Sports teams have a precious relationship with cities. But in the US, hometown pride and promises of economic growth are often leveraged to garner billions for new stadium megaprojects, taking public funds away from other pressing needs

This place is sacred ground. At least it is for Tom Derry, who visits the fenced-off shrine in Detroit’s Corktown neighbourhood every week, in memory of the demigods who once walked here. He also cuts the grass. A star-spangled banner dangles above him from a 125-foot flagpole, standing guard over the 10-acre field.

Across the field, another man repairs flood damage recently suffered at home plate, the altar of this former cathedral of American sport. A father and his young son, careful not to step on his handiwork, play catch nearby.

“People who come here today have memories of coming here with their parents, who came here with their parents, who came here with their parents,” Derry tells me when we meet in the now-empty plot one recent morning. West of downtown, his beloved Detroit Tigers baseball team played here for most of the last century, from 1912 to 1999.

When the privately built venue was bought and renovated by the city in 1977, the Tigers remained as tenants. But the lease deal saddled the city with maintenance costs and ultimately, following the team’s departure, demolition expenses. For the past five years, Derry has toiled here with a small band of volunteers – true believers in the church of baseball – to preserve what’s left of the original playing field.

In 2000, the Tigers settled into another publicly owned ballpark in the northern reaches of downtown Detroit. Local officials, wary that the Tigers could follow Detroit’s American football and basketball teams outside of the city limits, pledged $115m (£70m) in public money towards the new, $300m Comerica Park. Derry, for one, opposed spending public money this way, in a city with deteriorating schools and crumbling infrastructure. The lifelong Tigers fan refused to attend a game in Comerica Park for eight years.

“I didn’t believe the public should have paid for that new stadium costing millions of dollars when we have a perfectly fine one right here,” he says. The Detroit native and longtime postman looks down at the freshly cut grass of old Tiger Stadium for a moment, adding, “If [owners] don’t get their way, they threaten to leave. And unfortunately, we tend to give in to them.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Detroit Tigers left Tiger Stadium in 1999 and headed downtown to the then-new Comerica Park, but stubborn activists held out hope of saving the baseball team’s longtime home. Die-hards can still run the bases. Photograph: Carlos Osorio/AP

Derry’s point is underlined by what happened next in Detroit. With business and political leaders trumpeting a downtown renaissance, voters subsequently backed a publicly owned American football stadium next door to Comerica Park for the Detroit Lions. City and county bodies together contributed about $125m to the project, roughly a quarter of its total cost. Two years later, 65,000-seat Ford Field opened across the street from 42,000-seat Comerica Park. Ford Field hosts around 10 American football games a year, along with various other entertainment.

When Tigers owner Mike Ilitch’s stadium deal was struck in 1995, he said it would “really get the city moving”. The following year, a Detroit Lions official called their new football venue “part of the rebirth of the city”. Nearly two decades later, the palatial structures indeed dominate the north end of downtown Detroit, an area that has since seen a modest revitalisation. Bars and restaurants are sprinkled throughout the modern stadium district, which sits across Woodward Avenue from the elegant Fox Theatre, also owned by Ilitch.

But it would be an overstatement to say the publicly backed stadiums jumpstarted an urban boom. They’re nestled beside a handful of parking lots, court buildings and highways that cut through the city core – remnants of mid-century visions of urban renewal. Residential areas north of the district are still marred by abandonment. And for most of the year, the hulking structures stand vacant.



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The story in Detroit has played out in almost every American metropolis, at least those that crave to be a “major-league” city. For decades, sports franchises have leveraged hometown pride and promises of economic spin-offs to garner billions in government handouts for stadium construction. Such megaprojects typically produce far fewer tangible benefits than advertised. And they siphon public funds away from other programmes. Still, extraordinarily wealthy franchise owners – a tiny group of athletic oligarchs – continue to bend American cities to their will.

