The New York Times has it all wrong about stadiums (and politics)
Deconstructing Binyamin Appelbaum’s opinion piece
The New York Times ran a piece by editorial board member Binyamin Appelbaum on Wednesday titled, “Sports Stadiums Are Monuments to the Poverty of Our Ambitions.”
It contends that building sports stadiums comes at the expense of new infrastructure and housing and better public services, and it implicates big city (and Democratic) mayors in betraying that vision. This is catnip for the American left, or at least for Times’ subscribers, if the comment section is any indication. Readers lapped up Appelbaum’s righteous position and progressive talking points.
But to paraphrase the second-best basketball player of all time, Democrats watch sports, too.
I find the piece condescending and exclusionary. I don’t know why voters opted twice for a sociopathic narcissist as president. I don’t know why us Democrats are incapable of offering an appealing alternative or mustering an effective opposition. I do know that I’m tired of our pearl-clutching bullshit.
I deconstruct Appelbaum’s piece in a close reading below, with excerpts in block quotes. I drafted it while drinking beer and having on in the background the Champions League final and the Phillies-Brewers and Knicks-Pacers games.
People who say that the United States can’t build anything anymore must not be sports fans. Barely a year goes by without the debut of a sparkling new stadium or arena, often in the very cities where it’s most difficult to build almost anything else. A $2.3 billion baseball stadium in the Bronx. A 70,000-seat football stadium in the middle of Los Angeles County. A basketball arena on the San Francisco waterfront.
It is negligent for the US’s newspaper of record to publish a thousand-word broadside based on a generalization that is as false as it is true. Many stadiums do not get built.
SoFi, the “70,000-seat football stadium in the middle of Los Angeles County,” hosts the Chargers because San Diegans rejected a tax measure to fund a new stadium. The Athletics are playing in a Central Valley cowtown because Oakland officials refused to accede to the demands of John Fisher, the A’s billionaire team owner. Virginians derailed the Washington Capitals’ and Wizards’ plan to move to suburban Alexandria by linking arms around their subdivisions.
At the same time, many homes do get built, and, as we’ll later see, housing is what Appelbaum mostly means when he writes “the United States can’t build anything anymore.” Tell that to Austin. Earlier this month, Newsweek reported that rents are falling faster there than in any other city in the US due in large part to Austin’s recent building spree.
In Minneapolis, the housing stock grew and rents are flat five years after the city loosened zoning restrictions. A more honest opening for Appelbaum would have been, “People who say that the cities I’m familiar with and like can’t build anything anymore must not be sports fans.”
An even more honest opening: “People who say that New York can’t build anything anymore must not be sports fans.” That would implicate the Times in the city’s civic paralysis, so Appelbaum widens the scope beyond its eponym to let the paper and its readers off the hook, though Appelbaum does use the new Yankee Stadium as an example to support his thesis. It opened sixteen years ago, in 2009. Apparently, the ballpark is why the city has since proved incapable of improving the subway system or addressing its housing crisis. Wake me up when the Second Ave subway expansion is completed.
This critique is pedantic, though. Politics isn’t about facts. It’s about power, and on this point Appelbaum’s framing is intellectually and logically identical to a NIMBY’s.
The opponents of change project onto proposed housing all sorts of insecurities, biases, misconceptions, and deceptions. Homeowners cry “Protect our neighborhood!” as if lumber and drywall are going to commit violent crime, as if new homes for others signals the decline of social democracy but their home did not.
To stake out the moral high ground, NIMBYs position new housing in opposition to a real or perceived social need: parking, infrastructure, transit, sunlight, the strip of grass their dog craps on. It’s a clever maneuver, for it creates an impossible binary choice that often results in their maintaining power over the built environment and in real estate markets.
Everyone on the Times editorial board presents themselves as an American Socrates so they should know sports were integral to ancient Greek society—ever heard of the Olympics?—and nothing has changed since. Sports are a major part of economic and cultural life around the globe, and sports must be played somewhere (just as humans must shelter somewhere). Appelbaum rejects the very premise of stadium development and positions it in opposition to social needs. Pick one, Appelbaum implies: stadiums or housing? Ballparks or transit?
