Category: Detroit City F.C.

Detroit’s own clown documents show taxpayers losing $39m on $45m soccer stadium subsidy

access_time personNeil deMause

After I reported here Friday about Detroit’s WXYZ-TV reporting without comment that the new Detroit City F.C. soccer stadium getting $88 million in tax breaks “is expected to generate $25 million in annual economic impact,” Kennesaw State economist J.C. Bradbury dug up the actual report making that projection, and hoo boy:

Good grief. This is the document being used to claim that the Detroit minor-league soccer stadium will generate a $25 mil economic impact *per year*. It's nothing but ridiculous assertions. Reporting this as some sort of credible assessment is negligence. detroitmigov.app.box.com/v/DCFC-CBO-R…

— J.C. Bradbury (@jcbradbury.com) 2025-11-29T14:12:14.831Z

“Report” is probably a misnomer: The document, produced by the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation, is in fact a four-page slide deck, one of which is just a title screen. The remainder consists of numbers with no sourcing beyond “based on data provided by Detroit City FC and Visit Detroit,” and which assume 20 non-soccer events a year drawing 10,000 fans each. More troublingly, the projections also compare the economic impact from a stadium with the economic impact of nothing at all ever being built on the site (ignoring opportunity cost), don’t attempt to account for what spending at the stadium site might be cannibalized from elsewhere in the city (ignoring the substitution effect), and conflate present-day value with future revenue —it turns out that $25 million a year figure is actually the average over 30 years, with it starting at $18.4 million and growing over time.

The real kicker, though, is the slide posted by Bradbury, which rather than “economic impact” (money changing hands in your city) looks at “fiscal benefits,” which is how much tax money would come in as a result of a project. That projection comes to an average of $407,000 a year over the next 30 years. Even if we ignore that much of that tax revenue would be backloaded, that’s still only about $6 million worth of new taxes Detroit would bring in from the new stadium — in exchange for redirecting $45 million in taxes (the present value of $88 million over 30 years) to Detroit City F.C.’s ex-lobbyist owner.

(To distract from that sadly low tax revenue number, DEGC stuck the unrelated “annual new visitor spending” number at the bottom of that slide as well, which is some next-level misdirection, even for a clown document.)

It’s still unclear exactly what the whole $88 million would go toward: The DEGC document shows 84% of it as arriving via “brownfield TIF reimbursement” funding, but the act authorizing brownfield TIFs allows the proceeds to be used for all kinds of “infrastructure improvements,” demolition, and other things that aren’t specifically environmental cleanup. So it’s altogether possible that the soccer team owners will be able to use a large chunk of that $45 million worth of tax kickbacks on building, if not their stadium proper, amenities for their stadium, in exchange for contributing just $6 million in new taxes — and that’s the best-case scenario, according to the team’s own rosy projections. Good grief, indeed.

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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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Friday roundup: Pritzker demands Bears pay off $534m Soldier Field debt before approving stadium tax break, it’s on!

access_time personNeil deMause

It’s not that often that one news story gets a place of pride ahead of the Friday morning bullet points, but I’d say this one qualifies: Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has said that before he’ll consider granting the Chicago Bears owners tax breaks on their proposed Arlington Heights stadium, he wants them to pay off the remaining $534 million debt on Soldier Field first:

“We need the Bears to pay off what’s owed on the existing stadium. That’s going to be a really important feature of whatever happens.”…

The governor noted that the state works with a lot of private businesses on property tax incentives, but when it comes to the Bears, “if they want a … bill or some other help, we’re going to make that a pre-requisite.”

On the one hand, this is kind of a dumb number to choose: As we’ve covered here before in detail, remaining stadium debt is just bookkeeping, and has more to do with how a city chose to finance a project than with the actual cost to taxpayers. On the other: Sure, hell yeah, if Bears execs are going to demand a pile of future tax breaks, come right back at them with a demand for cash up front. This is what hardball negotiations look like when you have leverage, and it’s nice to see an elected official get serious with the haggling, even if you can quibble over the details.

If the Bears owners don’t want tax breaks, noted Pritzker, they’re welcome to move wherever they like. No reply yet from team execs, but you have to imagine they’re trying to count votes to figure out how to get a Pritzker-proof majority in the state legislature, which looks like an uphill battle. Or they could, you know, build their new stadium without any public assistance at all, though the last time that option was presented to them they started shopping around for other sites in or new Chicago where they might get somebody else to help pay the bill, we could yet see this again.

Okay, enough about the Bears, let’s move on to the speed round:

  • After saying last month that his new stadium plan would require “city and state support for infrastructure and programmatic build out,” Detroit City F.C. owner Sean Mann has now put a price tag on that support: $88 million in property tax breaks toward a $193 million total project cost. (Mann previously said the stadium would pay full property taxes, but apparently had his fingers crossed behind his back at the time.) That’s $88 million for a team in the second-tier USL Championship, which is, I’m not going to say a record because that would take a lot of research to confirm on a busy morning, but I think we can all agree “a lot.”
  • How’s development around Worcester’s new Red Sox minor-league baseball stadium going, seven years after Worcester-based economist Victor Matheson warned that new housing could end up just cannibalizing development that would have happened anyway? Even worse than that, it turns out, as much of the land around the stadium remains undeveloped, and since tax revenues from that land were supposed to be siphoned off to pay off the stadium, now Worcester is having to dip into its general fund to cover those costs instead. Somebody please check in with the Worcester Chamber of Commerce to see if they still think that their project will be different.
  • Prospective Orlando MLB expansion team co-owner Rick Workman has bailed to become a minority owner of the Tampa Bay Rays, leading prospective co-owner John Morgan to bail as well, saying: “The fix is in. What I believe will now happen is this group will seek a sweetheart deal in Tampa, while stringing the prospects of Orlando as a bargaining chip. Get lots of free land and entitlements and make a real estate profit on the surrounding land at the taxpayers’ expense.” That was always the most likely scenario, especially since it seems like MLB expansion is going to put off until next decade sometime, but it’s bracing to hear a wannabe owner say the quiet part loud.
  • The Denver Post editorial board says the Broncos owners’ plans for a new stadium at Burnham Yard is “an announcement that all of Colorado can celebrate,” before noting several paragraphs later that the team hasn’t said if it will pay fair market value for state-owned land, siphon off stadium property or sales taxes, or receive any other tax subsidies. Editorial writing sounds real easy, no editors or fact-checkers telling you you’re not making any sense, just say whatever you feel like and hit publish, that’s the life!
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Friday roundup: Reading the fine print on stadium and arena deals is a lost art

access_time personNeil deMause

A note to all of you Field of Schemes supporters who signed up to receive the daily posts in email — I’ve been made aware of a glitch that may have been keeping some new members from getting the emails. This should now be fixed, but if you think you should be receiving emails but still aren’t, please contact me; if you think you shouldn’t be receiving emails but are, then really contact me. (And if you’re not receiving emails because you haven’t become a monthly patron but would like to, just sign up!)

And with that business out of the way, let’s move on to the real excitement: the week’s leftover stadium and arena news!

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