Los Angeles Rams – Page 2 – Field of Schemes

Friday roundup: St. Louis to get $790m Rams payoff from NFL or Kroenke or both, MSG deemed too pricey to move

November 26, 2021 Neil deMause

Not even sure how many people are out there reading this rather than still Thanksgivinging (Canadians, right?), but the news sure hasn’t taken a break for the short holiday week:

As noted in an update to Wednesday’s post about the billions of dollars Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke and the NFL could be on the hook for in the city and county of St. Louis’s lawsuit over the team leaving town, the league and city have reportedly come to a settlement agreement where the league will pay St. Louis $790 million to make the suit go away. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that “the league will determine internally how much will be shouldered by Kroenke and how much by the league and owners” (according to “sources with firsthand knowledge of the settlement”), which should be a fun owners’ meeting for ESPN to do one of its in-depth exposes on. St. Louis University law professor (and former minor-league pitcher suing MLB for violating minimum-wage laws for its minor leaguers) Garrett Broshuis called the settlement “a wake-up call to the NFL,” which, sure, maybe it’ll stop the league from threatening to move teams at the drop of a hat, or maybe at least give local officials some backbone in telling the league, “You just go ahead and try, we’ll see you in court.” Or maybe it’ll just get the league to rewrite its relocation guidelines so they’re not so litigable, or send its owners for training in how not to put in writing letters to fans about their pending move before the league approved it, or at least how not to call it an “Adios, MFs” letter. Either way, at least St. Louis will get $790 million that it can now spend on something more productive than an NFL stadium, which is an undeniable win, whether or not it’s ever repeated.
Talk of relocating Madison Square Garden to make way for a new Penn Station, which has been ongoing for more than eight years and was still in play as recently as this January, is apparently off the table now that it’s been determined it would cost $8.6 billion to do so and taxpayers would have to foot the bill “to avoid lingering MSG complications that would arise with no buyout.” This according to the minutes of a June 1 behind-closed-doors meeting of state development officials and local legislators that was uncovered by the government-watch group Reinvent Albany last week. Metropolitan Transportation Authority chair Janno Lieber went on to add this week in a state hearing that taking time to negotiate for the relocation of the Knicks and Rangers would be “a guarantee that Penn Station won’t be fixed for, I think, another generation,” so really, forget about all that. None of this should stop talk of finally repealing that full property tax break that was supposed to expire in 1992 but instead keeps rebating more than $50 million to the MSG owners every year, but new Gov. Kathy Hochul apparently isn’t interested in doing so; the New York Daily News notes that MSG’s political action committee donated $5,000 to Hochul’s reelection campaign fund in September, which is either a coincidence, a reward for services rendered, or the chintziest bribe ever.
Baltimore’s arena is set to get a $150 million renovation from arena managers Oak View Group — the city’s Board of Estimates voted to approve the deal on Wednesday, but I haven’t been able to track down the actual lease and operating agreement yet to see what if anything the city is giving up — which means we’re getting the usual batch of renderings what the
I have no idea what any of this has to do with a sports/concert arena or why the weird ceiling lighting appears to be reflected in the floor or who that bare-midriffed woman is whose image towers over the (squints) Top Sail Wine Bar, but presumably we’ll find out in due time.
Twenty-one out of 23 Ohio economists surveyed last week say that the economic benefits of sports stadiums don’t outweigh their subsidy costs, which is kind of a dumb way of asking it — you would think it would depend on how much subsidies are, which is actually something raised by several of the individual respondents — but we get the point.
The Newfoundland Growlers have been evicted from their arena in St. John’s during an investigation by the city into allegations of “disrespectful workplace conduct,” and their owner is now trying to turn that into a bidding war by surrounding communities to let him build the new arena that he’s been wanting for a while anyway. Maybe if my idea for a Sunday Night Kroenke series doesn’t pan out, someone could take a stab at this one? David Simon, this has your name all over it!

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Stan Kroenke could owe St. Louis $4B for moving the Rams, is set to fight NFL over who pays the tab

November 24, 2021November 24, 2021 Neil deMause

The Los Angeles Times’ Bill Shaikin had a crazy-long article yesterday about the city of St. Louis’ lawsuit against Rams owner Stan Kroenke for moving the team to Los Angeles in alleged violation of league rules, and because one of Field of Schemes’ jobs is reading crazy-long articles so you don’t have to, here are the important bits:

On April 12, 2017 — 16 days after NFL owners approved the Raiders’ move from Oakland to Las Vegas, and 15 months after NFL owners approved the Rams’ move from St. Louis to L.A. — St. Louis sued. Oakland later sued too.

In both cases, the NFL argued the relocation guidelines represented a league policy, not a binding contract.

This, no doubt, is why the NFL agreed to set up relocation guidelines in the first place: They never expected anyone to hold them to them. (The guidelines, reports Shaikin, were first arrived at back in the ’90s after discussions between the NFL and the U.S. Conference of Mayors to prevent teams from leaving town without warning.) After all, it’s not like a judge would rule that violating your own internal rules could have real-world consequen —

St. Louis Circuit Court Judge Christopher McGraugh ruled that the relocation policy was akin to a contract in that it “contains obligations and promises that may be enforceable in a court of law” and that “many provisions of the relocation policy were intended for the benefit of a club’s home territory.”