In doing so, the author reveals his own “poverty of ambition,” that sports have no place in plural, diverse, inclusive, and affordable cities. He says he despises the modern neoliberalism dictating stadium development, but he, like whiny homeowners, perpetuates it by subscribing to a false scarcity.
I resent this zero-sum politics. Sometimes things don’t come at the expense of other things. Sports are fun, and it’s okay to have fun, even when injustice exists in the world. Fun and joy remind us why injustice is worth fighting. And whether it’s for housing or sports, sometimes a building is just a building.
Appelbaum’s opening paragraph rejects these sentiments to make way for an ideologically rigid point. That’s sad. I love attending professional sports events, especially when they’re at urban, walkable venues, and I’m a pro-housing leftist. I supported the 76ers’ proposed arena in Center City Philadelphia, for example, and I once managed a campaign for a $900 million affordable housing measure. In Appelbaum’s world—in the Times’—there’s no room for me.
The latest example, announced last month by the mayor of Washington, D.C., is a $3.8 billion plan to build a stadium for the local football team, the Washington Commanders, on 180 acres of public land just two miles from the Capitol.
Washington is not an easy place to build housing, but no one should doubt the capital city’s capacity to build a stadium. The city opened a basketball arena in 1997, a baseball stadium in 2008 and a soccer stadium in 2018. In Washington, as in other American cities, homes for sports teams are the only kinds of homes that still get built.
I share Appelbaum’s contempt for Washington D.C.’s proposed use of public land, and the cost of new stadiums is obscene, but I’ll return to these points later. Let’s focus on the second paragraph.
Highlighting three projects over a 21-year span is what NIMBYs do when justifying their resistance to new development, and it reflects a depressing conception of American cities, that they must be preserved in amber and changed only with community input (i.e. white people’s consent). Cities are museums to be curated. Dynamism and vitality are strangled out of existence because, like, those with power don’t want to ride the bus.
Homer Simpson has the best perspective on this type of city:
There are indisputably too few homes in the US’s most important cities, particularly for households with low incomes, but there are also too few sporting venues. It’s an idea I explored in a piece called “There should be professional baseball everywhere.”
The gist is there are only 28 cities with big league teams because, thanks to its antitrust exemption awarded by the Supreme Court in 1922, MLB owns a monopoly over professional baseball. It picks the biggest metro areas in which to place teams because that’s where the most wealth can be extracted. “MLB’s monopolistic control of where baseball is played is… about rationing baseball into artificial scarcity,” I wrote.
There should be professional baseball everywhere
During MLB’s offseason, I will post a series of essays titled “Toward a Better Baseball.” The goal of the series is to articulate a vision for the sport for when MLB loses its monopoly power. This is Part 1.
All the other leagues effectively have monopolies, too, and this results in the teams being able to extort cities for subsidies and pass the exorbitant cost of stadiums onto fans. Appelbaum decries the presence of three sports venues, when he should be advocating for more of them. That would mean there is competition in the market and in turn lower prices and consumer choice. Austin’s housing market indicates as much.
Facilitating more venues in professional sports would first require some combination of breaking up the extant leagues, requiring them to open up to new teams, and better protecting competitors. This is the job of the government. Democrats protest new stadium development, but I’m still waiting for their proposals and programs and rhetorical lines of attack for breaking up Big Sports, for protecting consumers of sports, for advocating for towns across America to be able to have professional sports if they want them.
Ironically, Republicans are doing more on this front. Their domestic policy bill working its way through Congress passed the House with a provision that reins in tax write-offs designed specifically for sports team owners. I hope that bill dies an ignominious death and voters punish the GOP for even thinking about taking away people’s healthcare, but a boy can dream about the government doing something about billionaires.