Most stadiums today are built with a mix of public and private money. Cities trying to keep teams in place – or others attempting to lure them away – routinely promise hundreds of millions to sway owners one way or another. In the past few years, such princely sums have been promised to teams in Atlanta, New York, Seattle, Dallas, Indianapolis, Phoenix, Sacramento, and many others. The estimated bill for two venues in Cincinnati alone surpassed $1bn, and Minnesota has pledged a cool half-billion more for a new football stadium downtown.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An aerial view of Detroit’s Tiger Stadium during the 1968 World Series. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

“It’s not going to end unless something really major happens”, says Neil deMause, co-author of Field of Schemes, a book examining stadium construction across the US. “It’s the backbone of the sports industry now. That’s how you make money. If you can get someone to build you a free stadium that generates revenue –which you usually keep 100% of – you have an incredibly powerful incentive to maintain the status quo.”

“It’s like the defence industry and the Pentagon”, he adds. “That’s their bread and butter.”

There are 122 teams in the four major North American sports leagues — football, baseball, basketball and hockey — attracting a combined attendance of 125 million last year. The independently owned clubs operate as regional franchises, sanctioned to play in the top-level professional leagues. More than 50 venues have been built across the US for them since 1999. While a handful of projects – such as the $1.6bn MetLife football stadium in New Jersey – were entirely privately financed, many still received tax breaks, public infrastructure improvements or cheap land sales.

Cumulative construction and maintenance costs can be hard to track. But some estimates for public contributions have reached tens of billions of dollars. Municipalities typically finance such investments through tax-free bond sales, depriving the federal treasury of billions in revenue and punting costs toward the back end of deals. In Miami, for example, where county officials sold about $500m in bonds to finance a new baseball stadium, steep interest rates could multiply costs nearly five-fold by 2048. Residents often end up footing such bills through increased tourism, sin or sales taxes. The National Football League and National Hockey League, on the other hand, are tax-exempt.

Franchises, and in turn many politicians and media, have for decades billed such projects as engines of development, economic “grand slams”. But researchers overwhelmingly pan those claims. Victor Matheson, a sports economist at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, says spin-off activity has historically been 20% or less of what franchise- or public-commissioned economic impact studies forecast. While new stadiums might provide a jolt to a very concentrated area of town, that often comes at the expense of consumer spending elsewhere in the region – what economists call the substitution effect. It leaves the lion’s share of venues providing negligible economic effects.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Comerica Park in Detroit. The public paid $115m towards the $300m cost of the stadium. Photograph: John Grieshop/MLB Photos via Getty Images

“Teams aren’t in the business of making sure to generate a lot of money for the local bar across the street”, Matheson says by phone. “They’re in the business of selling you the $11 beer to you once you’re inside the stadium.”

Today’s athletic amphitheatres last just a few decades before being thrown away for more lustrous replacements. And despite a long history of multipurpose venues in the US, contemporary stadiums are usually used for just one sport. The huge complexes, sprawling grounds and expansive parking lots are effectively deserted for most of the year – occasional concerts or wrestling matches notwithstanding. Teams in the NFL play just eight regular season home games each season.

To be sure, a number of sports venues have indeed helped revitalise surrounding neighbourhoods – take Progressive Field and Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Coors Field in Denver, or Petco Park in San Diego, all of them squeezed into dense, walkable areas. Just as housing and shopping culture have shifted back toward American downtowns, sporting culture is beginning to follow suit.

Still, a large body of research suggests governments typically pay top-shelf prices for bottom-shelf benefits. Franchises increasingly make money from luxury seating, cable deals, venue naming rights, seat-licensing fees and other new revenue streams. So most money spent inside lavish stadiums flows to the pockets of players and owners, more often than not millionaires and billionaires, respectively.

