Field of Schemes

by Neil deMause

  Perhaps more than any other modern American city, Detroit has in recent decades pursued a “development” strategy that seems destined to transform its entire downtown into vacant lots. It began in the 1950s with the construction of five major downtown freeways—“they cut through the city, cut it to ribbons,” says Rashid, who remembers, as a college student camped out outside Tiger Stadium for World Series tickets in 1968, watching the Fisher Freeway plow through the neighboring Briggs Community. Detroit’s old city hall fell soon after, to be replaced by a sterile plaza dubbed Cadillac Square. The city’s classic Orchestra Hall was almost replaced by a McDonald’s several years ago, before a concerted public campaign brought it back from the brink; meanwhile, the city’s oldest brick residential building was bought by entertainer Anita Baker and torn down to make way for an International House of Pancakes.

  In their place the remains of failed redevelopment schemes litter downtown Detroit. As Rashid’s battered Subaru approaches the city center, a tiny electric train car breezes by atop a concrete track that winds in a tight loop through downtown Detroit. This is the “people-mover,” an ill-fated light-rail scheme that cost millions of dollars in federal funds but goes nowhere and is little used.

  “What I’m going to do now is take you down Woodward,” says Rashid, “so you can see what happened to the city’s main street.” He pulls the car south onto Woodward Avenue and into a scene of utter devastation. Detroit’s downtown shopping district is simply gone. Cavernous department stores and jewelry outlets, blocks and blocks of them, sit vacant and shuttered. In the 1980s, the giant Hudson’s department store—the Macy’s of Detroit—fled to a suburban mall, and its neighbors along Woodward quickly followed. Now only the buildings remain, and these not for long: The city has announced plans to demolish the Hudson’s building, empty since the early ’80s, and the others may soon follow.2

  The car turns off Woodward and bears east along the Detroit River, and suddenly there looms the centerpiece of Detroit’s failed hopes: the Renaissance Center, four gleaming steel-and-glass towers isolated from the rest of the city by giant ivy-coated concrete berms. Henry Ford II, grandson of the company’s founder, raised the money for the center in the ’70s—“maybe he realized that the Ford Motor Company hadn’t built a car in Detroit since 1914 and felt guilty about what had happened in Detroit,” says Rashid. Ford had offered to build several smaller developments scattered around downtown, but Mayor Young’s predecessor, Roman Gribbs, instead chose a megalith that utterly transformed downtown, all right, but not quite in the way that was intended. “All those great buildings downtown that had high office occupancy, [their tenants have] moved to this place and now they’re empty,” says Rashid. “[The city] basically moved downtown over by a quarter of a mile and contributed to the devastation of Woodward.”

  Rashid steers past Cobo Arena, the Pistons’ waterfront arena until they moved to the suburbs in the ’80s, and the adjoining Joe Louis Arena, built with $26 million in city funds for the Red Wings hockey team (now owned by Ilitch) in 1979. “And now Ilitch wants another hockey arena, because he doesn’t like Joe Louis [Arena],” says Rashid.

  “We say in Detroit that we have a lousy class of rich people,” he muses. “They dumped on the city, they abused it, they exploited it, they controlled it, and then they left it.” Until the 1920s, Detroit’s economy boasted a variety of small manufacturing industries. The rise of the auto industry put an end to that, says Rashid, by creating an economy of booms and busts and continuous plant closings and reopenings and employing a largely Southern-born labor force that erupted in racial antagonism each time the industry took a downturn. The Ford Motor Company, in particular, hopped from Detroit to suburban Highland Park to neighboring River Rouge, leaving crumbling factories and displaced lives in its wake. “Each time,” according to Rashid, “[Henry Ford] built up a labor force, a tax base, and then abandoned it, and then foisted off the social costs of his erratic business, his layoffs, and all of that on the cities. It’s a fascinating story of abuse of the public coffers.”