The obvious reason is that sports are popular. Especially the N.F.L. When the Commanders win, Washington wakes up in a better mood. It doesn’t require a political science degree to understand why the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, is eager to persuade the team to return to Washington after a few decades in the Maryland suburbs. She wants to be popular, too.
Only a liberal can be cynical about winning and representative democracy.
But Ms. Bowser’s unseemly, almost desperate eagerness to shovel money into the maw of the team’s billionaire owner is also driven by a bleaker reality. Cities build stadiums in part because it’s so hard to build almost anything else. Municipal leaders fixate on big-ticket projects because it takes so much money and time to obtain the necessary permission to do anything that only the big things are worth attempting.
Municipal leaders have the power to make it easier to obtain permissions!
Democrats want to get stuff done for The People, but then leave untouched all the things that get in the way of getting stuff done, like mandatory community meetings, design review processes, environmental studies and mitigations, lengthy comment periods, and insufficient funding sources that force projects to sit on the vine and go up in cost. Villainizing sports will fix these!
The Commanders stadium, like a growing number of stadium projects in other cities, is being sold as the centerpiece of a broader development. The city says it will eventually include up to 6,000 housing units, some of them subsidized for lower-income families. The unspoken part is that it would be much harder for anyone to build housing on that land without a stadium attached.
An accumulation of reasonable concerns about development has produced an unreasonable system. There are no standard rules, no automatic approvals. Washington has 164 different kinds of zoning districts, and even so, many building projects are treated as exceptions. Anyone who wishes to build must run the gantlet.
Stadiums do pass through this process. Local opposition in San Francisco prevented the construction of an arena at the team’s preferred location. The Chicago Bears have spent the past four years pursuing two separate stadium plans, hoping that at least one will be approved. The D.C. plan still requires approval by the City Council.
Team owners make enough money from stadiums to justify the effort. It’s the smaller projects with slimmer margins that die on the drawing board. In Northwest D.C., there’s a parking lot developers have tried and failed to build on for 25 years.
There’s a lot here, and I’m not sure what Appelbaum is getting at.
The main barrier to subsidized housing development is funding, not stadiums. Bizarrely, the US’s primary affordable housing program is run through the Treasury as a tax credit, and state and local governments do not have the resources on their own to meet the need and demand.
Appelbaum started his piece by citing examples of stadium construction, but here, he’s citing examples of stadiums not being built to prove his point. So which is it? Is it too easy to build stadiums and therefore everything else is ignored? Or is it too hard to develop stadiums so all the resources and energy flows to making them happen?
And for what it’s worth, stadiums aren’t really the source of team owners’ wealth, since teams in the US generally don’t own their venues. The Yankees generated $295 million in ticket and suite revenue in 2023. It's an astounding sum, except it was just 40% of their $720 million total revenues and they must split their gate receipts to pay off public debts issued to construct the ballpark. Yankee Stadium is owned by the New York City Economic Development Corporation. The real money is in TV, brand licensing, and the tax code.
This is all to say Appelbaum doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Because the system makes it hard to build anything other than luxury projects, cities are increasingly for rich people. And make no mistake: Stadiums are playgrounds for the wealthy, thinly disguised as public spaces. Teams once feared that showing games on television would suppress ticket sales. They have learned to sell in-person viewing as a luxury experience. Fans of the Los Angeles Rams who want to buy season tickets at the team’s new stadium must first purchase a “seat license” that can cost as much as $100,000. The tickets are not included — just the right to buy tickets.
“Luxury” in the development world has no practical meaning. It is a marketing term, though it basically just means the units have a dishwasher and fresh paint. That hasn’t stopped NIMBYs from glomming onto the term for post hoc rationalization of their retrograde positions. Like many liberals, Appelbaum can’t help but use “luxury” as a cudgel.
I do not dispute professional sports are more expensive than ever and are pricing out more people than ever. The solution isn’t preventing stadium development. It is breaking up monopoly, protecting consumers and competitors in law and in practice, adopting a more equitable tax code, and improving workers’ purchasing power by supporting better wages and moderating costs across the economy.
