Oy.

That's about all you can say after the latest episode of HBO's "Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel," starring our very own District Detroit, the alliterative moniker for the as-yet-hypothetical development around the billionaire Ilitch family's $864-million, publicly subsidized Little Caesars Arena.

It's not that any of the information Real Sports' David Scott reported is new. But good grief, hearing it all in one place sure is depressing.

Because the reality is, Detroit taxpayers forked over $324 million in tax dollars meant in part to fund Detroit's struggling schools to a family that routinely appears on the Forbes 400 in exchange for jobs for Detroiters that didn't materialize, housing that doesn't exist, and the remediation of blight caused by the billionaire family itself.

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The justification for that substantial public subsidy, drawn from tax dollars intended to support schools (in a city literally on the brink of bankruptcy back in 2013 when the arena deal was announced), was that the public would benefit. Almost no politician can resist the prospect of job creation. It's basically catnip. The promise of new housing in the arena district didn't hurt. And the new arena, its supporters said, would connect Detroit's thriving Midtown and downtown, eliminating the doorstop of blight betwixt the two.

Six years later, there's an arena.

As for the rest? The Ilitches had promised that Detroiters would be 50 percent of the arena construction crews. Didn't happen. Property records show that the area around the arena was blighted in part because the family's companies purchased property and allowed it to rot in order to drive prices down and to discourage other developments in their planned arena's footprint.

And about that housing?

"In all, how many residential units have been built?" HBO's Scott asks Detroiter Francis Grunow, a member of the Neighborhood Advisory Council charged with the thankless task of holding the Ilitches to their promises.

"None," Grunow says. "They have developed none. Zero."

"Zero as in none?" Scott says.

"Zero as in none," Grunow replies.

There's a bunch of parking lots, though — and as the Freep's Joe Guillen reported last year, the Ilitches were allowed to cut corners to shoehorn in more spots to maximize profits.

There's no separating the promises made, and unkept, in the District from the racial demographics of the region, Scott told Gumbel: Because of the arena's location near freeways leading out of Detroit, and because the arena was built to house the Detroit Red Wings (although the Pistons later signed on), "The arena seems to be designed and situated largely to service a white suburban constituency around metro Detroit," Scott said. Namely, a population that isn't impacted by the tax subsidy.

U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit, a state lawmaker and outspoken community advocate when the arena deal was inked, summed it up for "Real Sports": "They promised it would be something that trickled down to the neighborhood. It hasn’t trickled down," she said. "We said yes to a billion-dollar corporation for nothing in return."

Former Republican state lawmaker John Walsh, who later served as budget director to former Gov. Rick Snyder, appeared on camera to defend the deal he helped to craft, a bill package that delivered a phenomenal amount of money to a private business after just a 35-minute committee hearing.

Walsh stuck to the party line: The investment was justified because the arena is successful. As to the rest? It's hard to quantify the benefit of investment in a city that's struggling like Detroit was.

Scott asked Walsh if conceding revenue from the arena — back at the Joe, the city and the Ilitches split revenue — to the Ilitches alone had been wise (he's fine with that), and whether he was aware of the mounting body of research that shows public subsidies for sports stadiums just don't work.

Walsh said he'd done his homework.

"I'm known as a data-driven person," Walsh told Scott. "... At some point you have to have a level of faith in a project. You have to believe in a vision."

Walsh is now the president of the Downtown Detroit Partnership.

Defenders of tax subsidies note that they're most often based on tax captures dedicated to a specific goal, or on future revenues that presumably wouldn't exist without the development they finance. They're not wrong. But what taxes we choose to levy, and how we choose to use those tax dollars, says a lot about our priorities. The lingering shots in "Real Sports" of dilapidated school buildings, contrasted against the luxe arena floating in a sea of parking lots. Those aren't my priorities, for my city or for yours.

Nancy Kaffer is a Free Press columnist. Contact: nkaffer@freepress.com.