  In the 1980s General Motors, another auto giant that had fled to the suburbs, agreed to return to downtown Detroit—in exchange for the city’s agreement to demolish Poletown, a thriving if poor neighborhood of ten thousand, to make way for a sprawling auto plant. Now there is talk that GM regards the Poletown plant as obsolete and is looking to move out of town again.3

  Rashid drives back through downtown, finally stopping the car in a wasteland of empty lots behind the Fox Theater. This, he explains, is the site projected for parking for Ilitch’s new baseball stadium. The city, through its powers of eminent domain, is in the process of seizing this spacious property from its private owners who use it as parking lots and handing it over to Ilitch at cost—to use as parking lots.

  Ilitch and his supporters like to boast that the Tigers’ owner hasn’t demanded the total subsidies that other teams have extorted from their hometowns. The Tigers’ 1997 program, for example, after a page of tributes to the old stadium that bears a striking resemblance to Fan Club materials, notes that “it became clear that a new facility was needed to replace the aging and venerable park” and that the new stadium’s financing “will include $145 million from the Tigers, the highest team-based financing for a Major League Baseball facility since the Dodgers built Dodger Stadium in 1962.” But like Dodger Stadium, which was built with private money on a gift of huge swathes of valuable public land, Ilitch’s contribution comes with its own hidden subsidy: The Fan Club projects that all this “team-based” money will be covered by revenues from the city-donated parking lots.

  It’s a pattern that is all too familiar to lifelong Detroiters like Rashid. “One of the things that the auto companies did was make us hungry for the single interest,” he says, surveying the wreckage of his city’s downtown. “We’re so used to being a single-industry town—it’s too bad that our single industry is now pizza. Pizza and entertainment—it’s now Mike Ilitch. We have ceded over to him one sixth of downtown.”

  It is the opening of another baseball season, the 86th for Tiger Stadium, the 102nd at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull. But Rashid and the remaining core members of the Fan Club—Kim Stroud, the Davidses, Bill Dow, Catherine Darin—no longer spend their days down in the Tiger Stadium bleachers that they lobbied to save. Press reports had already disclosed that Ilitch had been using the ninety-cent city ticket tax, earmarked for maintenance of Tiger Stadium once the 1970s renovations were complete, for such items as pizza pans at the Little Caesar’s concessions stands at the stadium’s new food court. Now, in the bitterest irony of all, the city has decreed that Ilitch will be allowed to use the surcharge to pay for the demolition of the old ballpark. Frank Rashid, who devoted ten years of his life to saving Tiger Stadium, cannot even go to say goodbye without helping finance its destruction.4

  What began as a whim by five baseball-loving friends bloomed into a movement that held off the city’s political and corporate leadership for almost a decade. And yet, in the end, they lost their war. “We did everything we could do, legally and politically,” says Rashid, with more than a touch of sadness. “We used the system. We tried to believe in the system. I don’t believe in the system anymore. I mean, I didn’t really believe in it before, but I thought, well, give it a chance to work. But it clearly doesn’t work. If you don’t have money and power, the system will not work for you—that’s one thing I’ve learned.”

  Notes

  1. As of 2007 the United Artists was still standing, stripped of much of its ornamentation, as Ilitch sought a developer for the site who would either rehabilitate the theater or demolish it.

  2. The Hudson’s building was imploded in a televised ceremony in October 1998. Though officials had promised that it would be a controlled demolition, several chunks of debris landed atop the people-mover tracks, forcing it to be closed for several months. The dust cloud that had engulfed the thousands of onlookers who’d come to see the building fall, meanwhile,
was later determined to have been contaminated with lead.

  3. In 2004 the Michigan Supreme Court belatedly overturned the two-decade-old court ruling that had allowed the city to use eminent domain to remove Poletown’s residents for a private project. As of 2006 the GM Poletown plant employed about three thousand workers, fewer than half what the company had originally promised; it was also ranked on the national Toxic Release Inventory as one of the country’s top polluters.

  4. In September 1999 Tiger Stadium closed its gates for the last time, following an emotional final game that closed with a post-game ceremony hosted by Ernie Harwell. The next spring, Comerica Park opened and, whether because of lingering affection for the old ballpark or because the Tigers were mired in the basement, was an instant failure, with attendance dipping as low as seventeen thousand per game, next to last in the American League, in 2003, when the Tigers lost a league-record 119 games.