Of course, that would take work. A friend put it well. A lot of progressives would rather throw away the pie than let everyone, even some rich people, have a slice. It’s just an easier political strategy.
Washington plans to provide more than $1 billion in cash and subsidies for its stadium project, a number city officials have sought to justify by calling it an investment. Kevin Donahue, D.C.’s city administrator, told The Wall Street Journal that the proposed stadium “is not a luxury but a fundamental necessity to grow our city again.”
If this is at all true, it is only in the sad sense that the city needs to give money to a football team in order to muster public support for housing.
The stadium itself is the very definition of a luxury project. Building a stadium would employ workers; building apartment buildings and stores and offices on the site reserved for the stadium would employ more of them. People spend money at stadiums, but those people overwhelmingly are local residents who otherwise would spend that money in the same community.
Football stadiums, in particular, are rarely used. The Commanders’ current home hosts about 10 games and a similar number of other events, like concerts, each year. That’s it. Really. An economy is money in motion; a stadium is a big cement bowl where most days, nothing happens.
Academic studies have repeatedly concluded that public spending on stadiums is a bad investment. Indeed, one of the leading authorities on the subject has memorably described that conclusion as one of the rare subjects on which economists have approached unanimity.
I could pick nits here, but this is Appelbaum's best passage. Stadiums and ballparks themselves are not evil, and I view them as essential to culture. Nothing brings more people together more often than a baseball team.
But public subsidies for a privately owned team are, in fact, financial losers. If he narrowed his scope to this point and proposed what to do about it, Appelbaum would have had a stronger piece. But he didn’t. Good thing I have already done that:
How to end stadium subsidies
We walked through Petco Park’s outfield gate and into a sun-baked carnival of baseball. Children shrieked in new play areas and adults sipped beer on the rebuilt viewing deck, biding time before the Padres’ first pitch against the Philadelphia Phillies. One friend was amazed. For my money—and it’s a lot of it, considering the $17 Bud Lights—Petco Park is the best modern stadium in America. Another friend lamented the $300 million from taxpayers that made the ballpark possible in the first place.
Better investments would yield bigger returns. One can only imagine a world in which the mayors of American cities were equally motivated by the economic benefits of public transit. But it’s much less expensive, much easier and much more fun to build a gussied-up grandstand than to invest in faster commutes or high-quality public education. The $3.8 billion price for the Commanders stadium is a lot of money, but it is a small fraction of what it would cost to build a neighborhood on the same land.
Our stadiums are monuments to the poverty of our civic ambitions and our inability to summon the collective will to use the land we have for the things we need. They are distractions from our inability to build anything else.
After San Diegans voted down a stadium subsidy for the Chargers in 2016, the city was able to invest in affordable housing, transit, and a range of public services.
Just kidding.
My affordable housing measure here “failed” in 2020 despite receiving 57% of the vote, due to California’s anti-democratic tax laws. Homelessness persists and San Diego has some of the most expensive housing costs in the nation.
A countywide measure to fund transportation needs, including road resurfacing and expansion, failed last year. The local transit authority is now figuring out how to close a $100 million deficit. Cutting routes and frequency is on the table.
For its part, the city proposed to close its $258 million deficit this year by closing libraries and recreation centers.
I use these examples to dispel the liberal fantasy that if we just deprive rich people (in this case, sports team owners) of what they want, then the people get what they need. We will only get more affordable homes and better commutes and education when we build coalitions with the requisite power to achieve those outcomes. This necessitates articulating a vision, developing rhetoric to sell it, and organizing, organizing, and organizing.
I love going to the ballpark. I hate spending $20 for a Bud Light, like I did in Sacramento recently at a Phillies-Athletics game. I’ll believe in the Times again once it holds Democrats accountable for doing something about that.
In your masterful demolition of stadium politics you hold up the mirror to so-called progressives who are themselves the root cause of the crisis in housing.