Damn those judges, with their minds of their own!

The city of St. Louis’s argument, basically, is that Kroenke always intended to move to L.A., and never negotiated in good faith with St. Louis to keep the team there. And apparently they turned up some evidence for that contention — we’d already heard that Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was mad about one unnamed owner having delivered a “shaky” deposition, and now there’s this:

There is concern in league circles that the discovery process could have turned up documents in which Chargers and Raiders officials — in trying to win NFL approval for their proposed stadium in Carson — outlined how they believed the Rams might not have been in compliance with the relocation policy, according to people familiar with the case not authorized to speak due to the ongoing litigation.

One uncomfortable document already has been disclosed in court. Before the NFL owners voted on whether the Rams would be permitted to move to Los Angeles, Rams staffers had prepared a farewell letter to the fans in St. Louis. Within the Rams’ offices, the document was known as the “AMF letter.”

AMF stood for “Adios, Mother F—.”

Okay, so Kroenke and the NFL may have played a little fast and loose with the whole negotiate-in-good-faith-with-your-current-city thing, figuring no one would really hold them to it. What could this mean if they lose in court?

St. Louis has asked to be awarded the $550 million that the Rams paid the NFL as a relocation fee, as well as the increase in the franchise value since the move.

Forbes estimated the Rams’ franchise value at $1.45 billion in 2016, just before the Rams moved, and at $4.8 billion in 2021.

Throw in the tax revenue St. Louis lost when the Rams moved, and damages could top $4 billion, independent of any punitive damages.

That is a lot of money, even for a guy worth upwards of $10 billion. So, naturally, Kroenke doesn’t want to have to be the one to pay it, even though he agreed to indemnify the NFL for any losses sustained in court:

Kroenke could sue the NFL if Goodell tries to compel him to pay damages should a jury find he violated a relocation policy with which the league said he had complied. Kroenke has informed his fellow owners he does not believe the legal “costs” covered under the indemnity extend to damages, and he has asked them to share in the cost of a settlement.

So what we have here is a three-way battle, where Kroenke is trying to settle the lawsuit (his latest offer is believed to be in the $500-750 million range) while simultaneously fighting with the NFL to pay part of the tab. How that latter negotiation is going is the juicy part that I wish Shaikin had more on — there is one delicious quote from Washington University sports business professor Patrick Rishe saying, “Right now, I think they want to roast Stan, figuratively and literally” — but as the court proceedings get ready to kick off in January, things are likely to heat up.

All in all, when you take in the roughly $6 billion Kroenke spent on his new stadium plus his neglecting to ensure that the Chargers would actually have to try to sell seat licenses to help defray his cost, maybe this whole moving-to-L.A.-just-to-prove-he-could thing wasn’t such a great idea after all. Apparently having billions of dollars plus “big balls” doesn’t actually help you make smart decisions — which may be cold comfort to St. Louis football fans, but if their city can get a billion dollars or two on top of the schadenfreude, that’s not nothing.

[UPDATE: Well, that was fast. We’ll see if Kroenke ends up paying the whole $790 million or tries to stick the NFL with some of the bill — more details once there’s an actual announcement, one hopes.]

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Friday roundup: NFL owner throwdown over St. Louis Rams lawsuit, and other prospective miniseries pilots

October 29, 2021 Neil deMause

Sorry for the lateness of today’s roundup, but I had to get a haircut in advance of an interview about the Buffalo Bills stadium plans. (I mean, I needed a haircut anyway, but this made it important to do so on Roundup Friday. This is probably more than you wanted to know about my haircut.) Lots of news this week, let’s get to it!

