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Friday roundup: “Unbelievable” Utah Olympics projections, Cavs crony capitalism, and stadium vapordistricts

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s Friday, I’ve been testing negative for two days, time to see what we all missed this week while we were busy making other plans:

  • “Second Winter Olympics could spark $6.6B in economic output for Utah, new report finds” reported a headline at KSL-TV, and “could” and “output” are doing an awful lot of work there. (Number of actual economists consulted for the KSL story: zero.) “These numbers are just so unbelievable,” said Salt Lake City Olympic committee COO Brett Hopkins, and yep, can’t argue with that!
  • The guy who negotiated massive tax kickbacks for Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert for the city is getting hired by Gilbert as the team’s CFO, this is fine.
  • The owners of Racing Louisville and Louisville City FC promised to build a new development around their new soccer stadium after it opened in 2019 with the help of city funding, but haven’t actually done so. “There’s good soccer going on, and I was for soccer,” city councilmember Robin Engel said at a hearing last month. “You know, we throw these TIFs around anymore these days like it’s chump change.”
  • Boston Magazine has a good oral history of how the 1999 All-Star Game hosted at Fenway Park helped save the ballpark from a planned demolition and replacement by a fake replica, though it kind of elides the main point, which is “Save Fenway Park activists put up a huge stink and then the new guy who bought the Red Sox decided he liked Fenway anyway. Also Save Fenway isn’t “defunct” as the article says, but the group’s Erika Tarlin does get a decent amount of screen time.
  • Whoever ends up the new mayor of Arlington Heights this fall, it’ll likely be someone who supports building a Chicago Bears stadium there, keep that in mind the next time you ask why people don’t just vote elected officials out of office when they back stadium deals.
  • If you always wanted a restroom sign from Pawtucket’s soon-to-be-demolished McCoy Stadium, now’s your chance.
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When does “How much money will Arizona make from the Super Bowl?” start?

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s the Super Bowl! Sometime soon it will be, anyway, you can Google (or Bing?) for what time it starts, but in the meantime the nation’s sports media is all agog over how much money will be raining down on (checks where the Super Bowl will be played) Glendale, Arizona as a result:

More than $1 billion. —ASU News, citing a consultant with a marketing degree who works at Arizona State University’s business school, Feb. 7

“Hundreds of millions.” —Arizona Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill, who was given Arizona Republic op-ed space for this purpose for some reason, Feb. 7

“Hundreds of millions of dollars.” —KPNX-TV, citing the same ASU business school guy, Jan. 25.

“All the way up to $1 billion.” —Sports Betting News, again citing the ASU guy, Feb. 3.

“$600 million.” —Phoenix New Times, citing guess who, Feb. 8.

“As much as $2 billion.” —Phoenix New Times one paragraph later, citing the CEO of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce

“These are made up numbers.” —Kennesaw State University economist J.C. Bradbury, Feb. 8.

“Move the decimal point one place to the left [and] you’re much closer to what it is that it actually provides.” —Lake Forest College economist Robert Baade, Jan. 27, 2007

“Typically, a big number like that comes in and it gets a big headline. It doesn’t always get the scrutiny that it probably warrants, largely because newspapers, particularly, are understaffed and they don’t have the resources to do rigorous examination of a story like that every day.” —Louisville Courier-Journal sportswriter Tim Sullivan, Jan. 28, 2015

 

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Friday roundup: Ravens lease extension would be priciest ever, Royals could be right behind

access_time personNeil deMause

Four full-length posts in three work days already this week, and still there’s more news that got left out! Guess 2023 isn’t going to lack for sports subsidy shenanigans after an eventful 2022, even if the U.S. House spends the entire year trying to figure out how to swear its members in.

While we all wait for noon to tune back in to C-SPAN, some bullet points to keep us occupied:

