Something to think about in regard to the City of Houston’s latest stadium boondoggle.
Skip Sauer over at The Sports Economist notes this Rick Eckstein op-ed on the myth of economic benefits from the public financing of sports stadiums:
. . . [M]y colleagues and I studied media coverage of 23 publicly financed stadium initiatives in 16 different cities, including Philadelphia. We found that the mainstream media in most of these cities is noticeably biased toward supporting publicly financed stadiums, which has a significant impact on the initiatives’ success.
This bias usually takes the form of uncritically parroting stadium proponents’ economic and social promises, quoting stadium supporters far more frequently than stadium opponents, overlooking the numerous objective academic studies on the topic, and failing to independently examine the multitude of failed stadium-centered promises throughout the country, especially those in oft-cited “success cities” such as Denver and Cleveland.
Meanwhile, Houston is bidding on another Super Bowl (XLVI in 2012). Get those yachts lined up, folks.
You’re oversimplifying. A publicly funded football stadium is a boondoggle. A publicly funded baseball stadium or basketball/hockey arena downtown is not necessarily so. While it’s true that money is shuffled from one part of town to another, there can be a benefit to the community overall from a project that serves to define downtown that is not measurable in net dollars. Baltimore is the prototype. Camden Yards changed that city, entirely for the better. The model has worked elsewhere, including Houston. Football with tax dollars is community masochism.