Good Thing It's For Football

March 26, 2004

Yesterday, New York City and the NY Jets announced a $2.8 billion plan to develop a new football stadium on the far west side of Manhattan. The full plan includes other developments, including expansion of the Javits convention center. The Jets are expected to pay $800 million to build the stadium itself. The City will pay for the deck over the LIRR yards on which stadium will sit and other infrastructure improvements in the area. (For more on the development, see Gothamist, West Side Story.)

Also yesterday, two economists, Marc Poitras and Larry Hadley, released a new report, finding that large public subsidies to build baseball stadiums cannot be justified on economic grounds; a typical new stadium generates enough revenue to cover most or all of its capital cost. Their study focuses on the 13 Major League Baseball stadiums constructed between 1989 and 2001 with public funding. (San Fransisco's Pac Bell Park, completed in 2001, was the first completely privately funded major league baseball stadium built since Los Angeles's Dodger Stadium stole that team from Brooklyn in 1961.)

Other economists have noted that publicly-funded stadiums fail to generate significant public revenues and benefit the team owners at a substantial cost to taxpayers. See Roger G. Noll and Andrew Zimbalist, Sports, Jobs, and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadiums