Current Conditions of Sports Stadiums
Sports stadiums also typically only host events having to do with sports. While a concert or large convention could be held in a sports stadium, many venues typically do not host those kinds of events often or as often as sporting events. This limits the amount of attractive activity a stadium can hold; its appeal is mostly only promoted to sports fans. Well put by the study, “Twenty dollars spent on football tickets may be merely twenty less dollars spent on theater tickets elsewhere in the city. The new restaurant across from the stadium may be offset by putting an old restaurant out of business in another neighborhood.” This back and forth between paying for stadium events but not for other businesses in the city evens out the total revenue for the city and in the long run, does not have much of an impact on the total wealth of the city’s income.
Additionally, the study found that the construction of new stadiums had a “negative and significant” impact on the city’s regional income. Creating new stadiums has been shown to have a negative impact on a city’s income as well as negative effects on the environment they are constructed in. Sports stadiums cause a multitude of environmental problems, such as air pollution leading to further environmental problems, overusing water consumption, and multiplying waste from humans, so why are sports stadiums constructed?
In “Municipal Disconnect: On Abject Water and its Urban Infrastructures,” the author Nikhil Anand proposes the following thought:
While he is talking about the citizen’s access to water, his idea that governments consider the residents of a region as customers can apply here to sports stadiums. Sports stadiums barely give any significant effect on the economy and are harmful to the environment as a whole, but continue to be built under the guise that the people will enjoy some benefits from them if completed. His idea of “good and bad subjects” can be seen when looking at a map of income in Harrison, New Jersey where Red Bull Arena, a soccer stadium, is.“That residents only became eligible subjects of his expertise after they paid their bills shows how the water department, despite being a public entity, recognizes residents more as customers than citizens, and provides a bureaucratic procedure through which public officials could discriminate between good and bad subjects, between residents that were eligible for their service and others that were not.”
Those living closer to Red Bull Arena enjoy a high income in the green while those living further away progressively obtain a smaller income in the orange. Living near a stadium is typically considered a luxury and adds to the price of a home the closer it is to the stadium. “According to a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, properties within a mile of a National Football League (NFL) stadium can see rents increase by as much as 9%.” Those able to afford the higher price of living closer to the Arena must then achieve a higher income.
Although a stadium is believed to be a good investment for a city and should bring a lot of community outreach to residents, those living with less income than others typically do not get the same compensation from the stadium as their richer neighbors do. Living closer to a stadium means that person can afford a higher price of home as well as cash in for tickets to the games and enjoy the things a stadium brings to a community. Living further away from a stadium means one might have a smaller income, have to travel further, and have to relatively spend more to enjoy the same things a richer community member can.
Through the construction of a stadium, a city effectively excludes community members that cannot afford to go to games as often as others might be able to. Anand offers a thought on abjection:
In the example of Harrison, New Jersey, the town itself has overlapping social histories. Red Bull Arena only started construction in 2008 and was opened in 2010. The town of Harrison must have had overlapping history, but may have started differing from each other once the Arena was built. The differences may have started earlier than 2010, however, the stark differences in income must have become more jarring and apparent with the addition of the Arena to the town which proves Anand’s point.“. . . I wish to suggest that abjection is a dialectical process produced out of deeply situated discursive relationships and material practices, where difference is constantly reproduced, enacted and fore- grounded between people that have deep overlapping social histories. Critically, these differences are realized and reproduced through the production and management of urban infrastructure.”
That being said, Red Bull Arena did do some environmental good for the town of Harrison. The Arena was built on a brownfield site, a site that has or may have the presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant. Building the Arena caused the town’s water clean-up effort to be started early and sped up. The clean-up finished 3 to 4 years earlier than the town originally planned. This is a massive advancement which can only be attributed to the construction of the Arena itself. With this in mind, there could be a benefit from building sports stadiums when it comes to the environmental benefits such as this that would have plagued the town of Harrison for longer had the stadium not been built. This raises the question of if stadiums could have the potential to be environmentally beneficial if not economically beneficial.
