Not only they aren’t cheap, but they are pretty much never profitable. If we are to build things that are not profitable, we could as well build something that will offer a service to the population, like public transportation.
Hell, without competition, even taxis can be held to a standard.
We’re going to pay a fortune for the government to provide safe infrastructure. But they’re going to hire all the right people vet them and make sure they do it right. Until they don’t.
Even NASA had to fall hard to get put back on track. I still think government services are the best option. Damn if the water isn’t fucking muddy. Pun not intended but I kind of like it.
A stadium is a service to the public. Stadiums are amenities, and increase happiness among the citizens that enjoy events. Even Sid Meyer’s Civ game has an amenities concept, because they’re really important for cities. If there’s no entertainment options in the city, then all of the talented people leave. That means all of the corporations with great jobs for talented people leave too. With them goes all the money, and you’re left with urban decay and poverty. Yes, transportation is important, but so are amenities.
Besides what Civ says, a lot of stadiums are built for a one time special event, like the olympics or some world cup.
I’m thinking about the olympic stadium of Montreal (which I think the post was about). It was built for the olympics of 76 and cost around a billion dollars at the time.
Since we don’t have a baseball team anymore, it is used only once in a while for music shows, but the acoustic is horrible because it wasn’t built for it. In my lifetime, I honestly never went inside for an event.
And now, the government is talking about a plan to repair it for an other billion. At this point, the only reason to keep it is because it’s so old and unique. Plus, it would just costs too much to demolish it.
It does bring a bunch of tourists annually, but for local people, it’s either seen as a weird relic of the past or a big scam.
Also, why can’t I just be a peaceful barbarian? Why would my population need amenities anyway? And who told them what is a stadium?
Baseball games aren’t the only thing that happen at baseball stadiums. I agree with you about the A’s though. That’s a tragedy of a team, especially considering their previous highs.
It cost £200 million (£327m at current prices) just for 14km of tram lanes in my local city.
It could buy a decent amount of buses (~£200k each, more for green options), but without infrastructure changes and bus lanes, have fun watching them sit in traffic while everyone refuses to use them.
Raiders and Rams stadiums each cost over a billion and have been built in the last 5ish years. Stadiums should and can be cheap but the NFL owners aren’t doing that. Vegas is also tearing down the Tropicana to build a massive and expensive baseball stadium in its please with a smaller Tropicana on the site as well
I don’t like public stadium funding, either, but outside of Olympic spending, cities are mot routinely paying over $1B in public dollars for a single stadium.
Kroenke should lay his own shit, he’s made billions ripping off fans and married a Walton, you know, the family that makes billions refusing to pay their workers fairly and makes the towns they go into finance the building of the Walmart because they “create jobs” shitty jobs that still require government aid to live on but jobs I guess
A bunch of teenagers (16-18) on a European (2westerneurope4u) Discord server took the piss out of me cos my avatar was Edward Elric. Apparently that’s not cool. Especially, considering my age. It made me sad. :(
On a side note, my grandmother is always thankful when someone leaves a shopping cart by the parking space, because she leans on them to help her walk, and it’s often hard for her to walk the distance from the car to the stall.
I agree with the sentiment of this post, but these numbers are silly.
$150m would barely build a bus fleet transit system, nevermind the maintenance, operating, and personnel costs for the fleet (and completely forget about actual long term transit solutions like rail at that cost figure).
And $1b stadiums are outliers – our city got into controversy over our stadium which costed around $250m. Not many municipalities are loaded enough to be getting into billion dollar capital expenditure decisions.
you could absolutely build 1 or 2 decent rapid bus lines for that money, as well as pay for a few years of operations. but…. 1 or 2 rapid bus lines, while nice, certainly doesn’t make for a comprehensive system.
Everyone often bleats out “bread and circuses” at everything but I think this is one area where that actually applies. It wins you votes to keep the city-branded circus in town even if it means kowtowing to billionaire team owner whims.
It’s a weird accepted fact that everyone despises, dismisses, denies and disregards but otherwise believe is true
It’s so widely accepted by anyone who has read a bit of recent history over the past 50 years that all evidence points to the fact that they were complicit in assassinating their own president in 1963.
People on Lemmy like to argue and I’m taking a strong stance on something here. With those two things in mind, I’m expecting some level of push-back. (Which, admittedly, has yet to materialize.)
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