by Neil deMause
The business community in Cleveland, and its political cronies, had a chance to “fix up those broken buildings, or hire social workers to deal with the kids’ problems, or open up the schools at night,” according to Charney, “so they [could] become stabilized institutions in a totally destabilized community.” Instead, those same civic committees backed the funding of Gateway.
The problem extends far beyond former rust-belt headliners. In 1997 in Austin, Texas, a state senator proposed legislation that would end abatements on property taxes that fund schools. A study conducted by the senate’s Economic Development Committee found that Texas schools had lost almost $480 million in local property-tax revenue from 1985 to 1995 because of tax abatements.
For Charney and other longtime activists who’ve watched the shift in urban planning and emphasis over the past thirty years, the symbolic impact of costly new stadiums is enormous. “I think that’s more of a metaphor for a society’s priorities than it is the actual drain on the actual cash,” Charney says.
The same can be said for other entertainment-zone specialties in cities such as Cleveland. After all, it’s hard to persuasively argue that the public school children of Cleveland somehow benefit—besides by having an increased appreciation of Little Richard—from the placement of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the shores of Lake Erie. In fact, because the museum was built on valuable property with tax abatements, the opposite could be argued—and has been, for decades, by local activists.
Charney, who’s been a public school teacher for more than two decades and has been active with the teachers union for the last ten years, wishes that “there were as much effort [put] into making sure that every child in Cleveland had a home library by the time they were in first grade, where they had ten or fifteen or twenty books that they owned, rather than just fixing up the stadium.” He’d take it a step further and declare that “admission to a Browns, Cavaliers, or Indians game would be the price of a ticket plus a children’s book. At least [for] the people in the loges.” It certainly might be one way, in the current construction-crazy climate, to force a reexamination of urban values. “Just as there is a somewhat moral obligation that people don’t starve,” Charney argues. “I think there may have to be created a moral obligation that children have the right to be literate by the time they’re seven or eight. And that’s not only the problem of the narrowly defined public school system, but society at large.”
The underfunding of Cleveland’s school system is a daunting problem—one directly related to a shift in the city’s priorities. “The legacy of that lack of capital investment shows up in the massive illiteracy of the adult population,” Charney says. “The same people pushing these stadia are the same people who live in the suburbs, moved their businesses to the suburbs, and now say, ‘Fix it, the schools are lousy.’”
Likewise, in Detroit, Bill Dow and other members of the Tiger Stadium Fan Club faced an uphill battle in trying to force politicians to look at the opportunities lost by putting so much emphasis on building a new stadium. “We kept saying, if you ask any urban-planning expert, if you had that kind of public money to spend toward urban renewal, one of the last things they would say would be a baseball stadium that’s used eighty-one days out of the year,” Dow says. “But they just fell for it.”
“There’s a real desperation in Detroit,” Frank Rashid points out. “I understand it—we all had that feeling when the Renaissance Center came, that one big thing is going to make the difference. It’s the politics of desperation, and it’s self-defeating. Finally, what we have to do is what you’ve got to do to rebuild a city, block by block, making sure that the business climate is right, planning carefully, and making sure that you’re investing in things that are going to improve the quality of life for your people, to make your city an attractive place to live and work. It’s not pretty, and it takes time. The problem with these big projects is when you invest everything in them you can’t do the other stuff; there’s nothing left. The lost opportunity is what’s so frustrating, and so awful.”
Structural Adjustment
Public money spent on private construction projects instead of social services, severe cuts in social welfare even as corporate welfare continues unchecked, growing inequities between the haves and have-nots, deteriorating quality-of-life indicators in so-called renaissance towns—if these were part of urban planning in the Third World, they’d have a name: “structural adjustment.”
In some ways, the public funding of huge stadium projects, outdoor malls, and casino halls, coupled with enormous cuts in local spending on social services, can be viewed almost as the domestic version of the structural-adjustment plans pushed on developing nations (and increasingly on Western Europe as well) by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The formula is simple: Devote ever-decreasing amounts of public wealth to support the services needed by the poor and helpless and invest more and more in ways that will return increasing profits to the small numbers of rich and privileged. Oftentimes in the Third World that has meant an emphasis on the tourist and export economy over more indigenous industrial or agricultural solutions. A similar emphasis on tourists over residents is happening in city after city across the United States. The new Comiskey Park was built with an eye for the outside baseball fan coming to the South Side to check out an exciting new attraction—not for locals, whose homes and businesses were destroyed as a necessary part of the process.
Seeing once-proud downtowns reduced to clamoring for tourist dollars is oddly reminiscent of witnessing Third World countries continually redefining themselves and their priorities, or being redefined, by their relationship to the almighty U.S. dollar. For years, development investment in Latin America and elsewhere has been linked to large-scale cutbacks in social services. Indeed, that link has been the cornerstone of World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies in much of the Third World. In U.S. cities, meanwhile, money becomes available for large-scale private projects like sports arenas or privately owned prisons at the same time that it’s reduced for education, low-income housing, or public health services. Increasingly, the two are intricately connected—they don’t just happen to occur coincidentally.
