numbers,” Ryan said. “We did that so that we could put every seat on top of the action by not having to put another 20,000 seats behind. It meant that you don’t have to worry about blocking those other seats. So you can put everybody in.”

Not sure where that first quote starts and begins, might want to check into that, USA TODAY copy editors. But in any case, Ryan’s point is clear: By getting rid of the lousy seats — which cost just as much to build as good ones, but you can’t charge as much for them — Northwestern is doing fans a favor, because the worst seat in the house is now better!

Except that doesn’t really help actual fans any, at all. The 35,000th ticket buyer to a Northwestern game will still be sitting in the same place; they just won’t have any more rows of seats behind them. The 47,000th ticket buyer will indeed be spared their crappy view — because they’ll be at home watching on TV, since the 47,000th seat will no longer exist.

We’ve been over this before, every time a stadium is described as “intimate” because of its low seating capacity: Just because a sports venue has fewer seats doesn’t mean those seats are closer to the field. In fact, most modern stadiums have more levels of luxury seating wedged in, making the worst seats worse than they would be otherwise — check out what adding two new layers of suites is set to do to the upper deck at Barcelona’s Camp Nou, which before its reconstruction offered decent nosebleed tickets despite its massive 95,000-seat capacity. The last seat at the new Yankee Stadium is about the same distance from the field as the last seat at the old one, but that’s because it has about 12% fewer seats total — the 45,000th seat is still just as bad if not worse.

To be fair, Ryan has also talked about “building things up and cantilevering them over instead of going out,” so it’s possible his designers have also worked to bring the remaining upper-deck seats closer to the field by setting them atop the lower deck, which would be a refreshing change from most recent stadium design. (Though it doesn’t really look like it from the renderings.) When stadium builders start talking about “the worst seat in the house” being closer to the action, though, it’s important for readers — and journalists — to demand proof that the new design is actually better for fans, and not just better for the ticket office since they can let the 10,000 chintziest fans stay home and watch on TV.

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Denver NWSL owners threaten to move expansion team before it’s even started play after council delays stadium approval

access_time personNeil deMause

Back in May, the Denver city council voted 11-1 to approve spending $70 million for land and infrastructure for a new stadium for a new NWSL team — at the time unnamed, since dubbed the Denver Summit — with one catch: The council would need to re-vote on it in the fall. “It’s a dicey time,” said councilmember Paul Kashmann. “We may find things ease up over the next six months, or it may be doom and gloom — and we will have to make some very dire decisions.”

Six months later, Denver’s budget is fairly doomy and gloomy, and that was enough to cause the council last week to put off votes on four of the five stadium measures it’s considering. Council president Amanda Sandoval specifically pointed to such items as a possible pedestrian bridge to the stadium — sports team owners sure do love asking for pedestrian bridges — that currently has no set price tag, and is to be paid for by maybe asking the state for money or using local property tax funds or something, we’ll get back to you on that:

“How does that work if we don’t have the funding right now? Like, when does that come into play?” Council president [Amanda] Sandoval asked regarding the potential pedestrian bridge. “I’m just concerned that, like, we’re taking the cart before the horse.”

There was also this exchange between Sandoval and the team’s lawyer:

“The core agreement was in all of the documents that were sent to all council members last week,” said Andrea Austin of Greenberg Traurig, outside counsel for the group working on the development of the Summit’s stadium.

“Yeah, and parts of them are blank,” said Sandoval.

“Parts of the exhibit. The agreement itself is not blank,” Austin said.

“No, I want to see the funding, like the money is not here,” Sandoval said.

“The money is all in the funding agreement. What is not there are the specific allocations of how that is spent,” Austin said.

In fact, the proposed stadium project could be significantly worse for Denver than $70 million plus ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ for a pedestrian bridge. As covered here back in May, the council is also considering exempting the stadium land from property taxes, plus kicking back property taxes on the stadium itself and other nearby development — a subsidy that University of Colorado Denver sports economist Geoffrey Propheter at the time estimated would cost the public “definitely less than $300 million but definitely more than $175 million.” The Denver Urban Renewal Authority has since projected the TIF cost as $158 million through 2042, which would be more like $100 million in present value — even if that lower estimate is correct, city cash and tax breaks would end up covering the bulk of the team owners’ proposed $200 million stadium cost.

The team’s owners, who include Mellody Hobson, wife of billionaire filmmaker George Lucas, have naturally enough responded that if they have to go through a whole legislative process before cashing $170 million or more in taxpayer checks, maybe they’ll just take their soccer balls and go, you know, somewhere:

“Denver Summit FC ownership is committed to fulfilling our obligations to the league, our fans, our athletes and the community. That means we need to deliver a purpose-built stadium for women’s professional soccer – on time, ready for play in March of 2028. We have been planning for a permanent stadium at Santa Fe Yards in Denver’s urban core. Given the challenges we have faced in the Denver City Council process, we are currently pursuing a parallel path regarding the stadium site and engaging with other jurisdictions outside Denver. We will continue to engage in an open and honest dialogue with the Mayor, City Council and Community in Denver.”

The Summit are currently scheduled to start play in 2026 at the Broncos‘ stadium, so “need to deliver a purpose-built stadium” refers only to the team owners’ promise to the league that they’d get their own 14,500-seat stadium eventually. This seems like it shouldn’t really be Denver’s problem — “We should not be rushing a spending decision of this level because of agreements between private parties,” remarked councilmember Sarah Parady — but arbitrary deadlines and unspecified move threats are part of the standard stadium playbook, you just have to expect them and move on. The council has meetings all this week; it’ll be interesting to see if and how Sandoval and other members respond.

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