As wealthy owners threaten to relocate their franchises to secure stadium subsidies, a new bill, the Home Team Act, which is co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders, aims to give cities a fairer chance at keeping them at home. Louisa Thomas writes.
Casar told Sanders about his experience as a city councilman trying to bring a Major League Soccer team to Austin. The owner of the Columbus Crew, a managing partner for a private-equity firm, had signalled that he’d move the team to Austin, but Crew supporters, blindsided by the announcement, invoked an Ohio law that had been enacted in 1996, after Art Modell had sneaked the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore, which stipulates that any owner of a professional sports team playing most of its home games in a publicly financed stadium in Ohio is required to give at least six months’ notice before relocating; during that time, the owner must permit local groups a chance to buy the team.
Ultimately, an Ohio family that owns the Browns helped buy the Crew and kept it in Columbus. M.L.S. granted Austin an expansion franchise. Casar viewed the outcome as not only good but just. The new Austin Football Club made a deal with the city for a privately financed stadium on public land, which was better for residents than what the owner of the Crew would likely have demanded as an enticement for moving to the city, Casar told me recently. And although Casar was eager to bring a professional sports franchise to Austin—previously the largest metropolitan area in the country without one—he sympathized with the Crew fan base, having experienced his own heartache as a child in Houston when the Oilers went to Tennessee. There wasn’t even oil in Tennessee, he pointed out to me. Casar’s story touched on a subject close to Sanders’s heart, and not only because the senator dislikes it when billionaires get sweetheart deals. Sanders was still mourning the loss of his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, who’d fled west, to Los Angeles, nearly seventy years ago. For many owners, the financial incentives to move—or even just to threaten to move—are worth the reputational cost. Relocating usually means getting a new stadium, and a new stadium is basically a chance to turn public money into private profit. Property-tax breaks, discounted prices on land, cheap leases, municipal bonds, free utilities—local governments will offer all these things and more to get teams to come or to stay. Taxpayers generally foot a substantial portion of the bill, and owners reap the revenue from ticket sales, concessions, and stadium naming rights. Twenty or thirty years ago, stadiums entered a luxury arms race, and they are now largely designed for lavish fan experiences affordable to only a few. Most of those who make this possible are watching on television at home. A few years ago, New York State officials approved more than eight hundred million dollars in taxpayer funding for a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills after the team’s billionaire owners indicated they wouldn’t renew the lease on the arena. A year later, Nashville earmarked more than a billion dollars in public funds for a new stadium for the Titans , after that team’s owners indicated an openness to relocating. In 1995, the owner of the Raiders, Al Davis, was offered about two hundred million dollars in public loans to move the team from Los Angeles back to its previous home in Oakland; when the team moved to Las Vegas, three decades later, it was promised nearly triple that amount. And by the time the principal and interest are fully paid off, in 2048, public payments for the team will total slightly less than one and a half billion dollars. The Raiders’ valuation has soared to nearly eight billion dollars, largely owing to high stadium revenues; earlier this year, Clark County, home to Las Vegas, announced school-budget cuts. Team owners, of course, reject this kind of analysis. Stadium funding doesn’t come directly out of school budgets but through mechanisms such as hotel and alcohol taxes and state lotteries. Owners argue that stadiums are good investments because they create jobs and boost the local economy. Occasionally, they do. But economists overwhelmingly conclude that the projections they use are often too rosy, and that, for cities, stadiums are almost never worth the costs. The public funding may not be siphoned out of library budgets, but shortfalls have to be covered somehow. And sources of public funding can be brutally regressive, derived from taxes on items like lottery tickets, which are bought disproportionately by the poor. So why do people stand for it? Polls suggest that most people want owners to pay for their own stadiums, but sports teams are desired and beloved, a source not only of entertainment but also of civic pride. The politicians who make these deals know that when franchises leave on their watch, some of the blowback lands on them. They hate to be blamed for making a man cry. Developers came up with a plan to build a suburban multi-use entertainment complex around a domed stadium—one that would keep out the snow and wind and allow for lucrative events year-round. Projected price tag: three billion dollars, far more than the Halas family, whose wealth is mostly tied up in the Bears, could pay outright. So the team asked for eight hundred and fifty million dollars in infrastructure improvements to make the property viable, along with property-tax relief in Arlington Heights. They cut a deal to freeze property-tax assessments, allowing them to negotiate reduced payments, for up to forty years. Illinois lawmakers had yet to vote on that plan when news broke that Indiana lawmakers had unanimously approved an amendment to allow for a publicly financed stadium in Hammond, about thirty miles to the southeast of downtown Chicago. How much will it matter if the Bears move to Indiana? Practically speaking, maybe not much. The San Francisco 49ers play in Santa Clara. The New York Giants and the New York Jets play in New Jersey. And Hammond is roughly the same distance from downtown Chicago as Arlington Heights; whichever direction the team moves, leaving windswept Soldier Field for the artificial environment of a dome means abandoning some of the proud misery that defines Bears football. What bothered Greg Casar, though, when he heard about the competition between the two cities, was that one group of taxpayers was being leveraged against another, and the people who stood to benefit from that competition were the owners of a nearly nine-billion-dollar team. Casar emphasized to me that he isn’t against public funding altogether. There are reasons a community might want to subsidize a sports team, he said. Cities pay for the arts. They build libraries without demanding direct economic benefits. Some of the value that sports teams offer to communities is intangible and incalculable. They help shape a region’s identity and give it a sense of cohesion, even in fractious times. But when owners threaten to bolt if they don’t get public money, he said, communities feel forced into bad deals benefitting billionaires. And Casar doesn’t believe that communities should be offering subsidies “with a gun to their heads,” he said. On the day we spoke, he and Sanders introduced the Home Team Act, federal legislation based on the Ohio law that had been invoked to keep the Crew in Columbus. Casar and Sanders’s bill went even further than that one: the bill explicitly allows for the kind of public-ownership model used by the Green Bay Packers, which N.F.L. bylaws otherwise forbid; after teams give a year’s notice about a planned move, not only can private groups make offers to keep the team in place but government entities and public groups can, too. Given the widespread opposition to publicly financing stadiums, it seems like an easy populist measure, one that could even attract some bipartisan support. Many Democrats don’t like subsidies that favor the rich, and many Republicans don’t like enacting new taxes to help pay for them. When the Republican governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, signed a bill that gave two hundred and fifty million taxpayer dollars to the hedge-fund managers who owned the Milwaukee Bucks for a new stadium, the libertarian Cato Institute was among the groups that opposed it. And both Democrats and Republicans like sports. That doesn’t mean the bill will pass anytime soon, if ever. Money is one reason; sports owners skew Republican, but they donate to Democrats, too. The value of home teams that money can’t measure is another. Most people don’t worry about the local economic impact of stadiums any more than medieval stonemasons used to worry about the lease terms of the cathedrals they built. The problem is those cathedrals couldn’t move. ♦
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