As more cities have been burned, of course, Americans have grown increasingly skeptical of stadiums as tools for urban growth. But public funding became engrained in the sports business model long ago, so teams still have every reason to convince their fans to believe.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest San Diego Padres catcher Yasmani Grandal in actiona gainst the Los Angeles Dodgers in Petco Park. The stadium has helped revitalise surrounding neighbourhoods. Photograph: Jake Roth/USA Today Sports

Publicly financed stadiums were the norm after the second world war, as officials offered up huge sums to entice major league clubs to relocate to their districts, often in suburbs. Milwaukee began the trend in 1953, building the $5m Milwaukee County Stadium to attract the Boston Braves to the Midwest. Four years later, writer Douglas S Powell penned in American City & County magazine that the American pastime was “rapidly becoming a municipal pastime”. The same would eventually hold true for football and – to a lesser degree – basketball and hockey. At the national level, meanwhile, Congress granted the NFL and MLB antitrust exemptions that allowed them to sometimes behave as monopolies.

Though entirely publicly financed stadiums are rare nowadays, owners still garner hundreds of millions in public funds to pad their private investments. Franchises typically have the upper hand in such negotiations, especially in small- or mid-sized markets that crave the “major league” label. Their outsized bargaining power stems largely from an artificially low supply.

Each of the four major leagues has limited itself to about 30 franchises, even though there are growing number of metropolitan areas that want teams. Los Angeles, for example, hasn’t had a professional football squad in 20 years.

The imbalance allows leagues to play communities against one another for the juiciest packages of development aid. Owners and league officials frequently voice threats of leaving town – some empty, others not – to garner the sweetest deals, says Robert Trumpbour, a professor at Penn State Altoona and author of The New Cathedrals: Politics and Media in the History of Stadium Construction.

“The owners have gotten much better at hardballing the negotiations,” Trumpbour says. “And politicians don’t like to be blamed that a team leaves … It’s amazing how the threats are played out [in the news media].”

Local media, too, are gears in the urban growth machine. Sports draw a large share of audiences to metro newspapers and newscasts, so stadium construction speculation is given a disproportionate amount of column inches and airtime. Though the question they face is fundamentally political – should government subsidise a local business? – the media has a history of implicitly cheering for the home team, putting even more pressure on elected officials to deliver.

Of course, the public’s calculation of whether to back a sports franchise goes beyond mere dollars and sense. Teams represent not only a slice of a metropolitan economy, but also a cornerstone of its collective identity. The value of such an intangible benefit remains impossible to measure. Nevertheless, it provides owners with yet another point of leverage over even the stingiest of politicians, for letting a team leave is unpopular indeed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Ralph Wilson Stadium in Buffalo, New York. Building this new home for the Bills cost $118m of public money, at today’s prices. The team only plays eight regular games a year there. Photograph: Claus Andersen/Getty Images for NHLI

In Buffalo, home of the Bills football team, the late owner Ralph Wilson Jr threatened in 1971 to move his franchise to Seattle unless a new stadium was built nearby. A “stunned silence fell over the chambers of the [Erie] County legislature when informed of Wilson’s threat,” one news report said. Then-New York governor Nelson Rockefeller stepped in soon after, saying “the state will continue to do everything it can to help Erie County and the city resolve its stadium problem”. Two years and $22m in public spending later – $118m today – Rich Stadium held its first Bills game.



Now known as Ralph Wilson Stadium, the 74,000-seat venue stands in Orchard Park, a wealthy suburb about 10 miles southeast of downtown Buffalo. The Bills will only play eight regular season games there this season, leaving its 10,000-spot parking lot bare most days. The stadium lies in a primarily residential area, and a community college and shopping mall are the only major developments nearby.

“The current stadium has basically zero to negative economic impact to the area”, says Jamie Moses, editor of Buffalo’s weekly Artvoice newspaper. The publication recently devoted a cover story to advocate for a new stadium downtown. “Most people go there, they sit in the parking lot, they drink, they go to the game and they drive home drunk. It means nothing to the city.”