ESPN did what it does best yesterday, publishing a long fly-in-the-wall report on this week’s NFL meetings based on, you know what, who cares who its sources are when the resulting story includes Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke threatening to sue to get out of his promise to indemnify the NFL against lawsuits from St. Louis over the team’s move out of that city, and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft griping that he wouldn’t have sat on the L.A. relocation committee if he’d known all the shit that would come with it, and Jerry Jones defending his pal (and stadium business partner) Kroenke and blaming the mess on one unnamed owner who gave a “shaky” deposition. This is way better than whatever that HBO show is about rich people that I won’t watch because it looks awful! Somebody greenlight Sunday Night Kroenke already, I’m out of stuff to hate-watch.
The Cleveland Guardians owners are being sued by a men’s roller derby team that, whoops, is also called the Cleveland Guardians and has been since before the baseball team changed its name, maybe somebody should have checked that? You would think that the baseball team owners would have simply paid off the derby team, and it appears that’s what the derby team wanted, but the baseball team made an offer that was “four figures” and then “surreptitiously filed” a trademark application for the name in Mauritius. Actually, forget the Kroenke show, I want to watch Cleveland Trademark Law.
The owners of the new KC NWSL women’s soccer team (catchy name) say they plan to build a “privately financed” $70 million, 11,000-seat stadium in downtown Kansas City, which sounds very promising, but we’ve certainly heard that before about stadiums that turned out to get tax breaks or free land or other under-the-table subsidies. So what’s the deal here? How much is KC NWSL paying to lease the land from Port KC, the local port authority? There are roughly a billion articles on the announcement, but none bother to go into specifics, so let’s file this one under TBD for the moment; in the meantime, here’s your requisite vaportecture of soccer fans watching, naturally, fireworks.
Bronx businesses are less and less thrilled with NYC F.C.‘s proposed soccer stadium, and more and more interested in getting the New York Yankees to actually start paying property taxes. I wouldn’t count on the latter anytime soon since the whole Yankees deal was structured to allow the team owners to pay off their stadium bonds with fake property taxes, and having to pay real property taxes would mess that up, plus the Steinbrenners are not going to want to pay more taxes nohow; but also it doesn’t look real likely that the NYC F.C. stadium is getting built either, so glass half-full, maybe?
There’s a new snag for the proposed Arizona Coyotes arena in Tempe, as the Phoenix Aviation Advisory Board has determined that arriving planes at nearby Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport would only pass “maybe 400 feet” above its roof when approaching to land. There are other airports with less headroom, but still the board’s deputy aviation manager noted that other projects have had to address issues around “the various building materials — the glare, the lighting, the way navigator equipment kind of would bound off surfaces. So it’s not as easy to just say, ‘Well, tell us your height and as long as you keep it under that we should be OK.'”
Not really stadium news except the team in question just got a ton of public money for one, but MLB commissioner Rob Manfred came out in favor of the Atlanta Braves‘ name and fan practice of chanting vaguely Native American things while waving their hands in imitation of chopping someone with a tomahawk, justifying it by saying: “The Native American community in that region is wholly supportive of the Braves program, including the Chop. For me, that’s kind of the end of the story.” The National Congress of American Indians begs to differ, as do some members of the same local tribe the team owners cite as supporting the name and the chop. Game 3 of the World Series is in Atlanta tonight, you can just feel the excitement!

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Friday roundup: Frank White (yes, that one) ready to talk money for Royals stadium, Bills vaccine veto threat, and more

September 17, 2021 Neil deMause

So! Much! News! This post cannot stop it, it can only hope to contain it:

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas and Jackson County Executive Frank White Jr. — yes, that Frank White — say they’re open to talking with Royals officials about a new downtown stadium, which why shouldn’t they, talk is cheap. White said a few years back that he was boycotting the team after they fired him as broadcaster for saying that their sucky players sucked, but now says, “As I have said from day one, we have a responsibility to ensure the county is using the tax dollars entrusted to us by our residents as effectively and efficiently as possible. Part of that responsibility is being open to opportunities to improve the impact our investments are making in the community, including a potential downtown stadium,” so guess he’s over it! We’ll still have to see what “efficiently” means, and if White will be willing to loose his tongue again if Royals owner John Sherman’s financing plan turns out also to suck.
The Buffalo Bills stadium campaign has barely gotten started and already has a lot of stupid going on, but the Erie County legislator who is threatening to veto any stadium if the Bills don’t let unvaccinated fans attend games really kicks it over the top — not least because one legislator can’t “veto” anything, especially when the funding the Bills owners are seeking is likely to come from the state, not the county. Leg. Frank Todaro’s bio states that the body-shop owner “has spent his life fixing things that are broken” and “hates waste and is determined to put the Erie County Taxpayer first,” and the hill he has chosen to die on over giving perhaps a billion dollars or so in tax money to the local billionaire sports team owner is whether the billionaire insists on enforcing public health rules, okay then.
The leading contenders in the extremely contentious Buffalo mayor’s race, meanwhile, aren’t saying much about the Bills stadium plans because — wait for it — the Bills don’t actually play in the city of Buffalo, and neither candidate wants to spend the money for a stadium in the city, because what part of “perhaps a billion dollars” did you miss?
New Mexico United‘s preferred stadium site may be in trouble because part of it would require eminent domain to take from its private owner, and the property owner is claiming in court that the city is getting around this by pretending it’s taking the land for a traffic circle. I mean, a soccer stadium has a circle in the middle, and soccer players are a kind of traffic, and — yeah, this is why I never became a lawyer. Isn’t there somebody the team owners can just pay off to make this problem go away?
St. Louis Circuit Judge Christopher McGraugh has rejected a motion by the NFL and Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke to throw out the city and county of St. Louis’ lawsuit seeking about $100 million in damages for moving the team to L.A. in violation of the league’s own relocation rules. The suit, which has been simmering for four frickin’ years since the last time McGraugh refused to dismiss it, will now move to trial in January, but more important, the league and the Rams only have until September 28 to start turning over internal NFL financial documents for discovery, and “each defendant would be fined $1,000 per day after the deadline if they don’t comply” — I can’t tell if that’s $1,000 each per day for the league and Rams or $1,000 a day for each of the league’s 32 owners, but either way, this should be some fun coming up as the league tries to figure out how to keep its secret books secret.
The Knoxville-Knox County Planning Commission has approved rezoning for a new Tennessee Smokies stadium, which isn’t at all the same as the city and county approving $61 million in public money to build the thing, which hasn’t happened yet. But still, it’s a hurdle, so please mark that off as cleared if you’re scoring at home.
There’s even more news, but I can get to it next week, it’s not going anywhere. Happy weekend, everybody!

