New York City spends $2 billion on stadiums while slashing public funds

[Joanne98]

New York City’s two major league baseball teams are in the midst of constructing enormously expensive new stadiums to be ready for opening day of the 2009 baseball season.

Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, which opened 85 years ago, will be replaced by a new structure that is going up right across the street, on the current site of Macombs Dam Park. The new stadium is expected to cost at least $1.3 billion, making it the most expensive stadium ever built in the US. The $1.3 billion figure does not include at least $500 million that the city is spending for garages and to replace the parkland handed over for the new stadium.

Meanwhile, the same thing is happening in the borough of Queens. Right next to Shea Stadium, since 1964 the home of the New York Mets, the new CitiField is going up, named after banking giant Citigroup, which is paying $20 million annually for the naming rights for the next 20 years. The cost of building CitiField will run between $700 million and $800 million.

The spectacle of two new stadiums going up in the shadows of two perfectly serviceable old ones—at a cost of well over $2 billion—is a fitting symbol of the greed and irrationality of the profit system in general and privately owned professional sports franchises in particular.

In a prime example of “corporate welfare,” the New York City and state governments have come up with $204 million for the new Yankee Stadium and $166 million for CitiField. They are also spending more than $300 million for parking garages and new parkland to replace what was taken for the new stadium in the Bronx.

And this does not include the hundreds of millions of dollars in tax-exempt bond financing arranged and agreed to by city and state officials. This past week, the Yankees were reported to have asked for an additional $350 million in such financing, on top of the $943 million in city bonds they got after the project was first announced in 2006.

The new stadiums are in some respects the sports equivalent of the million-dollar luxury condominiums sprouting up in various parts of Manhattan, which have lately been in the news because of two separate crane accidents only weeks apart that led to the deaths of construction workers and neighborhood residents.

Both the new Yankee Stadium and CitiField will have significantly fewer seats than the arenas they are replacing. The Bronx stadium will have 51,000 seats compared to the current 57,545. CitiField will have 45,000 compared to the current 57,333. The result will be higher priced seats as space is cleared for more luxury boxes. Both stadiums are being designed with the aim of making a greater appeal to the wealthy as well as corporate customers and their clients.

For average working class New Yorkers, the new stadiums will be even more out of reach than the existing ones, particularly when the cost of parking and other expenses are taken into account.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/jun2008/stad-j19.shtml

[blue sky at night]

1. sports.....

what is it goooood for....? absolutely nothin............!!! Hey, did you know my son's soccer team is undefeated?

[provis99]

2. those luxury boxes are nearly useless

Most of the time, they sit there empty. Pretty soon, all stadiums will consist entirely of luxury boxes, which will be empty. Players will be playing in giant stadiums with no crowds.