Indeed, if adjustment policies are forcing activists in the developing world into new strategies, their urban U.S. equivalent has inspired local activists to do the same. The Cleveland teachers’ union organized a successful petition drive to place a referendum on the ballot in August 1997 calling for limits on tax abatement. Confronted by the links between downtown development and their deteriorating schools, a local union was stepping far past a traditional workplace issue to combat the current powers that be. “Gateway does not represent something new that ‘we have’—it’s rather treating Cleveland the way the rich nations treat the Third World,” said one Cleveland radio commentator in the aftermath of the successful drive for a new football stadium. “Only instead of being dominated by foreign powers, we’re dominated by a small group of powerful local people who manage to convince us that we are the beneficiaries when they are robbing us.”
The way in which local stadium projects are reported—the discussion of those ever-popular urban renaissances—also mimics in many ways U.S. press reports on the complicated economics and politics of Third World countries. When the New York Times writes that a Latin American country is doing well economically, it usually means that its exports are up, that profits to a small group of corporate or industrial elites are up as well, and that thus by the paper’s own definition of success the country’s adjustment has been a success. Economic success is simply not connected to the actual well-being of a majority of the population. Instead, a substantial percentage of the population simply becomes irrelevant when the discussion focuses on economic success. And the same can be said for cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, and Baltimore.
Baltimore has built its reputation as a renaissance city on one glorious project: the Inner Harbor. Ringed by numerous malls featuring the trendi
est in retail shops and boutiques, and served by the numerous hotels constructed adjacent to it over the past decade and by “water taxis” that take you to historic Fort McHenry (site of the “rockets’ red glare” that inspired Francis Scott Key to pen “The Star-Spangled Banner”), Harborplace was among the first Rouse-designed architectural “triumphs.” Just to the west of the harbor you’ll find Baltimore’s Otterbein neighborhood, one of the first experiments in state-sponsored gentrification, where the city filled houses vacated for an aborted ’70s highway project by selling homes to “urban homesteaders” for $1 a pop. And just west of that is the culmination of Baltimore’s redevelopment: Camden Yards, complete with its own self-contained mall in the ground floor of the old B&O warehouse, now redeveloped as a symbol of urban revival through tourism.
Keep going west a few blocks past Camden Yards, and you’re in Pigtown, where, as in many other Baltimore neighborhoods, among the most notable landmarks are the numerous pawnshops. From here you can just see Oriole Park at Camden Yards and its new football neighbor. One of the best vantage points is Copper’s Lot, a huge plot of vacant land cleared for urban renewal. It remains vacant years later because of toxic wastes left by the factory that formerly occupied the site, which the city shows no great desire to clean up.
As others have argued before, the United States is increasingly a country whose economic system does not require that the vast majority of people be employed. In the modern American city with its modern old-time stadium, people who go from suburbs to the ballparks, tourists who stay in area hotels and take in a game for an afternoon, and even some successful downtown residential fans can pass by the people whose needs are simply not counted. Urban planners can draw up entire downtown developments while ignoring big chunks of the population as if the local needy didn’t exist.
And even when communities organize to stop new-stadium deals, they still face tremendous odds. That’s certainly been the case in three high-profile towns in the 1990s, where spirited opposition by local activists, a determinedly resistant public, and outrageous demands by team owners weren’t enough to stop the stadium juggernaut from rolling on.
Notes
1. When the New England Patriots began construction on their new stadium in 2000, team COO Andy Wasynczuk actually bragged about the distant nosebleed seats, telling the Boston Herald: “Even though the base of the new building is significantly lower—probably 60 feet lower—than Foxboro Stadium’s, by the time it’s finished the new stadium will vertically be higher than the current stadium. It’s going to be a pretty impressive structure.”
2. In 2006 the owners of the Sacramento Kings walked away from a tentative deal to build a new downtown arena, in part because city officials had refused to agree to a clause prohibiting “competing” restaurants from opening nearby.
3. A 2005 study by the budget-watch group City Project revealed that fully 60 percent of the total assessed value of New York City real estate was exempt from paying property taxes.
9
Repeat Offenders
Sports is a way of life, like eating. People say, “You should pay to feed the homeless.” But the world doesn’t work that way. —Minnesota Twins owner Carl Pohlad
Credit Seattle’s team owners and local politicians with audacity, if nothing else. In five years the city’s two professional sports franchises went up for sale, threatened to leave town, and wrangled huge public deals for new stadiums from a concerned populace. Twice they were met by a spirited, never-say-die opposition that maintained its multi-pronged attack long after deals were signed and funds committed. When the dust cleared and the bonds were issued, the lawsuits thrown out of court and the public referenda ignored, King County taxpayers would be left with one of the most enormous sports debts in recent history—close to $1 billion and counting for new homes for baseball’s Mariners and football’s Seahawks.
