Share this article!

A Phil Hall Op-Ed: One of the most lucrative and audacious scams in the real estate world involves the shakedown of taxpayers to finance the stadiums owned and operated by professional sports teams. Tons of money that could be used to improve schools, social services, public safety and the expansion of the housing inventory instead gets redirected into stadiums that usually sit empty for up to half the year.

As a native New Yorker, I am still angry that my city’s two celebrated stadiums, the original Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium, were demolished and replaced with venues paid for by city residents – the $2.3 billion Yankee Stadium opened in 2009 courtesy of $1.2 billion in public subsidies while the $850 million Citi Field opened in 2009 thanks to $615 million in public subsidies.

This type of corporate welfare is still going, but mercifully there is a new wave of skepticism and anger when sports teams try to squeeze the public for their new stadiums. In the Windy City, the Chicago Bears envision themselves in a new $4.6 billion stadium, with $1.5 billion coming from public funding. In Florida, the Tampa Bay Rays proposed a new $1.3 billion, with more than $600 million in funds coming from public sources.

In both cases, the teams are spinning their proposals to suggest they are doing a favor to taxpayers by helping themselves to their hard-earn money. In Chicago, Karen Murphy, the team’s executive vice president of stadium development, declared, “I will remind everyone that these infrastructure projects drive jobs, and they create economic impact.”

In Florida, Rays co-president Matt Silverman tried to play the good citizen card by stating, “If you look out over the next 10, 15, 20 years, we have so much more confidence that this is going to be a great place for a ballpark, and for a neighborhood that fits that ballpark.”

Well, the teams are pitching but not everyone is catching. St. Petersburg City Council member Richie Floyd flatly insisted, “Half a billion for a stadium over 30 years is not what’s in the public interest.” And Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker is on the record insisting public funding of a new Bears stadium is a “non-starter.”

And this is not a problem involving major league sports in big cities. In the relatively smaller city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, there are plans by tech millionaire André Swanston to build a stadium that will be the home of Connecticut United Football Club, which will become part of Major League Soccer’s development league MLS NEXT Pro. Swanston claimed that he “invested millions of his own dollars into the project and has received commitments from private investors,” but added (surprise!) that the propose venue “will be difficult to complete without some level of state support.”

For the record, Bridgeport’s population has a poverty rate of 23.2%, which is nearly double the national average of 12.6%. I can think of more than a few people in Bridgeport who could use public aid more than a millionaire who wants to build a stadium for a development league soccer team. Mercifully, Swanston has yet to receive a penny of pledged public funding for his soccer stadium from Connecticut’s state government, which has been conspicuously quiet about this scheme.

Of course, stadium projects can easily be financed entirely with private funds – a notable case is New Jersey’s $1.6 billion MetLife Stadium, which opened in 2010 without one cent of taxpayer money going into its creation.

However, that example will most likely be the exception rather than rule unless elected officials stop spending public funds in a manner that works for the sports teams’ owners rather than their constituents. Kudos to the politicians calling foul on the Bears and the Rays – enough is enough.

Phil Hall is editor of Weekly Real Estate News. He can be reached at [email protected].