This week, John Oliver ran his standard-issue evisceration mower over the unkempt lawn of publicly funded stadiums. A worthy target! Some of the best facts included:
• $12 billion was spent on 51 stadiums opened between 2000 and 2010, during which time the United States suffered its worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression and saw inequality levels rise.
• Mike Illitch, the owner of the Detroit Red Wings and Little Caesars, is worth $5.1 billion, which not only calls into question how much those garbage pizzas cost to make but also makes plain that people somewhere are eating them.
• There is no evidence that stadiums have a marked effect on job creation in their surrounding areas. This fact is the global warming of sports stadium journalism; all the evidence points to it being true but we’re still fucking debating it.
• An angry hockey fan tased the mayor of Glendale, Arizona for reasons I can’t even begin to understand.
One thing John Oliver did not talk about is a city doing things (relatively) right: Seattle. After the Kingdome fiasco in the ’70s, the city has made deals for major stadiums that are far more beneficial to its taxpayers. (The Kingdome deal was like the one Oliver talked about in Cincinnati, where the municipality was on the hook for constant improvements. When the Kingdome was destroyed, the debts associated with the building were double its initial costs, largely due to repairs and improvements made in the mid-’90s, five years before the whole thing was blown up. The debt for the stadium was finally paid off this year, 15 years after the stadium was imploded.)
Nathaniel Downes at Addicting Info does a solid job of running down the ways in which Seattle learned its lesson and set up better deals for KeyArena and CenturyLink Field. In both cases, revenue is shared with the city; the stadiums were not just a government handout to an incredibly wealthy sports team owner. Additionally, Seattle’s new proposed stadium for the NBA and NHL would be largely privately financed, with revenue generated used to pay down the public portion of the financing—which, by the standards of American stadium construction, qualifies as a miracle. That Chris Hansen’s group was denied the ability to purchase the Sacramento Kings was a great use of soft collusion to keep a horrible racket going for the NBA.
And that’s exactly it: While Seattle is a model for stadiums built right, it’s also a model that scares the shit out of sports team owners in other cities. Our model would reveal that their profit machines masquerade as beacons of civic pride. So, um, yeah. Please keep eviscerating American sports team owners, John. Eviscerate, eviscerate, eviscerate. Because if you eviscerate enough, maybe other municipalities will start demanding a Seattle-esque model of stadium construction, and then the NBA won’t have anything to gain by staying away.