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Friday roundup: More crazy stadium subsidy demands than can fit in one headline, you call this a lull?

February 12, 2021February 12, 2021 Neil deMause

Every couple of weeks, it seems, someone in the comments predicts that we are about to see the end of sports’ 30-year surge in stadium and arena subsidies, either because of Covid-depleted budgets or legislators smartening up or just everybody already having a new place. To which I say: If the stadium scam is slowing, why are my Friday mornings still so #$@&%*! busy?

Ahem. And now, the news:

A lawyer for the South Bend Cubs, saying the team owners were “shocked” to discover that a law allowing them to siphon off up to $650,000 a year in sales and income taxes for their own purposes had expired in 2018, has asked the state legislature to renew it. Oh, and also increase the cap to $2 million a year. You know, while they have the document open on their screens. “South Bend and every other city that has retained their relationship with Major League Baseball have to get to a certain level by 2025,” said attorney Richard Nussbaum. “If they don’t, they risk losing the team.” It’s an epidemic, I tells ya.
Speaking of which, Hudson Valley Renegades owner Jeff Goldklang got his $1.4 million in stadium renovation cash from Dutchess County, after emailing residents and fans warning them that the team could move if it was denied the subsidy.
Fort Wayne F.C., which I had to look up to be sure it actually exists and which turns out to be a “pre-professional” (much in the way that kids are “pre-adults”) USL League Two club, is seeking to move up to League One in 2023 and wants a $150 million soccer-stadium-plus-other-stuff project, to be paid for by mumble mumble hey look over there! It also features an instant classic in the field of fans-throwing-their-hands-skyward-while-fireworks-go-off-over-soccer-players-not-playing-anything-recognizable-as-soccer renderings, which is worth $150 million if it’s worth a dime:
The Oakland A’s owners (not the Oakland A’s, I still remember when I was an intern at The Nation Christopher Hitchens lecturing us on how one should always say “the U.S. government” and not “the U.S.” because just because the government approved something didn’t mean the populace did, but anyway) won their lawsuit to allow their Howard Terminal stadium project to have challenges to environmental impact reviews reviewed on a fast track, which is a big thing in California. “This is a critically important decision,” said A’s president Dave Kaval, who indicated he hopes the Oakland city council will be able to vote on a stadium bill this year, presumably after it’s figured out who the hell would pay for what.
Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin wants to talk about building a new hockey arena to keep the Carolina Hurricanes in town long-term — their “old” one opened just over 21 years ago — and Sougata Mukherjee, the editor-in-chief of the Triangle Business Journal, points out that maybe now is not the best time what with 7% of the state not having enough to eat, small businesses on the brink, and, oh yeah, a pandemic still going on. Cue Hurricanes execs or their political talking about how a new arena will mean “jobs” in three, two…
While we wait, here’s San Diego Union-Tribune sports columnist Bryce Miller saying that San Diego should build a new arena to lure a nonexistent NBA expansion franchise because it would be “catalytic.” In the sense of the Oxford dictionary’s sample sentence for meaning 1.1, maybe?
Twenty years ago this week, the Pittsburgh Pirates‘ and Steelers‘ Three Rivers Stadium was blowed up real good, only a little over 30 years after it was first opened. I went to a couple of games at Three Rivers over the years, and I agree with former Pirate Richie Hebner’s review that “the graveyard I work in during the offseason has more life than this place,” and the Pirates’ new stadium is one of my favorites. Still, it and the Steelers’ new stadium deserve the blame for popularizing tax kickbacks in the stadium financing world, after Pittsburgh voters passed a referendum barring any new tax money from going to new stadiums, and the state legislature responded by “loaning” the teams stadium money that would be “repaid” by taxes the state would be collecting anyway — prompting Pittsburgh state rep Thomas Petrone’s timeless comment: “It’s not a grant. It’s not a loan. It’s a groan.”
Phoenix restaurants are hoping that having partial attendance at Suns games will provide more happy hour customers, something that seems not only ambitious given the proven not-so-robust spinoff effects of sports stadiums, but also slightly heedless of whether it’s such a great idea to encourage basketball fans to congregate indoors and take their masks off to drink and then go directly to congregating indoors to watch the Suns. In entirely unrelated news, restaurants around the new Los Angeles Rams and Chargers stadium in Inglewood are afraid of being driven out of business by new high-priced options gravitating to serve well-heeled football fans.
Finally a partial explanation of how funding for that new Des Moines Menace soccer stadium would work: In addition to city funds, it would be up for state hotel-tax funds designated for projects that “improve the quality of life for Iowa residents.” Other projects proposed to dip into the hotel-tax pool include a Des Moines Buccaneers junior hockey arena, a private indoor amateur sports facility, and a new mall; is it just me, or does “quality of life” seem to have been interpreted as “ways to put money in the pockets of Iowa business barons”?
Hey, remember the $200 million highway interchange that Las Vegas is building, totally coincidentally, near the Raiders‘ new stadium? It is now a $273 million highway interchange. But the city needed to build it anyway, because traffic was too bad at the old interchange and, shh, don’t tell them.
Okay, here’s one way in which maybe the pandemic has delayed some stadium spending: The Baltimore Orioles owners have signed a two-year lease extension on Camden Yards, while also working with the Maryland Stadium Authority “to establish a new long-term agreement that includes upgrades to the facility,” according to WJZ-TV. So it’s possible some 2021 and 2022 sports subsidies will end up getting pushed back to 2023 or so — yay?
If you wanted a live webcam of construction on the new Knoxville stadium for the Tennessee Smokies that hasn’t even been approved yet, let alone started construction, the team’s new stadium promotion website has got you covered.

