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This is a very underrated point. I feel like in the abstract, we should be asking how much a city should be willing to pay for a place where tens of thousands of people can gather for a common purpose tens of times a year to attend an activity that tens (or hundreds) of thousands more people really enjoy watching on TV.

It seems very plausible that this should be a non zero amount. (Also plausible that it shouldn’t be in the billions...)

A lot of people think sports are not a worthy use of government funds, which I totally understand. But looking past the relative pointlessness of most sports, it really is an exceptional experience to be in a packed stadium whether it’s for a football game or a concert or whatever.

One big difference is that artists pay to use a venue for a performance. Sports teams get the city to pay to build the stadium, and keep the profits.

When I go to the theatre or the symphony or the ballet or the opera, the programs and the placards in the lobby always make it clear that most of their funding comes from donations from big companies (in Seattle: always Boeing and Microsoft) and private donors.

If we're so excited to spend public money for gatherings at events that people want to see, why don't they ever spend that sort of money on the arts? Why don't I see Seattle Pops concerts on TV? Why do we depend on private donations to keep the theatres open? Why do we zone for stadiums, but not community theatre?

Everyone I know wants to see more of these performing artists but most have trouble affording tickets. When you can't afford an NFL ticket, you turn on the TV and watch it for free anyway. When you can't afford to see the local arts, you're mostly just SOL.

Do you think there is a conspiracy to keep local art off TV? Or maybe the reason that you don't see the Seattle Pops on TV more is because broadcasters can't make money since people won't watch them? Sports are popular. That always seems to be a shock to people in the type of circles that frequent HN, but it is the underlying fact that allows sports teams to get these subsidizes in the first place.

"Conspiracy" is an ugly word, and usually not applicable. Let's not build straw men where none exist.

Go back a step. Why are sports so sought after? Well, they spend many millions of dollars on advertising, for one. That's more than the entire Seattle Symphony budget. How many people even know they play live movie soundtracks to popular movies here? Yet I don't even follow football and I can tell you about a team 2000 miles away which is in the playoffs. It's hard to avoid it. Why do they have that kind of money? Because they were successful in decades past.

I think a much simpler explanation is: a couple of professional sports leagues got big in the middle of the past century, for various reasons, and have used that success to gain a foothold into TV. Note that it isn't sports in general that are popular. There are really only 3 sports leagues that most of America cares about. Try to start a pro cricket league here and you'll just hear crickets.

The rich always get richer. In this case, the rich are getting richer using public money. It's not really about sports. Even the sports fans here aren't pushing to let kids play ball in the stadium when it's empty.

Nobody at a concert is going to wait through commercial breaks, for starters.

I think this is a question of relative popularity, they could hold a local arts performance at Centurylink and even if it were free, the stadium would still be mostly empty.

The 5th Avenue Theater holds a little more than 2,000 people, it’s not a giant logistical problem to fit an extra 2,000 people into downtown Seattle.

And I’m not trying to defend people’s preference for sports. I’m one of those people who wishes there was more of the arts around, but the demand for sports is enormous compared to the demand for local arts.

The last 3 live arts performances I went to had to turn away people because they didn't have the capacity to seat everyone who wanted to attend.

2000 seats isn't 2000 people. Add performers and stage crew and support staff -- and then consider that most of them have to leave town after the buses stop running for the night (and certainly can't afford downtown Amazon-esque rent). Do you think adding hundreds of cars downtown in the evenings isn't a major logistical problem?

In recent history, a significant theatre (not the 5th) was bought and sold under terms which turned out to be completely false. This isn't some libertarian fantasy where we're only giving people what they want. People in power are literally lying and cheating to keep the arts away from citizens.

If people like sports, they should express that preference not by spending tax payer dollars on stadiums, but paying higher prices on tickets to fund the increased cost of the stadium. That way, the market mechanism signals what is the appropriate level of resources society should spend on this kind of thing and instead of some backroom negotiation.

Please say "false equivalence" to yourself, as many times as you can.

You're going to compare a public park to a stadium? Go to a stadium without a ticket, and see for yourself just how "public" it is.

Really, really large numbers of people use public parks. Small, small numbers of people (by percentage, in large metro regions) ever see the inside of a stadium.

While I understand that there are many that enjoy professional sports, I certainly don't want my tax dollars supporting it.

You are missing basically the whole point of my comment. You don't have to enter a stadium or even pay a cent to a sports team to get utility from it. You can watch a game on free over-the-air TV or you can enjoy the communal aspects that other comments in this thread have mentioned. The business is generating positive externalities and therefore it might be appropriate to subsidize it.

Also, you might not want your tax dollars going to support professional sports, but many people do. That was my other point. We live in a democracy and the people generally are in favor of sports. The exact entertainment value it generates is debatable, but it is enough that these deals can be justified without requiring them to turn a profit. That was the only way I was comparing parks and stadiums. They don't need to be profitable to be a good use of money.

> Also, you might not want your tax dollars going to support professional sports, but many people do. That was my other point. We live in a democracy and the people generally are in favor of sports.