  All the while, the old ballpark sat undisturbed at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull while city leaders debated what to do with the site. (Among the suggested uses: a Wal-Mart or a “criminal justice campus featuring jails, courthouses, and law enforcement headquarters.”) After a last-ditch effort by a group calling itself the Navin Field Consortium—which included Frank Rashid, Kim Stroud, and other veterans of the Tiger Stadium Fan Club—to reduce the stadium in size and use it for minor-league baseball failed, the city finally announced in 2006 that Tiger Stadium would be demolished by year’s end and replaced by condos and retail stores. As of 2007, though, no developer had been found for the project.

  No one, meanwhile, has determined what happened to the ticket-surcharge funds, which Ilitch had exhausted by 2005, meaning that Detroit taxpayers will be on the hook for even more money to pay for Tiger Stadium’s wrecking ball.

  6

  Home Field Advantage

  For most of us, we feel that supply and demand, the market, capitalism has got us where we are today in the United States, and so there ought to be some sense, some obligation, to allow that to continue. —Randy Johnson, president, Orlando Area Sports Commission

  This is not about a very rich guy born with a spoon in his mouth that is trying to add to his riches and got the community to build something for him. This is the community saying—in the form of all the major companies—“This is good for the community, let’s go forward with this.” —Jerry Colangelo, owner of the Phoenix Suns and Arizona Diamondbacks

  Detroit may offer a dramatic example, but it’s hardly alone. In most cities, stadium deals are less an exception to standard urban policy than part of the everyday wheeling and dealing that goes on for public money. The question, then, is if corporate welfare, whether for sports teams or auto plants, is so obviously unprofitable for local governments, why do they keep shelling out the dough?

  Frank Rashid spent ten years watching Detroit politicians fight for a new baseball stadium, and the self-interest of elected officials in giant giveaways certainly seems obvious to him. “The local politicians, particularly the mayor and the county executive, know that they get far more mileage out of having a big new project than out of a renovation,” he explains. “They have the ability to say who gets the contracts, whose land is used, which developers are employed, which bond attorneys do it—and all of those people are the people who contribute to their campaign war chests.” That, he believes, is why expensive projects like new stadiums win out over small-scale ones like the Tiger Stadium Fan Club’s Cochrane Plan: “Not because they are intrinsically better for the city or better for the team or anything. There is a political interest in doing it.”

  This tendency has only worsened as local economies have become more dependent on footloose corporations for their economic well-being, says corporate-welfare researcher Greg LeRoy. “The Fortune 500 is still killing off a thousand to twenty-five hundred fulltime jobs a day, so it’s easy for companies to get governors and mayors to compete for the few remaining good projects that are happening,” he observes. “And now it’s really an expectation of a company, if you’re going to relocate or construct a major new facility, you’d probably lose your job as CFO of that company if you didn’t go shake a state down for eight figures. It’s just part of your job description now.”

  If there is anyone who resists these deals, interestingly, it’s usually state legislatures and city councils, which reap less of the publicity benefits and are left with the task of filling the resulting budget shortfalls. Says LeRoy, “There’s a lot of very skeptical state legislatures that have been trying to rein in their governors, and city councils that have been trying to rein in their mayors—it really is an executive–legislative tension. You see that theme over and over again.”

  As for sports team owners, they can count not only on their lure as economic investors (albeit a rather small one, proportionally) but also on the popularity of their product, which can’t be matched by any mere car company. Politicians already predisposed to salivating at the prospect of announcing a new “job-creation” deal can get absolutely fanatical when the deal involves their favorite teams. Minnesota Governor Arne Carlson, a key backer of new sports facilities in his state, declared he wanted to be a college sports booster when he retired from politics. Cleveland Mayor Michael White spent months talking of little but the Browns to local media during the fight over that team. And in an exceptional display of sports exuberance, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown declared that he would “do a hundred [campaign] appearances in a week if [he] had to” in campaigning for a new stadium for the 49ers and whooped and hollered for several minutes when the favorable referendum results came in. “He wasn’t close to hysterical,” said a radio reporter who watched as Brown, a 49ers cap on his head, climbed onto a table and swilled champagne from the bottle, screaming at the top of his lungs. “He was hysterical.”