Many observers in Buffalo endorse the national trend toward urban stadiums, an about-face from the postwar boom that drew many franchises to fledgling suburbs. Moses believes a new downtown venue could help reverse 50 years or more of commercial flight.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mary Wilson, wife of the late Buffalo Bills owner Ralph Wilson, hands a football to New York governor Andrew Cuomo during a recent ribbon-cutting ceremony for renovations to Ralph Wilson Stadium. Photograph: AP

“We made a whole lot of mistakes that were big mistakes,” Moses says of Buffalo. But he later adds: “There’s a big movement to that area. It’s not just the stadium. The stadium would just be one piece of it. There are a lot of developers and entrepreneurs who want to do business downtown, in that core.”

Though the Bills have fallen on hard times on the field recently, the team still boasts some of football’s most vociferous fans. That conviction, coupled with the fact Buffalo is the second-smallest market in the NFL, has only increased the league’s bargaining power. In 2012, the state and county committed $226m to the team in a new lease deal. While diffuse, the cost would cover renovations – now finished at a price tag of $94m – and up to a decade’s worth of operating subsidies and capital payments – starting at $11.5m a year. The Bills promised $44m of their own money for the project, which top brass said in 2012 would keep the team near Buffalo “for many decades to come”. The agreement also included a promise by the state to form an advisory group exploring the potential for a new stadium in the future.

“The Bills, the state and the county have done a great job of continuing to make improvements to the stadium to keep it competitive,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said at the time. “But you have to continue that.”

Indeed. Two years later, renovations on Ralph Wilson Stadium have been completed, and its namesake, the franchise’s longtime owner, has passed away. Local energy billionaire Terry Pegula agreed to purchase the franchise for $1.4bn this month, assuaging fears that the Bills would skip town for a gleaming venue elsewhere.

Goodell ginned up that speculation in May, saying the Bills would need a new stadium to remain economically viable. The claim is hard to verify, as privately owned NFL franchises don’t open their books to the public that subsidises them. But last year alone, the league’s 32 franchises shared about $6bn of national revenue, most of it culled from lucrative TV deals. That comes in addition to income from tickets or concessions sales. In New York, local and national media have reported the Bills earned at least $30m in net profits last season.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Blueprints for the the Detroit Red Wings’s proposed new ice hockey arena. The public is paying $284m towards the scheme, with the billionaire Ilitch family pledging $200m. Photograph: Dennis Allain/www.districtdetroit.com

Goodell added: “The intention is that whoever buys the team will make the team work in western New York.” Though governor Andrew Cuomo has said he’s “not convinced” of the need for a new stadium, he followed Goodell’s comments by assuring fans: “We will do what we have to do to keep the Bills in western New York.” It’s unclear how much a new stadium would cost – or how much the public could contribute to it. But the past three NFL stadiums to open have all eclipsed $1bn.

It’s an election year in both New York and Michigan, where ground will be broken on Thursday for a publicly backed, $450 million ice hockey arena for the Mike Ilitch-owned Detroit Red Wings. The downtown stadium plan has sparked familiar talk of an urban revival among the region’s business, political and chattering classes. The former heart of American industry needs its heroes, of course, and Detroiters can’t help thinking of the city that could be – living their mantra, hoping for better things.

“This is part of investing in Detroit’s future,” Michigan governor Rick Snyder, a Republican, told reporters of adding a new hockey arena downtown. “Detroit moves from a place where people might have had a negative impression – although there are great things already going on – to being a place that will be recognised across the world as a place of great value and a place to invest.”

The Red Wings will continue playing in the ugly, publicly owned Joe Louis Arena until 2017. The construction of that facility 35 years ago was financed with $30m in municipal bonds, and its coming demolition will likewise fall on the public dime. The hockey team’s new home will sit in what’s now a blighted corridor across Woodward Avenue from Comerica Park and Ford Field.

The Ilitch family pledged another $200m to improve infrastructure around the new hockey arena and develop a five-neighbourhood entertainment district with restaurants, office buildings and shops. “The vision thrills,” wrote Stephen Henderson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning scribe for the Detroit Free Press. Stadium backers argue that the plan will push Detroit past the tipping point it’s tried to reach for so long, creating a critical mass of activity and physical and economic links between the city core and trendy Midtown.