So let the taxpayers vote! If a majority wants to waste their money, then let them. But even then it is an absolute waste no matter your arguments because these are commercial entities backed by obscenely wealthy interests _that can afford to build them themselves_.

> You don't have to enter a stadium or even pay a cent to a sports team to get utility from it.

That is completely not true. But even if it was, why does the stadium have to be brand new and built in a high property value area? What's wrong with existing arenas?

> You can watch a game on free over-the-air TV

There are very few games that are shown OTA. And on top of that, there are commercials so it isn't free. Good luck trying to watch every game without paying money or doing something illegal. I'm willing to bet that this has never been accomplished by any fan in the history of sports.

You are just factually wrong here. The NFL mandates that every game that is sold out (nearly 100% of the games in the NFL) must be broadcast in the local market on free OVA TV.

And the reason why the stadium need regular upgrades is to attract the team in the first place. If a team doesn't have a new stadium like the St Louis Rams, San Diego Chargers, or Oakland Raiders they will move to a market that either offers them subsidies or would simply be more profitable. That is the fundamental cause of all these problems.

Oh. I didn't realize this. None of the teams I'm a fan of are in my local area.

  There are very few games that are shown OTA.

All NFL games are broadcast OTA to the participating teams' home regions.

The game could be filmed in a comparatively cheap warehouse and you could still watch it on TV.

Awesome comment, and I legitimately have never heard this point of view before. You're right, the closest it ever gets is "don't you like [sports team]??" I'm far more inclined to change my view on this issue.

We (San Diego) recently had a protracted fight for our sports team. They wanted a new stadium, the city didn't, they moved away. I voted against it. I probably still would have, just because I think the NFL is dead in the long run from all the TBI stuff.

TL;DR - It is more complicated than "sports stadiums = bad" but these discussions rarely get deeper than that.

Additionally, the detractors often don't understand that these things are basically urban pacification projects. The argument has been made that having a place where the mayor sits down with a businessman on one side and a bricklayer on the other, where everybody has temporarily set aside their differences in politics, occupation, wealth, class, IQ, gender, religion, what-have-you and is lustily cheering for the same outcome, is good for social order.

To the extent that's true, it makes stadiums a valid subject for government funding. I don't like sportsball and I don't like being forced to pay for it, but I also can't see how to shoot any holes in this argument. It makes some sense.

You can always make up a story where your project brings intangible but wonderful benefits that no decent person could be against. This is normal.

If you can paint a rosy picture of community, or the happiness of children, or the safety of the vulnerable, it is indeed very hard to argue against. Saying the glowing vision is exaggerated or fabulated just makes you look like a grouch and a jerk.

In my town, the new stadium has a VIP area. Important people are specifically shielded from contact with bricklayers. Just saying.

Saying the glowing vision is exaggerated or fabulated just makes you look like a grouch and a jerk.

Yep. Unfortunately, the people who want to treat stadiums as public works projects have 2000+ years of history on their side going back to classical Rome and Athens. I've concluded that it's not a battle worth fighting, if only because my lack of appreciation of team sports makes me a bad judge of how important they are to society.

Panem et circenses.

Massive "sports" events have been a staple of social control since Greek and Roman times, and still are to some extent. Instead of going out and killing people on the streets, you just watch gladiators kill one another.

People still riot from time to time when their favorite team loses a big match, but those riots can be much more easily controlled and condemned than one that actually exposes deep fissures within the society.

Having said that, however, it's worth asking whether a democratic society should allow the government to encourage such a well-known method of silencing dissent.

It also benefits an area to have regional cohesion. I'm sure having the big local city and all its suburbs rooting for the home team helps with that.

The problem is using the electoral mechanism rather than the market mechanism to determine how much we as a society should allocate to stadiums.

In an electoral mechanism the 51% can compel the other 49% to spend tremendous resources on something the minority does not want. That is incredibly wasteful and those who want sports should pay for it directly via higher ticket prices instead.

Also a lot of these are a zero-sum contest between cities to attract the teams who demand the new facilities. The economic value is transferred rather than created when two cities are bidding against each other.

Same argument for bidding on Amazon HQ #2. Sports franchises and Amazon are leveraging their negotiating scale against local governments. Since cities cannot conduct "M&A", nor are they designed around the unyielding quest for growth, they will forever be out muscled by large businesses. This kind of subsidy simply needs to be illegal, as most cities are never in a strong negotiating position against private interests.

Nobody is confused about this point when the thing in question is highbrow (e.g. the symphony, opera, museums). We don’t get a lot of hot takes about how those are bad economic investments.

That's because we don't get many outright lies about how those are good economic decisions. They're usually framed honestly as "let's buy some culture".

I agree with you. Governments subsidize and pay for things with a lot less ROI than sports stadiums that can foster a sense of local community.

Seattle spent $5 million making public shelters for drug deals and prostitution[1], and I bet most residents would have preferred that money go toward a new basketball/hockey arena.

1. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattles-5-million...