  The free tickets that are commonly distributed to local political leaders no doubt help grease these political wheels. But the most crucial asset for sports owners is the likelihood of a legislative body for whom a sports star like Jerry Rice, or even a high-powered owner like Edward Bennett Williams, is a celebrity of the first order. As Daniel Finley, county executive of Wisconsin’s Waukesha County, told the Sports Facilities Finance conference, “You send Robin Yount or Hank Aaron into the state capital, and they melt.”

  Add in the generally chummy relationship between politicians and local business leaders, and you have a scenario ripe for exploitation. “It’s incredibly incestuous,” says Ricky Rask, a child-care activist in Minneapolis who became a leader in that city’s fight against public spending on a new ballpark. “Everybody’s got a finger in here or a finger in there. They all play golf together.” Fears of losing out to other cities, Rask is convinced, are just a smokescreen for politicians whose ties to the old-boys’ network are so strong that they are eager to provide for their friends, even at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to the public treasury.

  Paying to Win

  Fortunately for the residents of cities run by these subsidy-happy politicians, local democracy has another means of controlling the public purse: referenda, through which voters can override the will of their elected officials at the ballot box. Not as fortunately, the electoral process has proven to be as susceptible to the power of big money as the politicians themselves.

  The stadium-funding opposition has taken many forms in different cities, from established anti-tax or economic-justice groups to ad hoc groups of individual citizens. But in every case, they have one commonality: None of them has even a fraction of the money of the stadium proponents. “It was beyond David versus Goliath,” moaned Campaign to Stop the Giveaway organizer Jim Ross to San Francisco reporters, after his campaign against public funding for the 49ers’ new stadium was outspent 20–1 by stadium backers. “David at least had a sling. We were throwing rocks with our hands.”

  A rare glimpse behind the scenes of a pro-stadium campaign was provided at the 1997 Sports Facilities Finance conference, when Jay Cross, presi
dent of the Miami Heat basketball team, transfixed listeners with his team’s tale of extracting a new sports arena from their county government. By the fall of 1996, the Miami Heat had spent their entire eight-year existence at the Miami Arena, a combined hockey–basketball facility that Dade County had spent $53 million to construct in 1988. Unfortunately for the county, that was the exact moment when the economics of basketball underwent a seismic shift: The National Basketball Association was soaring in popularity, and luxury suites were just taking off as a major moneymaker. Miami Arena, with its paltry sixteen suites and fifteen-thousand-seat capacity, instantly found itself on the small end of league facilities. As stadium consultant Marc Ganis described it, “That facility was obsolete—economically obsolete—before the concrete dried.”

  The Florida Panthers hockey club, which had shared the Miami Arena with the Heat since the team’s founding in 1993, had already whipsawed Dade County and neighboring Broward County into a bidding war for its services, a battle ultimately won by Broward with a bid of $212 million. Heat owner Mickey Arison, the billionaire owner of Carnival Cruise Lines, followed with his own demands, proposing first $60 million in renovations to the still-new arena, then a whole new building of his own. By leveraging the threat to join the Panthers in Broward County, Arison ultimately arrived at an agreement for a $162.5 million arena on the Miami waterfront, of which Dade County would pay three quarters, the team the rest.

  The Miami populace, however, was somewhat less obliging. A local lawyer—“an annoying little man,” as Cross would describe him to his listeners at the Grand Hyatt—gathered forty-eight thousand signatures to put the arena deal on the November ballot. The election was just eight weeks away. Polls were running 60–40 against the publicly funded arena, and the leading candidate for Dade County mayor was a vocal opponent. Cross, sensing impending disaster, came to a decision. “This is a political campaign,” he recalled thinking. “This is no different than if you’re running for the Senate, or governor, or mayor. We’re talking about winning the hearts and minds of the voters.”