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Sport Fishing

Stay Free! Issue #24 is slowly being uploaded to the website. We've just added a pair of interviews that I did with Andrew Zimbalist and Neil DeMause about how sports team owners get the public to pay for private stadiums.

Unused rail yards have never been so popular. Owners of sports teams across the United States see these large, unused spaces as ideal locations for new stadiums. Proponents of stadium building tout their projects as a combination jobs program, civic-pride-generator, and tax revenue bonanza, but the reality rarely lives up to the hype.

Baltimore and Denver built stadiums for their baseball teams on abandoned yards and now the owners of the New Jersey Nets and New York Jets want New York to do the same. Nets owner Bruce Ratner plans to move his team to Brooklyn, where he hopes to build on the Atlantic Yards. The project would be getting more attention if the Jets hadn't been simultaneously plotting to build a new stadium above the Hudson Yards on Manhattan's West Side. Not surprisingly, both stadium plans require New York taxpayers to subsidize construction.

Andrew Zimbalist, best known for his critical analysis of stadium funding, consulted for Bruce Ratner on the Nets proposal. Along with Roger Noll he edited the revolutionary essay collection Sports, Jobs & Taxes. His new book, National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer, was published in April. He spoke with Stay Free! by phone about public financing for stadiums and his evaluation of Ratner's Atlantic Yards project.

Neil DeMause is coauthor, with Joanna Cagan, of Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money Into Private Profit. A native New Yorker and longtime Brooklynite, he monitors plans for new stadiums across the country at his website, FieldofSchemes.com. Stay Free! met Mr. DeMause at Vox Pop in Flatbush to talk about the local stadium proposals.