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NFL season opens, bringing partially masked fans and completely masked stadium impact claims

September 14, 2020September 14, 2020 Neil deMause

The NFL season has started, something I mostly noticed because of the appearance of Defector’s (née Deadspin’s) “Why Your Team Sucks” series, and pretty much every news outlet in the U.S. had an article about how there were no fans in the stands and it was weird, something I am not going to bother recapping for you all because I already just did. Except in Jacksonville, that is, where this happened:

News4Jax reports that “officials were strict on the inside and made sure everyone followed the rules” and “News4Jax saw fans wearing masks except for when eating or drinking, and keeping distance in the stands from other pods,” which:

That looks to me more like “except when eating or drinking or talking to the person you’re probably not in a household with who is way less than six feet distanced from you,” but it’s something, anyway.

What the impact on Covid in getting-better-but-still-bad Florida (its death rate per capita is now second in the country), or on still-surging Missouri (where the Kansas City Chiefs allowed in fans for Thursday’s opener, which went not so well) is really hard to predict. That CDC study on restaurants was pretty clear that taking off masks to eat and drink is a major risk, though it’s conceivable that being outdoors will help mitigate that enough that it won’t cause an outbreak. It doesn’t look like anyone has tried to determine the impact of MLS games allowing in fans yet, and that study claiming Sturgis as a superspreader event has been largely debunked, so we’re left with things like that Champions League game in February in Italy, where nobody was masked or distanced or anything, so that’s tough to draw comparisons from. So allowing fans at NFL games is still a giant human experiment, one whose impact in all likelihood won’t be clear for a couple of months yet, at which point it will be too late to do anything about it, because that’s how modern humanity rolls.

Meanwhile, in Inglewood, the Los Angeles Rams opened their new $5-to-6-billion-ish stadium with no fans in attendance, but according the the Los Angeles Daily News’ headline, “a resurgent Inglewood has hope.” Number of Inglewood residents interviewed for the story: one.

“I haven’t felt this way since the first time my father brought me to a Rams game when I was 7 years old in the 1960s,” Inglewood Mayor James Butts said on Friday. “Even though we won’t have the crowds there’s going to be that same feeling because this is history being made.”

You can just smell the resurgence!

After all the vaportecture, I would be remiss if I didn’t include at least a couple of photos of the new Rams and Chargers stadium, so here’s a nicely postapocalyptic one, courtesy of USA Today:

And here’s a nice view of what the game would look like from the upper levels, if you were allowed to watch it from there:

Teams warm up at #SoFiStadium ….Pro football in LA #covid era looms. pic.twitter.com/4JmnPT07ZU

— Ryan Carter (@ryinie) September 13, 2020

Five billion dollars doesn’t buy what it used to.

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Friday roundup: Stadium news reporting hits rock bottom, don’t believe anything you read (except on this site, duh)

August 14, 2020 Neil deMause

Hey look, it’s Friday again! The St. Louis Cardinals are maybe (assuming no positive test results today) going to start playing games again tomorrow for the first time in 17 days; if they pull it off, and no other teams have outbreaks in the meantime, it will be the first time in nearly three weeks that all 30 baseball teams will be in action, and every team in the four major U.S. sports that are in action. That’s way better than I expected, frankly, and shows that isolating players from the general public (and each other) can work — there’s probably a decent chance that most leagues can limp to a conclusion without shutting down entirely, though football remains an enormous question mark with such huge rosters and no bubbles. Still, glass half full, that’s what I always say! (Okay, I never say it, but I’ll say it now.)

