Barack Obama should have known better. At last week's AFL-CIO Presidential debate, when asked if he supported the use of public funds for the construction of Soldier Field, he should have known better than to say that building the stadium promoted economic development in Chicago.
Obama should have known better because presumably he is smart enough to know that there exists broad consensus among economists that sports stadiums and big-ticket sporting events (like the Olympics) do not generally promote economic development, neighborhood uplift or create permanent high-quality jobs. Most economists also agree that governmental bodies rarely recoup the investment in public funds.
It's not as if this information was available only to those who know some secret password or to subscribers to the Journal of Obscure Economics. Obama could have ambled across the Midway from his office at the University of Chicago law school to talk to Allen Sanderson or fought traffic to Lake Forest College to cross-examine Rob Baade, both experts in the study of the economics of sports and stadiums. If Obama wanted a less academic treatment of the issue, he could have pointed his web browser to studies from Good Jobs First, the Heartland Institute or even columns from the Chicago Reader. (The Beechwood Reporter collected a number of these links in their live blog of the debate).
Perhaps Obama was confused by the anomaly of Wrigley Field and the vibrant, livable neighborhood around it. For every Wrigley, there are dozens of Shea Stadiums, Meadowlands or Metrodomes: massive piles of concrete surrounded by moats of grey parking lots. Almost all sport stadiums are part-time affairs, more often empty and dark than filled with screaming happy fans. And even when filled with fans, those fans rarely spend the kind of money outside the stadium that boosts local economies. The bulk of stadium jobs are part-time, temporary service jobs that generally do not provide a living wage, provide good opportunities for advancement, or stepping stones to better work elsewhere. Good evidence exists that stadium construction rarely creates new jobs.* Public subsidies for stadium construction are the worst kind of corporate welfare.
Beyond all the policy wonkery and academic debate about accounting and public expenditures, Mr. "community organizer from the South Side of Chicago" should have known better. Obama supposedly cut his political activist teeth working with a network of churches to overcome decades of economic divestment and political neglect, symbolized by the closing of the LVT steel plant on Chicago's Southeast Side. Public subsidies for stadium construction are part of the "cranes and condo" model of urban development that community organizers constantly struggle against. The cranes and condo model gauges a city's economic and social health by the number of large construction projects, condo conversions and filled downtown office space.
Community organizers know that the best way to gauge a city's health is to look at the life in its working and middle class neighborhoods. They know a city's health and vitality comes as much from the condition of the lowliest playlot in Woodlawn as it does from Millennium Park. They know that new economy jobs cleaning up after the high priests and priestesses of finance, whether it is in their offices or playgrounds are no substitute for the high quality, high wage jobs of the "old" economy. Stadium construction does little to help families in Little Village living in a park desert, those in Woodlawn living in a food desert or families in countless neighborhoods despairing over their children's low quality education.
Barack Obama should have known better. If his "new politics" are going to mean anything for those left behind or struggling by the new economy, he needs to refresh the lessons he learned as a community organizer. A new politics that trades one set of downtown elites with kinder, gentler, prettier ones is nothing short of betrayal.
* Miller, P.A (2002). "The Economic Impact of Sports Stadium Construction: The Case of the Construction Industry in St. Louis," Mo. Journal of Urban Affairs, 24(2)
T / August 15, 2007 1:09 PM
Jacob Lesniewski writes, "Public subsidies for stadium construction are the worst kind of corporate welfare." People who speak in absolutes are, in most cases, absolutely wrong. Mr. Lesniewski does little to support his argrument other than to site examples of stadiums built many decades ago with little or no input from experts in the field and the communities they exist within. These are problems that have been corrected in many of the newer stadiums that have been built in the last decade or so.