One Last Time
Joseph Bruno and Sheldon Silver both get News Hole "Pol of the Week" plaques for refusing to approve the West Side stadium in time to save the city's Olympics bid. For all but killing off Doctoroff-Bloomberg's Olympic dreams, they have earned a Special Olympics place in our hearts. Hopefully they'll stay there by blocking the stadium plan itself when the Public Authorities Control Board holds its vote next month. But even if Silver and Bruno do give the green light to Gang Green, the Jets and their allies will still face a meteor shower of lawsuits, the latest of which was filed Friday by the Hell's Kitchen Neighborhood Association. The federal suit charges that the stadium plan violates the Clean Air Act by including more than 10,000 parking spaces, twice the number allowed under a 1982 city agreement to combat air pollution.
The Hell's Kitchen suit isn't a bad angle of attack. Neither is Joe Bruno's demand that the state match its $300 million subsidy with equal spending upriver. Ditto Sheldon Silver's worry about the stadium's impact on what he considers the more urgent task of downtown renewal. All three criticisms are fine so far as they go, but all ignore the biggest and best reason to fight the stadium: The economics are corrupt and insane.
It's well known that by backing the Jets bid, the cash-strapped MTA is underselling the land and air rights by almost $700 million. It's also no secret that the stadium deal would involve dumping $600 million of state and city funds into the coffers of a successful private firm.
Much less discussed, however, is the negligible day-to-day economic activity likely to be generated by the stadium and convention facility. As UCLA's Michael Manville has explained in these pages, professional economists rarely agree, but there is little dispute among them on one thing: Stadiums and professional sports franchises are not economic growth machines for surrounding communities. The big money (generated on game days) goes to the owners, the players and the tv stations. One Stanford University study has shown that opening a branch of Macy's would have a bigger economic impact on San Francisco in terms of job creation than the San Francisco Giants. As for the proposed convention facility, the economics aren't much better, as ever more convention cities compete for a static number of major annual events.
Whatever the real number of jobs the stadium would create-the Jets claim a dubious 7000-nobody denies that the vast majority will be seasonal, low-paying and without benefits.
Seasonal is the key word here. Even if you grant the project some wildly optimistic projections (35 conventions of three days each, 10 football games, assorted concerts and big ticket events) the stadium will still sit unused and empty almost eight months of the year. When full, the majority of the stadium's economic output is payroll, the majority going to athletes who are unlikely to live in New York full-time. Likewise, most revenue from concessions and merchandise goes to the companies that make them, which tend to be located in the South and Midwest. Money for t-shirts and hot dogs is economic development for Virginia and Pennsylvania, not New York.
As for non-Stadium jobs, the influx of fans and convention-goers just isn't frequent enough to sustain new businesses. The 1994 baseball strike offered stark evidence of this: Sociologist John Zipp studied the impacts of canceled games on retail stores and found that the strike had no significant effect. In fact, in 17 of the 24 cities studied, retail sales increased.
As for the non-economic benefits of hosting a sports team in Manhattan, Jets home games are sold out through 2015. Local fans will get nothing in that regard. And we'll leave it up to readers to decide if New York City needs the kind of cachet that can be bought with a garish, once-a-decade television event like the Superbowl.