In other newses:

A Florida judge has ruled that Inter Miami‘s ballot measure that approved its new stadium was written properly, giving David Beckham one less lawsuit to worry about. Now he just needs to figure out how exactly he’s going to build the stadium, but it’s still early, he’s only been working on this for seven years.
Paterson, New Jersey, has approved a 30-year tax break for the refurbishment and redevelopment of its old Negro League stadium, Hinchliffe Stadium, but there remains no word on how much the tax break is worth. The Paterson Times calls the $129,153 per year in taxes the stadium will now pay “substantially less” than what it would pay normally, but math is still hard, man.
A Florida man broke into a minor-league stadium in St. Petersburg and started living in one of the luxury suites and eating the concessions food that no one else was using, and instead of getting a medal for coming up with an ingenious solution to the region’s homelessness problem, he was arrested, I swear, there’s no justice in this world.
The postponement of the Big Ten and Pac-12 college football seasons until at least the spring is causing an economic crisis for nearby coffee shops and local economies as a whole, according to “an author of several best-selling books on college football” and a “spokesman for the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry,” respectively. Or, you know, not.
Former San Diego Padres owner John Moores has gotten “involved” in plans to build a new arena in that city, getting “regular updates,” and that’s big news, says San Diego Union-Tribune sports columnist Tom Krasovic, because “consider his track record”! Moores’ track record, for those who may have forgotten: He got the city of San Diego to fund a new Padres stadium in part by putting ads for it on the outfield walls during Padres games, then proposed a combined stadium-and-convention-center for the Chargers that went nowhere. He did sell the Padres after the new stadium opened for a 500% profit, though, so he’s definitely good at some things.
The Los Angeles Rams and Chargers‘ SoFi Stadium construction site is suffering a major outbreak of Covid, with 77 construction workers testing positive. That’s a positivity rate of, uh, the Los Angeles Daily News doesn’t actually say, so there’s no way to tell if stadium workers are spreading it at the worksite or just picking it up elsewhere in virus-riddled Southern California. It’s almost like reporting raw numbers without any context is bad journalism!
The decision by the city of Henderson, Nevada, to spend upwards of $30 million on a minor-league hockey arena for the Silver Knights is paying off already, says a Las Vegas Sun column by … the mayor of Henderson? I guess it saves time to just let elected officials write the newspaper instead of having to have reporters go interview them and then interview other people and then try to figure out who’s right, but it’s kind of less useful for that whole “informing people” thing.
The Green Bay Booyah summer collegiate league baseball team says it’s been holding games with fans allowed at one-quarter capacity and Brown County reports no outbreaks related to attendance at Booyah games, something the team and the county attribute to the measures taken by the team, which include wearing masks in indoor sections of the stadium and … and … oh, come on, seriously, WLUK-TV? The Booyah website isn’t much help either, though it does teach us that the Booyah logo is a rooster shouting “Booyah!” with a paddle for an exclamation point and … what is that in place of the Y, exactly? Too bad the team face masks depicting the rooster hiding in what looks like a vat of spaghetti sauce are sold out, because truly this is the greatest team merch ever.

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Rams stadium’s new artificial lake deemed “gentrification,” but that’s only half the story

July 30, 2020July 30, 2020 Neil deMause

Writing a post based on a news story based on tweets is not exactly my favorite way of doing journalism, but in this case, I think it’s warranted. Newsweek, which still exists after passing through a series of ownership changes that included a bizarre money-laundering scheme, reports that residents of Inglewood are increasingly griping on social media about how the Los Angeles Rams‘ new stadium is getting all kinds of fancy gewgaws while the city’s schools remain underfunded; one declared of the team’s new artificial lake: “This is gentrification.”

https://twitter.com/ch1chi_xoxo/status/1288718599532589056

https://twitter.com/d0ntpissmeoff/status/1288733252866330624?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1288733252866330624%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Finglewood-residents-lash-out-rams-new-stadium-1521602

As someone who’s written books on both stadiums and gentrification, I think I’m uniquely qualified to nitpick this, or at least to delve a little deeper into the implications of stadium-led redevelopment.

One of the arguments often made by community members opposed to sports projects — or any kind of big development projects — is that they will price existing residents out of the neighborhood. The evidence that sports venues actually make a neighborhood a more enticing place to live is fairly weak: Stadiums bring excitement and crowds, but also public drunkenness and traffic problems. And while you can definitely find plenty of examples of stadiums that saw luxury housing rise up around them, luxury housing has been going up in cities all over America as part of the Great Inversion; as I noted a couple of years ago, the New York Jets having their stadium on Manhattan’s then-low-rent West Side rejected didn’t stop developers from coming in with a new plan that put up tons of new luxury housing, with the help of a few billion dollars in taxpayer funds. Sometimes the causality even runs the other way: Stadium builders target a neighborhood because they think it’s primed for gentrification and they can reap the benefits by speculating on land around their new venue.

