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Comment by digianarchist | Hacker News Reader

>Turns out that publicly shaking down cities across the US tends to draw out the opposition.

Unless it's for a football stadium.

> Unless it's for a football stadium.

You haven't seen the perpetual and energetic fights in my part of the nation about public funding for football (and other professional sports) stadiums. Sports businesses trying to get tax money to be spent in order to enhance their profitability is absolutely something that brings out the opposition.

Correct. St. Louis and San Diego both let pro football clubs leave recently.

It's more complicated than just St. Louis and San Diego not wanting to put up money. The owners of the respective teams wanted to move to LA pretty much no matter what, and requested particularly absurd things so they could pretend they tried

I think Oakland would be a better example of a city not caving in to giving to Raiders money to build a stadium...

So Las Vegas gave them a lot of money.

That trend seems to be (gradually) changing, although yeah, it seems like many municipalities still let themselves get shaken down by stadium-owners.

Is it just a coincidence that the Giants and Jets both play in New Jersey. Maybe Amazon should just move across the river and call it the New York office.

This was one of the common critiques of the LIC HQ2 plan - LIC doesn't _need_ Amazon to continue redeveloping well, but a nearby city like Newark gets access to the same talent pool and a big anchor tech campus could do a lot more good there. If you're gonna throw tax incentives around, it seems prudent to do the most good with them.

(Granted, Newark is in NJ... and the proposed tax deal was from NY. Thinking as adjacent states instead of a region bites.)

This is true, but sadly it’s democratic and lots of fans turn out in support. I don’t get it, but that’s probably because I’m not a pro sports fan.

And hot off the press, here's an article on that very subject in Memphis, TN: https://granolashotgun.com/2019/02/14/easy-payments/

Well, the NY football teams play in a New Jersey swamp so that didn't really work out for NYC either.

Other than the fact that stadiums are known to cost cities a lot of money without returns and NYC gets to avoid those costs and benefit from the branding.

Hundreds of thousands of people don't turn out for a parade for Amazon. They do when pro teams win championships.

Football stadiums get subsidized because football is extraordinarily, wildly popular with most of the people that pay taxes. Those taxpayers spend massive sums of money on sports every year, across the NFL / MLB / NBA / NHL / MLS / NCAA. Those people pay most of the taxes that fund the government that then pays for the stadium subsidies.

Taxpayers love sports, love spending money on sports, and the majority of taxpayers are clearly fine with subsidizing sports at all levels. They vote with their dollars and... votes, over and over again, year after year, decade after decade, to keep supporting sports subsidization.

See: football attendance and ticket spending on NFL and college games annually, as well as sports packages for television, merchandise sales, etc.

You've got it backwards.

Sports are very popular, and stadium-lovers are vocal with their representatives.

But they are an outspoken minority. The majority of tax-payers do not support subsidizing stadiums.

And stadiums will get built regardless of whether the city gives them free money, because they're profitable. So why subsidize private profits from public coffers?

IT never works out for the city/tax payer.

Stop Padding Billionaires’ Profits by Paying for Sports Stadiums

https://ritholtz.com/2018/07/stop-padding-billionaires-profi...

Being a sports fan does not imply you are happy with tax dollars being used to fund stadiums.

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