The first fight began in the early 1990s, over the fate of the Mariners. Saddled with what he claimed were insurmountable debts and a dwindling fan base, team owner Jeff Smulyan put the club up for sale in the winter of 1991. Early fears that the team would leave Seattle for greener pastures—presumably one of the southern cities then making overtures to Major League Baseball—were assuaged when the Baseball Club of Seattle bought the Mariners for more than $100 million in early 1992. The club, a consortium of local businessmen headed up by Nintendo officers, would need official league support—and some controversy did arise over partial foreign ownership of the “American pastime.” But their bid was successful, and almost a year after buying the team, its owners began pushing for a new baseball-only stadium to replace the not yet twenty-year-old Kingdome.
A September 1995 referendum to institute a sales-tax increase to fund a new Mariners stadium was narrowly defeated, but team owners were undeterred. They declared that by October 30 the state would have to come up with a commitment to build a new stadium or else they’d put the team up for sale. Just in the nick of time, an emergency session of the state legislature approved a plan for a $320 million stadium to be paid for with new taxes on restaurants and car rentals. It was a move that outraged those who’d already questioned the priority of funding a new public facility—and who thought they’d had a victory with the September referendum’s defeat. “If the Mariners need a new stadium—if any private business needs to build a new factory—then find the money on the private market,” says attorney Shawn Newman, who, on behalf of his citizen group CLEAN, sued the state, and ultimately lost.
Citizens for More Important Things was another grassroots group formed to oppose the public funding of a new stadium. With only three people at its founding in 1995, the group at its peak had eight hundred donors and approximately four thousand volunteers, according to Chris Van Dyk, one of the organization’s founding members. An investment broker and adviser, Van Dyk had an apparently boundless supply of energy when it came to taking on the stadium barons. “Every time they put up a dike to stop the flow of opinion,” he once told the Seattle Times, “we know exactly where to dig a hole.”1
By June 1996 the architectural plans had revealed yet another old-time stadium—this one with a retractable roof to shield players and fans from the notorious Seattle rain. But in large part because of the cost of that high-tech roof, within months the Public Facilities District created to oversee the stadium project had declared that the new stadium was going to cost some $45 million more than initially projected. Additionally, the retractable roof would not be ready for the venue’s planned April 1999 opening.
Reaction was swift and concerted. Despite their push to see a new stadium built for the ’99 season, the Mariners hadn’t yet signed a lease for the new facility. Local politicians, no doubt wary because of public outcry over the highly publicized cost overruns in such cases as Cleveland, wanted assurances that forking over an additional $45 million was really worth it. By December 1996 four city council members wrote a letter to the PFD urging a delay of the stadium opening until these issues could be better examined.
The reaction from the Mariners was harsh and unequivocal. Within two days, team owners announced that they were selling the team and pulling out of the stadium project. In a statement read live on local radio, team owners declared, “Recently, after more than three years of work toward fulfilling the dream of thousands of fans, the Baseball Club of Seattle has concluded that there is insufficient political leadership in King County to complete the ballpark project in 1999. [The] owners of the Mariners take great pride in having fulfilled all commitments and obligations to those who looked to us to preserve Major League Baseball for Seattle. To them, and to everyone, we cannot explain why those who represent the people have chosen to let baseball go.”
The team owners declared they weren’t interested in any more talks with King County officials, but like any good hostage takers, they were bluffing. There wasn’t much point in holding a gun to taxpayers’ heads if team management didn’t think they could ultimately get their way. Sure enough, w
ithin two weeks of the Mariners’ declaration, Republican senator Slade Gorton had stepped in to broker yet another deal with team owners—this one handing the petulant bosses more profits and fewer expenses. Based on media coverage of the ensuing events, local officials might as well have been dealing with armed guerrillas at the governor’s mansion as with supposedly respectable local business owners. “Gorton helped persuade the owners to reconsider,” the Seattle Times reported in one Christmas Day story. “He has urged governments to accede to the Mariners’ demands and has criticized the city for its dealings with the team.”
Under the terms of the new deal, the city of Seattle would pay for police traffic control, cleanup, and extra transit, and would compensate the local neighborhood for the stadium’s impact—all of which was originally supposed to be covered by the Mariners. What had once seemed outrageous was about to become reality. The Mariners had their conditions met; ground was broken at the new stadium site in March 1997.2
Give Them an Inch…
Meanwhile, with the Seattle Seahawks’ ownership in California businessman Ken Behring’s hands for nine years, rumors surfaced that the team’s position in northern Washington State was less than secure. “In Washington State,” explains attorney Shawn Newman, “the worst thing you can be is a California developer.” A local owner was needed, supposedly, to keep the team in town. But once such a prospective homegrown buyer was found, he followed the pattern of local owners across the country.
When Microsoft cofounder and local billionaire Paul Allen expressed interest in buying the Seahawks in early 1996, he made one thing perfectly clear: A new stadium to replace the twenty-year-old Kingdome was a necessary condition of his purchase. His interest was greeted with joy by many in the Northwest community, despite the warning bells that hundreds of millions in public money was about to be requested once again. The hero worship was appalling to Newman. “They paint the local guy as the savior on the white horse,” the Olympia resident says in disgust, “where we’re picking up the droppings.”