If anything, what stadiums do to smooth the way for gentrification is what might be termed the bulldozer effect. As I discovered in researching The Brooklyn Wars, one of the biggest reasons why big development projects or rezonings can lead to hikes in housing costs and displacement of existing residents — even when you might think that building lots of new housing should lead to lower rents in simple supply-and-demand terms — is that they provide an easy excuse for the demolition of neighborhoods, or at least large stadium-sized parts of neighborhoods, that are standing in the way of rapid gentrification. With cities increasingly attractive places to live for people with money, for all the same reasons they grew so big in the first place (easy access to jobs and culture, mostly), the only real thing keeping them from gentrifying even faster is the distaste of many suburbanites for living next to the black and brown people with low incomes who settled there when their parents and grandparents decamped for the suburbs in the first place — at least if there aren’t a few local artists or white dads with baby strollers around to make the place feel like it has “potential.”

Which, finally, is where the artificial lake comes in. It isn’t receiving any public money that I can tell, but by carving out a chunk of Inglewood and repurposing it as a playground for the moneyed classes (or at least for people who can afford football tickets, who tend to be pretty well-off), it creates a bubble of perceived safety that allows other developers to market Inglewood to newcomers who might otherwise turn up their nose at living next to Inglewood residents. In fact, this is exactly what Inglewood Mayor James Butts said he was hoping for when he compared the stadium to the Genesis device in Star Trek: Wrath of Khan that turned a lifeless planet into a utopia, which really is an odd way to refer to the city of more than 100,000 human beings that you are supposedly representing.

New stadiums and artificial lakes, then, are less about directly luring people to cities, and more about rebranding them. Which surely must seem tempting to mayors who Google their own cities and are met with this:

All of which would be fine and great if Inglewood could be made less dangerous in a way that allowed current residents to benefit from the improvements, rather than risk being priced out as a result. (In fact, the crime rate in Inglewood has already been dropping pretty dramatically.) But in an America defined by massive and still-widening inequalities in wealth and income, that’s hard to pull off, at least not without freezing rents and banning evictions.

In the anthology New York Calling, labor historian and musician Philip Dray memorably recalled a time when he first moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side (artist on the block! quick, tell your friends looking for cheap city apartments!) and went to a block association meeting about the city’s offer to install new street trees on the sidewalk:

All the white people want the trees, but the Hispanics are against it, saying that prettifying the block will just drive the rents up. The whites are kind of numb — how can anyone not like trees?

This is America: A land where people are afraid to have nice things because they’re afraid it will just make someone with more money want to take them away from them. That’s not the only reason why stadiums continue to get built while teachers have to make GoFundMe campaigns to buy books for their students, but that’s pretty much impossible to understand without it.

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Friday roundup: Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it for 150 years edition

June 19, 2020 Neil deMause

Happy Juneteenth, the most quintessentially American of holidays, in that it celebrates both the nation’s ability to right seemingly intractable horrific historic wrongs through grassroots action faster than anyone ever could have dreamed, and also its ability to then revert to virtually the exact same horrific wrongs in all but name for the next century or so. We got issues.

And speaking of issues — if that’s not too inappropriate to compare the enslavement of an entire people with the siphoning off of tax dollars for sports, which it probably is, but segues gotta segue — here are a bunch regarding stadiums and arenas that reared or re-reared their heads in the last week:

Plans for a minor-league hockey arena in Palm Springs have “stopped” thanks to the pandemic, according to city manager David Ready, but it’s not immediately clear whether that means just the timeline has been delayed or the entire project is up in the air, if that’s even a distinction anymore.
Also up in the air: exact plans for David Beckham’s Inter Miami stadium complex, details of which were released this week but without any actual details. It looks like Inter will be playing in its “temporary” stadium in Fort Lauderdale for at least the next several years, if not indefinitely, which is absolutely par for Beckham’s Miami stadium campaign ever since he opened that cursed mummy’s tomb.
Hidden in this Newsday article about Nassau County worrying about losing revenue with the Nassau Coliseum shut down is the fact that arena operator Mikhail Prokhorov is trying to defer $4.4 million in annual rent payments while he tries to unload his lease on the now-squeezed-out-of-the-arena-market place. Which makes a kind of sense since his business has ground to a halt, but what about everybody else?
So few people buy tickets to Miami Marlins games that the team could make more money this year by playing fewer games and paying its players less, which should come as no surprise since that’s been the team’s business model for years.
The NBA and MLS are both preparing to return to play this summer entirely in Orlando, and Orlando is in Florida, and Florida is set to become the nation’s new coronavirus epicenter with new cases going through the roof the last two weeks even as testing has largely leveled off, so that’s all gonna be interesting. But NBA players won’t be allowed to share snorkels, which should totally take care of any problems.
Over in Texas, meanwhile, which is seeing its own spike in virus cases, college football players are testing positive in bunches, which could put the season at risk, though I suppose there are always more people in Texas who want to play football if they wanted to go to 200-player rosters.
Also seeing a spike in positive coronavirus tests: construction workers at the new Los Angeles Rams and Chargers stadium. None of this should be surprising — obviously reopening work sites is going to increase the spread of the virus, and equally obviously more people are going to show up sick to work (whether they have symptoms yet or not) if there are more people in the general community who have it. The plan was supposed to be to first mitigate the number of infections through lockdowns, and then once cases were at a low level keep them under control via widespread testing and contact tracing, but since apparently most states have decided to reopen before waiting for that second part, it looks like much of America is going to have to prepare for the roller coaster.
On that note, Anthony Fauci says he doesn’t see how the NFL season will be able to be played as usual if a second wave of infections hits, which seems to kind of overlook that many states are still in the first wave, but whatever. Maybe the NFL can play its whole season in New Zealand — okay, maybe not New Zealand. Vermont?
Major League Baseball, meanwhile, is inching its way toward a late July restart, with games to be played at teams’ home stadiums, or in the case of the Toronto Blue Jays, probably their single-A ballpark, because Canada is still requiring two-week quarantines for anyone entering the country, though they did lift that for hockey. Location of the Blue Jays’ single-A ballpark? Florida, of course.
And yes, it’s looking more and more like outdoor transmission of the virus is a smaller risk than was initially feared so long as everyone wears masks — a conclusion reached in part from noting that there’s been no measurable spike in infections after last month’s police violence protests — but also note that Columbia University virus expert Jeffrey Shaman tempers that optimism by saying, “Beaches—you’ve got open air, sunshine, people spread out on blankets—that’s OK. A baseball stadium—people lined up shoulder to shoulder, semi-indoors, for hot dogs and beer and for crowded restrooms—I’m not so crazy about that.”
And as a reward for sitting through all that epidemiology news, here are a couple of fresh New York Islanders Belmont Park arena vaportecture images, which are mostly notable for conveying “loud” and “intimate” not through any actual innovations in arena geometry — the cheap seats still look a million miles from the action — but rather via having all the little CGI people raise their fists in the air in excitement! CGI people are so much easier to please than real people, even if they seem even less willing to wear their damn masks.