“This arena is an anchor for much more real estate development,” says Mark Rosentraub, a University of Michigan professor and Ilitch consultant. “That changes the story of Detroit. And that creates the opportunity for other investors because people start taking the city seriously again.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The interior of the Pontiac Silverdome: the publicly financed former home of the Detroit Lions has sat derelict since the team moved. Photograph: Carlos Osorio/AP

Local-born Ilitch, an 85-year-old pizza baron whose family is worth more than $3bn, has been credited over the years for moving his company’s business operations downtown and keeping his sports teams – he also owns the Tigers –within city limits. But he’s had every reason to do so.

Just a week after the City of Detroit filed for bankruptcy protection in July 2013, a state board approved $284m in public money for the hockey venue. Most of the funds – $262m – will come from property taxes levied through a construct called tax increment financing. It allows the city’s quasi-public Downtown Development Authority to earmark tax revenue from a 615-acre area for certain projects. The City Council, meanwhile, sold more than three-dozen parcels of publicly owned land where the arena will be built – all for $1. The Ilitch organisation will pay no rent to play in the city-owned stadium and pocket 100% of the revenue it generates.



Critics contend that such huge public sums should be funnelled away from billionaires and toward more pressing – though admittedly less exciting – improvements to schools, public safety and the like. And these sceptics need look only 25 miles northwest along Woodward Avenue to see the ugly aftermath of stadiums past.

The publicly financed Pontiac Silverdome was home to the Detroit Lions football team from 1975 to 2001. Built for $55m – about a quarter of a billion dollars today – the suburban stadium has sat mostly vacant and increasingly derelict since the football team returned downtown. The indoor venue was sold to Toronto-based investors for a paltry $583,000 five years ago. Since the new owners’ plans for an indoor soccer team fell through, they have been pawning off Silverdome relics at auction. Pontiac has continued its quiet deterioration around the empty monument.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Construction crews demolishing Tiger Stadium in 2008 after the Detriot Tigers moved out. The 10-acre field in Corktown remains open to fans. Photograph: Carlos Osorio/AP

Back in Corktown, Joe Michnuk kicks dirt on the pitcher’s mound in what’s left of old Tiger Stadium. The 55-year-old worked as a locker room security guard in the venue in 1984, the last time the baseball team won the World Series. “It was the best year of my life,” says Michnuk, 25 at the time and now a member of the Tom Derry-led grounds crew. “It was a dream.”

Michnuk, who grew up in Detroit and now lives in bordering Dearborn, has seen stadiums come and go. “You can’t prevent it,” he says, calling himself a realist. And he’s doubtful a new ice hockey arena will catalyse a downtown revival. “So it’s a new arena – big deal. It’s another sweetheart deal for the owner.”

Michnuk points toward Corktown businesses within eyeshot. The neighbourhood, devastated by the disinvestment and population decline that ravaged Detroit for 60 years, has seen new causes for optimism more recently. The area is far from vibrant. But a smattering of bars and restaurants has sprouted up along Michigan Avenue, and nearby residential developments are approaching full occupancy. Just a block away, a few hundred paying spectators watch souped-up cars weave through the grounds of the towering, abandoned Michigan Central Station. “This is what jumpstarts an area – small businesses, grassroots stuff,” Michnuk says above the roaring engines.

Yet the baseball romantic intimately understands the way sports teams tug at a city’s heartstrings, how they become an integral part of urban lore. “I’ve had some great times at Comerica Park. It’s nice,” he says, wearing a Tigers hat and leaning on a rake. “But it’ll never be Tiger Stadium. I love this place as much as I did when there were 54,000 people in the stands.”

He turns back toward centerfield, pointing at the red, white and blue banner waving in the clear summer light. “Look at that flag,” he says. “That flag’s been there for 102 years.”

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