Is it only in this era that government funds have been used
to construct athletic stadiums?
Living in Minneapolis, one of the facts of life that a
person who consumes local sports news will have to deal with is a never-ending
hue and cry regarding stadiums. Talk of athletic facilities is everywhere,
and strangely, for a conversation that really centers only upon big buildings
and money, there can be a lot of (for lack of a better term) sex-appeal in the
discussions. The fabulously wealthy are
always a good headline source, and when you can throw in highly visible
athletes and sports teams, local and state politicians, matters of civic pride mixed
in with general income inequality and tax policy issues, the mixture can become
pretty volatile.
Stadium talk is currently in the news because of the recent
award of a Major League Soccer franchise to Minnesota, subject to the caveat
that the team needs to build an 18,000 seat downtown Minneapolis
soccer-specific stadium before it can join the league in 2017. The expected cost for the proposed stadium is
$150 to $200 million dollars. Clearly that is a lot of money. So in this current stadium debate there has
been a lot of pro and con discussion in the media, some grandstanding by politicians who vow that ‘this time we are taking a stand’,
cameos by billionaire owners/partners, and an appearance by all of the platitudes that surround soccer in general (the passionate, urbane audience, the worldwide game with a domestic league gaining in popularity, the fact that it’s
not American football, and all the rest).
The forthcoming chatter around this stadium ought to be pretty
good. That is until reality sets
in. The stadium will get taxpayer
funding, it will be built and eventually seen as an asset to the
community. That’s just the way the
stadium debates always end up.
I am not passionate about Minneapolis’s current or past
stadium debates. In my mind they all
involve a lot of air and ink being spent on pro and con arguments that are ultimately pretty meaningless. I am
curious, however, about how long stadium debates have been going on? It seems to me like there is a pretty myopic
idea that new stadiums and arenas are some sort of personal property for the
team that primarily occupies them, has that always been the case? This should be riveting. I’m only going to focus on baseball
stadiums. It’s the American pastime
after all.
First I checked out Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, they were
built in 1912 and 1914, respectively, but I was not able to find much on how
construction of those ballparks was financed.
I was hoping to find archived newspaper
articles from those cities decrying the owners for their greed, but no such
luck. Amazingly the next oldest ballpark
in use today is Dodger Stadium, a full 50 years newer than Fenway.
Dodger Stadium was finished in 1962, and while Wikipedia
reports that it was financed using private funding, looking at the stadium’s
history shows that local government was not sitting by idly as the noble private
financiers built their ballpark. Per the site “The land for Dodger Stadium was
purchased from local owners and inhabitants in the early 1950s by the city of
Los Angeles using eminent domain with funds from the Federal Housing Act of
1949.” When a planned apartment
development was not built on the land[1],
the city was able to buy the land from the Federal Housing Authority for a
reduced price. Eventually the land in the Chavez Ravine area was essentially given to the owner of
the Brooklyn Dodgers in an effort to lure his team to LA. When the local government gives land to a
professional sports team that seems to me like government funding of a
stadium.
Maybe I’ll just stick in California, like Minnesota it’s another
hotbed of stadium construction talk these days, and four Major League Baseball
stadiums were built there between 1962 and 1967. Looking at the construction history of
Candlestick Park in San Francisco shows that “[a]s part of the agreement
regarding the Giants' relocation to the west coast, the city of San Francisco
promised to build a new stadium for the team.”
Across the bay in Oakland, it’s reported that
in order to keep up with the Jones’s in San Fran and for the east bay to have a
positive self-image, the Oakland Coliseum was built using public funding, which
eventually helped Oakland land the Kansas City Athletics. Down in Anaheim, to convince the Angels
to move out of Dodger Stadium, “the city of Anaheim and its mayor, Rex Coons,
lured the team with an offer too sweet to refuse: a publicly financed ballpark,
a 35-year lease, and the chance to build a new fan base among Orange County's
growing population.” The decision by Major League Baseball to
award San Diego the Padres in 1969 was also no doubt buffeted by the city’s
decision to construct Jack Murphy Stadium with a $27 million dollar municipal
bonding measure. It’s funny, with discussion of NFL teams
possibly returning to the LA market, something you always hear is that there
will be no appetite for any public assistance for the construction of any stadium in California, given the history of stadium construction there, I don't know how much faith I put in that proposition.
Is it the cost of stadiums today then that seems to have amplified
the idea that spending public dollars on stadiums is abhorrent? As noted above the proposed soccer stadium in
Minneapolis will cost $150 to $200 million dollars. The under-construction Minnesota Vikings
stadium is supported by nearly $500 million dollars in public funding. That’s a lot of money. I don’t know that it’s a huge enough increase
though to suddenly turn off the spigot and ban the use of government dollars on
sporting venues. A nifty inflation
calculator found at dollartimes.com shows that San Diego’s $27 million dollar
bond in 1965 would cost it over $200 million in 2015. That’s a lot of money too.
Even 50 years ago in stingy California there was public
assistance to build stadiums for professional sports teams. I was hoping to find some salacious newspaper
articles from the time that are having their arguments in essence plagiarized
by those who are either on the pro or con side of current stadium debates. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. I did learn that public funding has been a
part of baseball stadium construction for a long time. For
the record, I have no issue with government dollars being used to build sports
stadiums. I think the question is
whether a professional sports team is seen by a community as an asset. If a community values a team, I think it is
perfectly fair for the community to put a dollar figure on the cost it is
willing to pay to acquire or keep the asset. Insert your Vikings and Twins jokes here, I
guess.
[1]
Wikipedia’s entry on Dodger Stadium includes this line regarding the City of
Los Angeles deciding to scrap plans for the proposed housing development, “[p]roposed public housing projects such as
Elysian Park Heights lost most of their support as they became associated with
socialist ideals.” There was not a cite
for the line, however. I would have
liked to have learned more about the ideologically dangerous design of the housing
development.
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