Synopses & Reviews
Rich and his contributing authors provide a political and economic analysis of sports stadium construction in the United States—the impact it has on the sports industry itself and on the host communities in which stadiums and arenas are built. The book brings together the research of leading academic analysts of sports in American society and gives a candid assessment of the claims and benefits the sports industry makes, in its continuing promotion of new stadium construction. Focusing on Baltimore, Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, New Orleans, Toledo and Phoenix, the authors examine the topic from the perspectives of history, politics, and economics—and in doing so they raise several questions about taxpayer and community protection issues. Specifically, what do communities really get out of these facilities?
They point out that even as new and more expensive facilities are being built, Congress has not provided taxpayers and cities any real protection from the risks involved in stadium investment. Rich and his contributors examine how the pro-stadium coalitions mobilize and explain why stadium supporters manage to win most of their construction initiatives. In doing so, the contributors challenge the conventional wisdom that stadiums stimulate economic development and provide good jobs. On the contrary, they have not lived up to the promises owners made to their host communities. Neither have they generated high paying jobs nor have they met their operating costs. The book concludes with ways in which sports franchise owners can be held more accountable to their communities. The result is a powerful, well reasoned, skeptical but fair assessment of a growing phenomenon, and an important resource for professionals and academics in all fields of public policy administration and urban development and management.
Review
A strength of the book is that is is written for a wide, nonacademic audience.Business History Review
Review
A wealth of significant literature is reviewed--with references at the conclusion of each essay. These essays thoroughly catalog relationship between personalities, cities, issues, and histories in these literature reviews.Public Administration Review
Review
It provides a very useful and readable overview of a particular strand of sports economics. It skillfully and in great detail brings us to the present-day situation where public money is used in large quantities to subsidise private businesses which, the author argues, contributes little to the local or city economy. The importance of this book is that it is grounded in a far longer history of the interrelationship of sport and local and national government....this is an illuminating set of readings whicch might begin to inform the thinking about the importance (or otherwise) of sport elsewhere in the world.Urban Studies
Synopsis
A rigorously objective study of the impact that sports stadiums have on their host cities, emphasizing their benefits but also their liabilities as supposed engines of economic development.
Synopsis
Rich and his contributing authors give a far reaching, rigorous analysis of the impact that professional sports stadiums and arenas have on the economies of their host communities. Critical of, yet sympathetic to, the problems of the sports industry, the book emphasizes the cost of sports facilities and makes clear that as engines of economic development, they are of dubious value. Thoroughly researched and scrupulously objective, the book provides among other things the first comparative study of host cities, raises the question of the role of the sports media, and examines the "theater of sports" and its cultural meaning.
About the Author
WILBUR C. RICH is Professor of Political Science, Wellesley College and has taught at Columbia University and Wayne State University.