Monday, April 21, 2008
Problems in St. Louis' Downtown Revitalization.
A couple of weeks ago, Skip had a post on the lack of development beyond the left-field wall at St. Louis' Busch stadium. The vacant field, seen clearly in this picture and in this image from Google maps, was to become a ballpark village. But that plan has at least been temporarily scuttled by Centene's plans not to relocate to new office space there.
A recent St. Louis Post-Dispatch article notes how difficult it has been for new development projects to get up and running in downtown St. Louis, even with a brand new stadium. The author notes a kind of multiplier effect: when one project fails, several other unconnected projects may also fail.
Business owners usually revel in vanquishing their competition. But when Steve Roberts wears his hat as a downtown St. Louis developer, he roots for competitors.Frequent readers of TSE know that we here generally (generally?) do not support public funding for stadiums. Although the a-priori studies claim stadiums are magnets for development and economic activity, the ex-post studies tell a much different story.
Indeed, Roberts, a principal in St. Louis-based Roberts Brothers Properties, is concerned about the broader impact of projects stalling or dying.
If the adage that success breeds success, then the reverse could be true: Failure is contagious.
"When you have projects or developers failing it raises suspicions in the minds of potential investors, retailers and even residents," Roberts said. "I don't think one particular project can take down the whole downtown renovation effort, but if you have multiple ones for different reasons, it hurts those of us who have been sowing our fields for many years."
Labels: economic development, St. Louis ballpark village, stadiums
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
19 Years Old, 100% Publicly Financed and Owned, and a Pile of Rubble
The Charlotte Coliseum, the site of 19 years of sporting excellence, has been imploded. This arena was opened in 1988 and was built with 100% of public funds.
Why was it imploded at such a young age? It was imploded in part because it was too big and had too few* luxury boxes. It was also obsolete. Why was it obsolete? Because politicians built the Charlotte Arena for $265 million dollars in part to lure an NBA franchise back to Charlotte. The Hornets left Charlotte in part because a new publicly-funded arena was not forthcoming quickly enough.In some Utopian sports society, where the separation of sports and state are clear, would the Coliseum have been torn down at 19 years of age and would it have been built so big in the first place?
This seems to be one of the things Milton Friedman had in mind when he warned us about spending other people's money on other people.
*Thanks to commenter Frank for noting that I had written the arena had too many luxury boxes when I originally wrote the post
Labels: NBA, stadium subsidies, stadiums
Monday, May 21, 2007
Stadiums and eminent domain
Here's some bits from Keating's column today:
Part of the allure of the recent retro parks has been asymmetrical playing fields. In place of the bland,As I recall from the excellent book Dodgers Move West
uniform dimensions that came with multipurpose stadiums from the 1960s to the 1980s, the new fields have varying outfield distances, walls of differing heights and assorted peculiar angles. It certainly provides these new ballparks with added character.
But a little history shows that this is a manufactured character, as opposed to the organic kind that sprang from the original ballparks of yesteryear.
...[W]here did the special dimensions come from? Well, teams had to make their
stadiums fit on a particular piece of urban land, often within a set of city streets and having to accommodate many neighbors.
For example, Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., which was home to the
Senators, had a center-field wall that jutted in towards the playing field. Why? Because, PhilipLowry reported in "Green Cathedrals," there were five houses and a large tree on the other side.
...What a difference a century makes. Developers, sports team owners and players now reap rewards not only from taxpayer-subsidized stadiums, but also from the government's muscling homeowners and small businesses off their properties to enrich the politically connected.
That's what looms with Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Willets Point proposal to move some 100 small businesses and one resident to alter the area near the new Mets home to fit his political vision. Eminent domain also is a weapon to grab property provided by government to Bruce Ratner for his multibillion-dollar Brooklyn residential, office and retail project, including an arena for the Nets.
, the willingness to use eminent domain was instrumental in the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn for L.A. The powerful Robert Moses blocked every move that WalterO'Malley and the Dodgers could make in Brooklyn (apparently preferring a location in Queens). Meanwhile, the L.A. city fathers gave O'Malley Chavez Ravine, easy freeway access, etc. in order to lure the team to the west coast. It seems clear that restrictions on the number of franchises (in contrast to the open systems of Europe) raise the stakes in the stadium game, and make the use of eminent domain more likely.Thursday, March 08, 2007
Are Stadiums and Players Complements in Production?
Teams seeking public subsidies commonly claim that building a new stadium will improve the team's revenue flow, allowing it to acquire more talent and improve the quality of the team. No doubt building a new stadium improves team cash flow, but the important question is "what is this cash being spent on?"
If fans are spending the extra cash on amenities at new stadiums, then there is no reason for teams to invest more in team quality. In other words, players have no claims to these revenues. The critical question is whether capital augments labor: do new stadiums improve the marginal product of players and, thus, improve their contribution to team revenue? If so, then teams have an incentive to increase spending on players.
Quinn, Bursik, Borick, and Raethz (2003) find that a new stadium may be complementary to on-field production, but only for baseball. But a recent Wall Street Journal article (reproduced here) provides an example how capital augments labor in sports in general:
In a separate study published this past summer, a Ph.D. candidate in Canada took saliva samples from 14 players on a minor-league hockey team before and after games. The key finding: Levels of testosterone, which have been found to facilitate assertive and aggressive behavior, were 25% to 30% higher before home games, suggesting the home arena triggered players' elemental instinct to protect their territory. "It has the potential to go a long way in developing techniques to create the ideal physiological profile prior to playing," says Justin Carre, the doctoral candidate at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, who co-authored the study.
...Mr. Poulson made his name in the 1990s, overseeing construction of the Portland Trail Blazers' arena for owner and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Mr. Allen, an avid fan of both music and sports, wanted the new venue to draw top bands for concerts but not if that meant using materials that would deaden crowd noise during basketball games. Ellerbe Becket came up with a novel although expensive solution: rotating ceiling panels with a soft, absorptive side for concerts and a hard side that reflects crowd noise back to the court during games.
...At other schools, it's more than just musical chairs that's going on. When Oklahoma State University expanded its Gallagher-Iba Arena -- already one of the loudest venues around -- it went overboard to make sure that those deafening noise levels didn't drop. After taking sound readings and measuring reverberation times throughout the building, architect Gary Sparks came up with a strategy: Instead of building the extra 7,300 seats outward, he stacked them on top of the existing seats on a steep slope. He also added a flat ceiling stripped of almost all absorptive materials. The goal was to give every sound wave a direct path to a hard surface that would send it ping-ponging around for as long as four seconds.
The author of the article also notes that visiting teams and referees are adversely affected by home team crowd noise. He also notes that in the interest of fairness, some leagues are looking at ways to control noise.
The push for fan power is ratcheting up a cat-and-mouse game between teams looking for an edge and league officials charged with keeping things fair. A number of college-basketball conferences, including the ACC and the Big East, are cracking down on the practice of seating pep bands directly behind visitors' benches to make it harder for coaches to talk to their teams during timeouts. Last year, Major League Baseball instituted new rules governing stadiums with retractable roofs, which can be closed to keep out the elements -- but also to keep in the noise. Teams now have to tell the league by May their criteria for deciding when to open or close their roofs during the season, and in the postseason the final decision is up to MLB.
Seemingly this is another way that leagues standardize the effect of capital across teams. Leagues do this with standardization of playing field dimensions and equipment. While they may try to legislate against some ways to distract players, let's hope they don't go too far. We wouldn't want to be deprived of wonderful scenes like this.
Labels: capital, labor, marginal revenue product, stadiums