  • Did I neglect to mention in yesterday’s report on the Baltimore Ravens lease extension that at 15 years in exchange for $600 million in renovation money, the $40 million a year cost makes it the most expensive sports team lease extension in history, blowing past the New Orleans Saints‘ $30 million a year and the Indiana Pacers‘ $24 million a year? To make up for that, you can hear (and watch a slightly blurry) me expound on it at length to WNST’s Nestor Aparicio. (In other Ravens news, my request to the Maryland Stadium Authority for an actual copy of the team’s new lease was met with a reply of “Thank you for contacting the Maryland Stadium Authority. This email acknowledges receipt of your public information act request,” so it may be a while before we get to see that.)
  • The Kansas City Star editorial board, after stumping for a new downtown stadium for the Royals, now warns “there is much we don’t know about the plan.” You mean who would pay for the possibly $1-billion-plus in construction costs that Royals owner John Sherman doesn’t want to cover? Yes, that, but mostly the team needs to vow to stay put for 30 years or else “voters will rightly reject any tax for the ballpark.” That would be, as you know if you didn’t skip past the bullet point just above and can do simple math, one of the priciest lease per-year lease extensions in sports history, but the Star editors are apparently all about defining success downwards.
  • Louisville City F.C. got a bunch of money from the city for a new soccer stadium in 2017, with promises that new development around the stadium would generate enough new property taxes to make it a win-win. You can probably guess how this is going, but in case you’re a rose-colored-glasses wearer who somehow stumbled onto this site, here’s a WDRB article with lots of photos of the stadium surrounded by nothing but empty lots, plus team co-owner Tim Mulloy talking vaguely about how “we’re sitting on a couple of opportunities right now that we’re very excited about.”
  • City leaders in Augusta, Georgia want to build a new arena for concerts (and, I guess, a minor-league hockey or basketball team if the city ever gets one again) and pay for it with a 0.5% sales tax hike, which Mayor Pro-Tem Brandon Garrett says is a great idea because it “takes much of the burden off of property tax owners and puts the burden on sales tax.” That’ll be great news for the 53% of Augusta households that are homeowners, and somewhat less good news for the 100% of Augusta households that pay sales tax; guess Garrett hasn’t learned about tax regressivity during his formative time as a billboard sales manager.

 

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Plague of minor-league soccer stadium subsidy demands reaches pandemic proportions

access_time personNeil deMause

Oh hey, USL press release about the ill-fated Pawtucket soccer stadium project, which utterly fails to mention either the metastasizing public costs or the fact that Rhode Island voters now oppose funding it by a 44-35% margin. Anything else in there of actual interest?

Tidewater Landing becomes one of five current stadium projects that are under construction in the USL Championship and USL League One, including one for a future USL Championship club in Des Moines, Iowa. There are another 11 stadium projects approved or in development across USL Championship and League One, following clubs such as Colorado Springs Switchbacks FC, Louisville City FC, Monterey Bay F.C., and Chattanooga Red Wolves SC, whose new homes have opened in recent years.

So, five stadiums under construction (or at least having had a groundbreaking, which lets Pawtucket qualify even though funding hasn’t gotten final approval) and 11 others “in development” — that’s rather a lot, even for a league that currently sports 38 teams across two levels in an attempt to take over the U.S. soccer world by sheer volume. The press release doesn’t specify which cities the USL is currently getting or seeking stadiums in, so with the help of the Field of Schemes archives and Reddit, let’s attempt a rundown in rough order of approvalness:

That’s 19 potential projects, though only maybe ten of them could be considered in progress, and for some of those you’d have to squint really hard. John Mozena of the Center for Economic Accountability, the people behind those excellent stickers, has a Twitter thread about this whole kerfuffle, in which he points out that sports stadiums, thanks to being closed and empty most of the time, have less economic impact than your typical supermarket or chain food store:

If there’s a silver lining to all this, it’s that most of the USL stadium campaigns appear to be spinning their wheels to various degrees. If there’s whatever is the opposite of a silver lining, it’s that none of the potential team owners are giving up, because why stop grabbing for that brass subsidy ring if you can maybe get tens of millions of dollars if you get lucky? Not sure if the USL qualifies as a Ponzi scheme yet, but it’s certainly striving to head in that direction.

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NM United owner says maybe he’d chip in a little something toward $70m stadium, if people really want

access_time personNeil deMause

New Mexico United execs held a public Zoom meeting on Tuesday night to discuss its planned $65-70 million new stadium, virtually all of which would be funded with public money. According to the Daily Lobo:

At the meeting, public concerns included the potential capacity of the stadium, the historic status of the Barelas neighborhood, getting the surrounding community involved and how much the team will be willing to contribute on top of the city’s bond sales. [team owner Peter] Trevisani said listening to the community would be a priority and confirmed that the team would contribute if needed.

“If it’s an issue of getting from $60 million to $70 million, the team will step in, and we will have skin in the game,” Trevisani said.

Aw, how generous of him!

