Of Course the Public Should Pay For Stadiums

Last week’s announcement that the Oakland Athletics have a deal in place for a new stadium in Las Vegas marked the end of a long, sad, familiar story. The rich owner of a professional sports team wanted a new stadium, but didn’t want to pay for it himself, so he dangled the team as bait and waited for different cities to bid on it, before ultimately going with the best deal. While sports fans may be used to this tale, there’s always wrinkles that make each new iteration hard to stomach.

In this case, the A’s are the third team to leave Oakland in the last few years. The Warriors and Raiders left in 2019, for San Francisco and Vegas respectively, so if the Athletics leave, the city will have no major pro sports teams left. And the Athletics and Oakland have a unique history and identity. I suppose every fanbase and city thinks their identity is unique, but Oakland, a historically Black city and hotbed of Black radicalism in the 1960s and ‘70s, also fielded the one of the first MLB dynasties comprising mostly Black players: They won three straight World Series titles from 1972-74, led by guys like Reggie Jackson, Vida Blue, and Bill North.

But it is true that their stadium — the Oakland Coliseum — is a dump. It first opened in 1966, in that era of multi-purpose stadiums that neglected aesthetics or fan experience for a rigid utilitarianism, and has needed to be replaced for a while now. The only question is who will pay for it…

In recent years, as more and more research shows that publicly funded stadiums are almost always bad deals for cities, public opinion has shifted against these handouts. Politicians still don’t want to be on the hook for letting beloved teams leave — look no further than New York Governor Hochul’s billion dollar handout to the Buffalo Bills — but now there is also outrage any time these billionaire owners get tax dollars thrust into their hands to build these stadiums. No city wants to be the sucker who gets fleeced by a team, but no city wants to lose their team to another city more willing to be that sucker.

“No public tax dollars for billionaire owners” is a very tempting position to hold, but the problem is really the second part, about billionaire owners, not the part about tax dollars. The stadiums should OBVIOUSLY be built with public money – they are, or at least ought to be, public goods. It’s easy to say that if the Athletics’ owner, John J. Fisher, wants a new stadium, then he should go out and pay for it himself. After all, his net worth is reportedly over $2 billion, so surely he could afford it, right? But this doesn’t really hold up, and not just because “net worth” is made up.

Even if Fisher could simply pay for the land and the construction and all the other costs associated with building a new stadium… would we really want him to? Do we really want a class of unelected billionaires controlling our cities that way? Deciding where to put stadiums and how they should look and who should build them and all the other crucial questions that go into a project this big? Of course not. 

This is why, even when cities are reluctant to front the money for stadium projects, they are still actively involved in the negotiations over the projects. Even Oracle Park in San Francisco, one of the only stadiums built in recent memory whose funding was entirely private, was built in collaboration with city officials. So even as cities try to avoid getting stuck with the whole tab on these stadiums, they know they have to be part of the process. When the Athletics’ move to Vegas was announced, Oakland’s mayor declared that, “Oakland is not interested in being used as leverage in the A's negotiations with Las Vegas.” But she was also clear that Oakland was actively involved in negotiations with the A’s, and trying to work with them to stay in Oakland.

Because teams are a public good. This is true in the treacly sense that cities have an emotional, non-economic investment in their teams; it’s also true in a more logistical sense, that if a city is going to have a baseball stadium, or any sports arena, then it will have to devote all kinds of additional public resources to it. There’s public transit, parking, the environmental impact, what to do about all the drunk people after the game, etc. These kinds of decisions cannot and should not be left up to some random billionaire who happens to own the team. 

So it’s not just that owners use their teams as hostages to extract public funds for their stadiums — even though it is effectively what happens. It’s also true that, even in an ideal world, stadiums and arenas would be built with public input, as part of a process of urban planning that factored in a city’s needs and culture. The public is going to be invested in these stadiums one or the other; there’s no avoiding it.

The problem isn’t that stadiums are built with taxpayer money; that is how it should be. The problem is what happens AFTER that, once the stadium is built, when all the revenues generated by the team, not to mention the management of that team, are left to some billionaire because his parents founded The Gap. This is the part worth objecting to.

Socialists tend to scare people when they start using the phrase “abolition of private property.” People tend to imagine agents of the state knocking down their door and taking their shirts or something. But what they are really talking about is public ownership of the means of production. Things like baseball stadiums, which generate revenue but have significant external costs that are shared by the public, ought to in turn be OWNED by the public. Until we recognize that, our cities will stay at the mercy of people like John Fisher…