Comment 46956

By HamiltonFan (registered) | Posted September 01, 2010 at 06:54:18

I thought this read was interesting citing some research in the area of stadiums in urban areas:


In determining what is best for a city, however, the impact on the metropolitan area as a whole is not the final consideration. There are good reasons to expect the impact of sports stadiums on the particular city in which they play to be different from their effect on the metropolitan area as a whole. Fans may come from the suburbs surrounding the city to spend time and money near the stadium, in the team's home jurisdiction. These expenditures reflect disposable income that will not be spent in other parts of the metropolitan area. So it seems possible that a stadium could benefit a city or town, while having no impact on the economy of the entire metropolitan area. This possibility has not received much attention, but a recent article by Mark Rosentraub finds that sports stadiums generally do not fuel the economies of cities.

Rosentraub chooses 12 cities in the South and Midwest thought to be similar in ways relevant to the question he poses.22 He questions whether such downtown sports facilities met their intended goal of reinforcing the centrality of the central business districts and slowing the gradual erosion of jobs from the central city to the suburbs. Comparing the experience of the seven cities with downtown facilities to the five cities without, Rosentraub finds that this strategy does not seem to be working. The cities with downtown facilities lost more population than those without, both in the central business district and in the balance of the city. The cities with downtown facilities had a smaller share of metropolitan area jobs in the central business district in 1985, and this share declined almost exactly as much as in the cities without downtown facilities between 1985 and 1995. Rosentraub does not argue that sports stadiums hurt the economies of the cities in which they locate. But the evidence he gathers does suggest that they have not had an appreciable economic benefit.23


Source: http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/doub...

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