The issue of how much city taxpayers should spend on a new soccer-specific stadium is shaping up to be the big question surrounding the stadium plans, as it should be: This would be easily the priciest USL stadium subsidy ever. (I’m still trying to tally the final numbers for Louisville City F.C.‘s stadium, but it likely wasn’t much over $30 million, and nothing else comes close.) Which is why it’s interesting that as soon as the public price tag started becoming clear, the city stopped asking residents about it:

[A 2019 survey] asked respondents if they supported using public funds to build either the multipurpose arena or soccer stadium.

Half – 50% – said they supported the public investment, while 38% said they opposed it. …

But the city did not include a separate question about using public money for a new venue in the 2020 survey as it had just the previous year.

That’s still a pretty good level of support for public funding of a United stadium, though it’s important to note that nobody has ever asked if $60-70 million is the right amount of public funds to spend on one. (Albuquerque residents are overwhelmingly in favor of a new soccer stadium if you don’t ask them who should pay for it; the city has not surveyed locals on whether they feel the same way about a pony.) I’m going to be part of a panel discussion on KUNM-FM from 8-9 am Mountain Time this morning, along with Trevisani and some local elected and unelected officials; this should be interesting.

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A’s move threat, Day 2: Team exec, mayor stump for $855m in public money, just disagree on which public

access_time personNeil deMause

Day 2 of Oakland A’s owner John Fisher’s threat to hold his breath until he turns blue move his team out of town if he doesn’t get $855 million in “infrastructure” spending from the city of Oakland was all about the principals being interviewed on daytime TV and radio talk shows, apparently, which provided every bit as much enlightening journalism as you would expect. First off, we have A’s stadium czar Dave Kaval explaining to KNBR’s Papa & Lund (who “delight the Bay Area with their unique combination of loose and informative sports talk“) why the Oakland Coliseum site isn’t acceptable for a new stadium, if by “explaining” you mean “propagandizing”:

“The site here is really a manifestation of the 1960s design for ballparks and sports venues,” Kaval told Papa & Lund on Wednesday. “Destination, lots of on-site parking, just kind of like in a big parking lot. That was all over the country. That was in places like Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium (Braves) and Riverfront (Reds) and all these stadiums across the country. Candlestick was kind of like that.

“But that model has shifted. All the modern stadiums since the 90s and Camden Yards have really been built in these downtown urban corridors and been really successful. Obviously Oracle Park is an example of that, so is Petco Park down in San Diego, and that is really the model that we’re looking for in success in baseball.”

Except that’s not entirely true: The areas around the Baltimore Orioles‘ Camden Yards, the San Francisco Giants‘ Oracle Park, and the San Diego Padres‘ Petco Park are considered “downtown urban corridors” today, yes, but none of them especially were before the stadiums were built. And if we’re talking “all the modern stadiums,” then we have to include the Atlanta Braves‘ new stadium, which was built way out in the suburbs with a faux-urban mixed-use development around it; not to mention the New York Yankees‘ and Mets‘ new stadiums, neither of which is anywhere near downtown (and which in the Mets’ case is still surrounded by parking lots).

And more important, the Oakland Coliseum may currently sit in a sea of parking lots, but, especially in the red-hot East Bay real estate market, there’s nothing stopping Fisher from building a new neighborhood on that site the same way he hopes to at Howard Terminal, which is currently a sea of shipping containers. Kaval could have more honestly argued that the Coliseum site might not be as lucrative as building at Howard Terminal after Oakland taxpayers spent $855 million to spruce up the local roads, but presumably that didn’t play as well with the focus groups.

(I should also note that KNBR’s accompanying article misstated something itself about the A’s stadium plan, citing ESPN as reporting “the public’s share of the approximately $12 billion project at $2.2 billion,” a figure that’s been repeated elsewhere as well. That’s because ESPN’s Jeff Passan did some uncharacteristically sloppy writing in describing the terms of the deal, lumping together the $855 million in city infrastructure spending with projections of $450 million in community benefits to the city and $955 million in new general fund revenues for the city — those last two figures are likely pretty bogus for reasons we’ve covered previously, but either way they’re public benefits, not public costs. The taxpayer price tag on this remains $855 million, which is still a crazy amount of money, mind you, but it’s important to be accurate about these things.)

Moving over to KGO’s Midday Live (“More local news, more local weather, more local hot topics“), we find Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf clapping back against Fisher’s demands by … okay, actually she pretty much made his case for him, saying she “appreciates” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred for emphasizing that “a new waterfront ballpark is the only path to keeping the A’s in Oakland,” and responding to a question about whether $855 million was too high a price tag like this:

“The A’s are privately financing the ballpark itself. But for this ballpark to be successful, we will need to make transportation improvements beyond the ballpark. And deliver community benefits that our community expects. Particularly to make sure this project does not cause displacement or gentrification…

“What we need is for our other regional partners to participate: The port, the county, the state. We all will see incredible revenues if this project gets built. Contributing some of those new project-based revenues is the key to getting this done. We have gotten a lot done over this year. I am confident we can get this over the finish line.”

Translation: I don’t want to spend $855 million in city money, but $855 million in city plus county plus state money? That’d be cool. Discuss amongst yourselves whether this is a massive betrayal of Schaaf’s principles that not a dime of public funds should be spent on sports stadiums or a clever gambit to get taxpayers in the rest of the state to pay for new roads and bridges in her city by piggybacking on Fisher’s threat.

KGO also has its own interview with Kaval in which he says that the $855 million in city money isn’t really city money, because “we pay the city that money, and then they use it for that infrastructure.” First off, hey, that’s the Casino Night Fallacy! And secondly, that’s not just the A’s owners paying the taxes that they’re demanding be kicked back:

(Area to be developed by the A’s is in gray.)

Where all this ends up is anyone’s guess, but fortunately in our modern world we have the gambling industry to make those guesses for us. A Forbes “contributor” (i.e., unpaid writer) notes that the betting odds (not clear on from which source) have the A’s eventual destinations ranked in this order: Las Vegas (7-4), Montreal (5-1), Charlotte (6-1), Portland (6-1), San Antonio (8-1), Nashville (11-1), Indianapolis (12-1), San Jose (12-1), Austin (14-1), Oklahoma City (14-1), Vancouver (14-1), Louisville (16-1).

You can also bet on whether the A’s will relocate by the end of 2022, and while the odds are slightly against it — a $100 bet on them moving will earn you $110 in winnings, while a $150 bet on them staying put will only earn you $100 — the very fact that none of those cities listed currently have stadiums for the A’s to move into or could build one in the next year and a half would seem to make a “no” bet some pretty easy money. Unless “relocate” means announce a relocation down the road, not actually pack up and go? Maybe better check the fine print before you put down your life savings on this one.

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Friday roundup: Jacksonville council holds screaming match about Jaguars subsidy, Braves to charge county for fixing anything that wouldn’t fall out of stadium if you turned it over, plus Texas cricket wars!

access_time personNeil deMause

I admit, there are some Fridays where I wake up and realize I have to do a news roundup and it just feels like a chore after a long week, and, reader, this was one of those Fridays. But then I looked in my inbox and there was a new Ruthie Baron “This Week In Scams” post for the first time in months, and now I am re-energized for the day ahead! Also despondent about how the fossil fuel industry is trying to catfish us all into thinking global warming isn’t real, but that’s the complex mix of emotions I have come to rely on “This Week In Scams” for.

And speaking of complex mixes of emotions, let’s get to this week’s remaining sports stadium and arena news:

  • Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry on complaints that Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s $200 million development subsidy deal is being rushed through the city council: “What does that mean, it’s rushed? What does that mean? We are following the process we follow as a city. The administration has put forth legislation that includes the development of Lot J. The City Council will take their time and do their work. And then they’ll ultimately have to press a green button or a red button — a yes or a no.” Now I really want to know if the Jacksonville city council actually votes by pushing a green or red button, and if so what they do if a city councilmember has red-green color blindness, and oh hey, what happened at yesterday’s council hearing? “Finger-pointing, name-calling and what some members say was a big embarrassment for government”? Excellent, keep up the good work.
  • The Atlanta Braves owners have tapped their first $800,000 from their $70 million stadium repair fund, half of which is to be paid for by Cobb County, to pay for … okay, this Marietta Daily Journal article doesn’t say much about what it will pay for, except that one item is a new fence, and there was dispute over whether a fence counted as a repair (which the fund can be used for) or an improvement (which the team is supposed to cover). It also notes: “Mike Plant, president & CEO of Braves Development Company, described capital maintenance costs in 2013 by using the example of taking a building and turning it upside down. The items that would fall out of the building represent general maintenance, which is the responsibility of the Braves, while the items that do not fall out, such as pipes, elevators and concrete, fall under capital maintenance.” This raises all kinds of questions: Would elevators really not fall out of a stadium if you turned it upside down? What if furniture, for example, fell off the floor but landed on an interior ceiling? Would you have to shake the stadium first to see what was loose and just stuck on something? So many questions.
  • The Grand Prairie city council has approved spending $1.5 million to turn the defunct Texas AirHogs baseball stadium into a pro cricket stadium, which the Dallas Morning News reports “could cement North Texas as a top U.S. market for professional cricket.” (If this sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of nearby Allen, Texas, which thought about building a cricket stadium a couple of years ago but then thought better of it.) I went to a pro cricket match in the U.S. once, years ago, and there were maybe 100 people in the stands, and later the league apparently folded when none of the players showed up for a game, but surely this will go much better than that.
  • Angel City F.C. has announced it will be playing games at Banc of California Stadium, which made me look up first what league Angel City F.C. is in (an expansion team in the National Women’s Soccer League) and then what stadium named itself after Banc of California (the Los Angeles F.C. stadium that opened in 2018, I’m pretty sure at no public expense but you never know for sure with these things, and which is not supposed to be called Banc of California Stadium anymore since Banc of California bailed on its naming-rights contract in June) and then why Banc of California insists on spelling “Banc” that way (unclear, but if it was an attempt to put a clean new rebranding on the bank after its creation in a 2013 merger, that maybe didn’t go so well). So now, burdened with this knowledge, I feel obligated to share it — if nothing else, I suppose, it’s a nice little microcosm of life in the early Anthropocene, which may be of interest to future scholars if the cockroaches and microalgae can figure out how to read blogs.
  • The Richmond Times-Dispatch says that even if the Richmond Flying Squirrels get eliminated in baseball’s current round of minor-league defenestration, “Major League Baseball’s risk is our gain” if the city builds a new stadium that … something about “a multiuse strategy”? The editorial seems to come down to “Okay, the team may get vaporized, but we still want a new stadium, so full speed ahead!”, which is refreshing honesty, at least, maybe?
  • When I noted yesterday that the USL hands out new soccer franchises like candy, I neglected to mention that a lot of that candy quickly melts on the dashboard and disappears, so thanks to Tim Sullivan of the Louisville Courier Journal for recounting all the USL franchises that have folded over the years.
  • Six East Coast Hockey League teams are choosing to sit out the current season, and that’s bad news for Reading, home of the Reading Royals, according to Reading Downtown Improvement District chief Chuck Broad, who tells WFMZ-TV, “There is lots of spin-off, economic development, from a hockey game for restaurants and other businesses.” Yeah, probably not, and especially not during a time when hardly anyone would be eating at restaurants anyway because they’re germ-filled death traps, but why not give the local development director a platform to insist otherwise, he seems like a nice guy, right?
  • In related news, the mayor of Henderson, Nevada, says the new Henderson Silver Knights arena she’s helping build with at least $30 million in tax money is “a gamechanger” for downtown Henderson because “it’s nice to have locations where events can happen in our community.” This after she wrote a column for the Las Vegas Sun saying how great it will be for locals to be able to “attend a variety of events that create the vibrancy for which our city is known” — a vibrancy that apparently Henderson was able to pull off despite not having any locations where events can happen, because that’s just the kind of place Henderson is.
  • In also related news, the vice president of sales and marketing at New Beginnings Window and Door says that the Hudson Valley Renegades becoming a New York Yankees farm team could be great for his business (which, again, is selling windows and doors) because “the eyeballs are going to be there” for advertising his windows and doors to people driving up from New York City who might want to pick up some windows and doors to take home with them, okay, I have no idea what he’s talking about, seriously, can’t anybody at any remaining extant newspapers ask a followup question?
  • And in all-too-related news, here’s an entire WTSP article about the new hotel Tampa will have ready for February’s Super Bowl that never even mentions the possibility that nobody will be able to stay in hotels for the Super Bowl because Covid is rampaging across the state. Journalism had a good run.
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Friday roundup: Drumming clowns, vaporgondolas, and the XFL rises shambling from its dusty grave

access_time personNeil deMause

The magnets have shipped! Repeat: The magnets have shipped! If you want to get in on this, act now, or you might have to wait until I make my second trip to the post office.

This was an extra-busy news week, which felt like a bit of a return to normalcy after several months of sports team owners mostly focusing more on getting back on the field than on getting money to pay for new fields. But life can’t be put on hold forever, and by “life” I mean “grubbing for someone else’s cash,” because what is life if not that? (Answers may differ if you are not a sports team owner.)