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Friday roundup: Sacramento faces cuts to pay arena debt, Henderson approves arena debt, music festival to be held in phantom Yankee Stadium parking lot

May 22, 2020May 22, 2020 Neil deMause

Sorry, getting a late start today, let’s get straight to the news without delay:

The city of Sacramento is facing having to make cuts to city services in order to pay off its Kings arena debt, and since I’ve previously argued that it’s silly to act like public sports subsidies are a particular problem during economic crises, maybe now is a good time for a reminder that spending public money on stuff that doesn’t benefit the public is always bad if you want to have money left over for stuff you actually need! Sacramento officials acted like the arena payments were free money because they were supposed to come from hotel taxes and parking meter fees; that was never true, but it’s thrown into starker relief now that those taxes and fees aren’t coming in and the city will have to dip into the general fund — you know, the general fund that only isn’t getting those taxes and fees in the first place because the city carved out those revenues and handed them to the Kings. Is firing police and librarians to pay for a sports arena worse than never getting to hire them in the first place? So many ethical dilemmas in this pandemic!
Not running short of money, meanwhile: The NFL, which just approved increasing its G-4 loan for the new Los Angeles Rams and Chargers stadium from $400 million to $900 million. plus given the teams’ owners a longer time in which to pay it back, which they can do with club-seat and ticket-sales money they normally would have had to share with the league. Maybe the NFL could loan some money to Sacramento on these terms? Or at least not complain too loudly about how they’ll go broke if they aren’t allowed to play games this fall.
The Henderson, Nevada city council approved moving ahead with city subsidies for construction of a minor-league hockey arena for an affiliate of the Vegas Golden Knights, and the motion included yet another number for how much public will be involved: $42 million, or half of the $84 million total construction cost. Henderson had previously approved $60 million in bonds, with $30 million of it to go to arena construction, or maybe it was $25 million from the bond plus $17 million from other city funds, and then there was that economic impact report that seemed to involve just overturning a big box of random numbers and dumping them on the floor. What we do know is that the team will pay $150,000 a year rent on the arena, which will somehow produce a 106% annual return on investment because we’re in a national crisis, okay, there’s no time for math!
Speaking of math, you know what would be a good way to help with the economic impact of a pandemic that’s expected to stretch into 2021 or 2022? Spending a whole lot of government money now to hold the Commonwealth Games in Hamilton in 2026! Definitely nothing wrong with that logic.
Here’s an article, and another article, and another article, and another article, and another article about how a Bronx events company is planning to hold a drive-in food and music festival in Yankee Stadium’s “largest parking lot” this summer, notwithstanding that Yankee Stadium doesn’t actually have any open-air parking lots. (It has parking garages, but an indoor drive-in sounds logistically difficult, and possibly epidemiologically unwise.) Nobody at Time Out, CNN, USA Today, WCBS, or Gothamist seems to have asked MASC Hospitality Group where they’re actually planning to hold this thing, but journalism is all about one outlet reprinting the press release and then everybody else quoting the first outlet, right? Pretty sure Edward R. Murrow said that.
This is all too depressing, what’s a good way to lighten the mood and also get some good SEO going? Sex dolls! There, mission accomplished — Monday’s something called a “holiday” whatever that means anymore, see you all Tuesday!

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