Jennay Overton's List: philadelphia Politics

In his column, Metronomics for Next American City magazine, Andrew Thompson debunks the myth that sports stadiums equal an economic boon for cities:

My colleague Isaiah Thompson at Philadelphia City Paper wrote an excellent story last week about questionable dealings involved in the building of a new soccer stadium in Chester, PA, a city outside Philadelphia with an industrial glory-days past and post-industrial frustrations ahead. The agreement between the stadium’s developers and groups in Chester was that an allotment of monies granted to build the project would go towards building a mixed-use property with housing and a supermarket, which would be the first in the city. So far, that proposal hasn’t seen a dime towards its realization.

Thompson’s piece focused on where, exactly, the money is for this side-project and why it remains invisible, an in doing so raised an important point that academics and urban analysts have been touting for some time: Sports stadiums do not guarantee bonanzas. From the article:

It hardly takes lengthy statistical analysis to think of a few cities whose stadiums haven’t yanked them from the same post-industrial quagmires that Chester is stuck in: Cleveland, St. Louis, Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, Oakland, and on and on until a list is checked off of nearly every city that has a sports team. Brad Humphrey, professor of sports, recreation and tourism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, came to an even more absolute conclusion: His 2004 study found that there was not a single instance – not one – in which a sports stadium positively impacted a city’s economy. In fact, “The net economic impact of professional sports in Washington, D.C., and the 36 other cities that hosted professional sports teams over nearly 30 years, was a reduction in real per capita income over the entire metropolitan area,” the study says.

Pennsylvania provided millions of dollars in grants to build the stadium, as did New York in renovating the stadiums of the Yankees and Mets. But if the jury has already reached a verdict on the potential benefits of stadiums, why the massive public investments?