Here’s a bunch more stuff that happened than what already made FoS this week:

  • That protest to call for the New York Yankees to pay their fair share of taxes or maybe just bail out local struggling businesses only drew about 10-15 people, according to NJ.com, but also “clowns playing a drum on stilts.” The site’s accompanying video features less than two seconds of drum-playing stilt clowns, and a whole lot of 161st Street BID director Cary Goodman talking about the plight of local businesses, and while I know Cary and he apparently paid for the clowns, I still say that this is a dereliction of journalistic duty.
  • Along those same lines, the gondola company owned by former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt has reportedly released new renderings of its proposed gondola to Dodger Stadium, but does NBC Los Angeles show us any of them? No, it does not. (I so yearn to see Cab-Hailing Purse Woman cast off her foam finger and hail a gondola.) We do learn that “the gondola system could move up to 5,500 people per hour in each direction, meaning more than 10,000 fans could be transported to Dodger Stadium in the two hours before the start of a game or event,” which seems to misunderstand how people arrive at baseball games, which at Dodger Stadium is mostly all at once in the third inning, and even more misunderstand how people leave baseball games, which is all at once when they’re over, at which point there would suddenly be a two-hour-long line for the gondola. McCourt’s L.A. Aerial Rapid Transit company says it will pay the project’s $125 million cost, but even if true — and you know I’m always skeptical when people ask for public-private partnerships but promise there will be no public money — that doesn’t make this much less of a crazy idea.
  • The XFL’s Los Angeles Wildcats might have to share their stadium this spring with a college football team, and, wait, didn’t the XFL fold? I swear the XFL folded. Oh, I see now that The Rock bought it, so: In the unlikely event that the XFL gets going again, its L.A. team will have to share digs with a college football team playing in the spring. Honestly having to use a football stadium more than 10 days a year just seems like efficient use of space to me, but sports leagues do get gripey about scheduling, even sports leagues that barely exist.
  • That Palm Springs arena being built by AEG now won’t be built in Palm Springs after all, but rather nearby Palm Desert, because the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, whose land was going to be used for the project, decided after Covid hit to “reevaluate what was going on just like most other businesses because they had so many other projects,” whatever that means. Given that the Palm Springs police and fire departments said they’d need tens of millions of dollars to provide services for the new arena, I think it’s safe to say that Palm Springs just dodged a bullet here.
  • The San Francisco 49ers are finally paying rent again to the city of Santa Clara, after initially trying to get out of it because their two exhibition games at home were canceled.
  • This Athletic article about the attempts in the 1980s and ’90s to save Tiger Stadium is paywalled and is not nearly as comprehensive as the entire chapter about the same subject in Field of Schemes, but it does have some nice quotes from Tiger Stadium Fan Club organizers Frank Rashid and Judy Davids (the latter of whom worked on a renovation plan for the stadium that would have cost a fraction of a new one, a scale model for which I once slept in the same room with when she and her husband/co-designer John put me up at their house during a FoS book tour), so by all means give it a read if you can.
  • If you’re wondering how $5.6 billion in subsidies for a new high-end residential/office/mall development in Manhattan is working out now that Covid has both residents and offices moving out of Manhattan, I reported on it for Gothamist and discovered the unsurprising answer: really not well at all.
  • The KFC Yum! Center in Louisville’s naming rights are about to expire, but KFC is talking about signing an extension, so with any luck we have many more years ahead of us to make fun of the name “KFC Yum! Center.”
  • That’s not how you spell “ESPN,” Minneapolis-St.Paul Business Journal.
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Friday roundup: Rattling sabers for Panthers stadium, leagues large and small seek bailouts, and a very large yacht

access_time personNeil deMause

So how’s everyone out there, you know, doing? As the pandemic slowly feels less like a momentary crisis to be weathered and more like a new way of living to be learned (I refuse to say “new normal,” as nothing about this will ever feel normal), it’s tempting to occasionally look up and think about what habits and activities from the before times still make sense; I hope that FoS continues to educate and entertain you in ways that feel useful (or at least usefully distracting) — from all accounts the entire world being turned upside down hasn’t been enough to interrupt sports team owners’ important work of stadium shakedowns, so it’s good if we can keep at least half an eye on it, amid our stress-eating and TV bingewatching.

So get your half an eye ready, because a whole bunch of stuff happened again this week:

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Friday roundup: 49ers stadium squabble, Richmond nixes arena plan (for now), Mets’ $55m taxpayer-funded sofas off-limits to mere minor-leaguers because “status”

access_time personNeil deMause

A glacier in Antarctica just lost a chunk of ice bigger than Seattle twice the size of Washington, D.C. nearly the size of Atlanta almost as big as Las Vegas a third the size of Dublin, maybe it’s time to quit driving an SUV? Or maybe it’s just time to focus on some more human-scale disasters that involve small groups of people enriching themselves to the detriment of humanity:

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