Publicly Funded Stadiums Are Bad Business. Sports Economist J.C. Bradbury Says the Browns' Brook Park Dome Won't Be Any Different

When Atlanta’s Truist Park opened up in 2017, there were mixed feelings about the Braves’ new ballpark as the team moved out of downtown. Truist Park was now surrounded by a village of shops, restaurants, bars and luxury move theaters, all buoyed by some $300 million of public money with promises of grand returns.

That’s not what has happened, according to sports economist J.C. Bradbury. A professor at Kennesaw State University, Bradbury is one of the nation’s leading researchers on publicly financed stadium and arena projects. And he’s just released his latest book, This One Will Be Different: False Promises and Fiscal Realities of Publicly Funded Stadiums, a 440-page dive into how sports teams time and again attract taxpayers dollars to pay for new stadiums that, decades later, never turn a profit or deliver on economic impact pledges.

We recently asked Bradbury, who visited Cleveland this summer to research the city’s stadiums, his thoughts on our own controversies in the world of sports infrastructure—from repair woes in the Gateway District, to the Haslams’ $800 million state subsidy for their Brook Park dome and mixed-use development project, to how Downtown Cleveland may fare when Huntington Bank Field is a mound of rubble in 2029. His take was pretty cynical: the Browns flight to the suburbs will pad their pockets and no one else’s.

Brook Park is about the same distance away from downtown Cleveland that Truist Park is away from downtown Atlanta. What can Cleveland learn from Atlanta’s experience of moving the Braves’ ballpark to their suburbs?

First of all, Brook Park is actually on your public transit line. You can actually get there. There’s not public transit to Atlanta’s.

What to expect? A few things. Like Atlanta’s, yours will have shops and restaurants, apartmants, whatever they’re doing. And people will go and buy things, and it’ll maybe be a fun place to visit.

But it’ll make more money for the Haslams, it’s not going to make any money for Cleveland. The expectation that it’s going to generate enough new revenue from added taxes coming in to fund the new stadium is not correct. The same thing happened here. Cobb County, where The Battery is, runs on an average deficit of $15 million a year.

Let’s talk about funding. Huntington Bank Field 2.0 involves $800 million in the state’s money and $2 billion of the Haslams’ dollars. Do you think this private contribution makes any difference?

No! If I were to build a bigger, nicer house and live in it, does that help my neighbors? I’m the one who lives in it.

So, if the Haslams build a nicer investment, they are getting all the money back from that. The fact they are spending more is zero material difference to taxpayers. It may sound like a big number, but it’s meaningless.

In This One Will Be Different, you’ve delved into this flight-to-the-suburbs narrative across the U.S. I’m curious: how many cities dealt with the same kind of controversy?

I mean, it all depends on the city and how it’s laid out.

A construction wave happened in the 1960s and 1970s, and again in the 1990s and 2000s. When owners’ leases are up after, say, 30 years, teams often want new stadiums. Some moved next door, like Nissan Stadium in Nashville, or Buffalo’s new stadium. In Atlanta, it was more of that move to the suburbs—like Cleveland’s.

The relocation within the city is something that’s quite common, but there doesn’t seem to be necessarily a trend.

I live a block north of Progressive Field, where the Guardians play roughly 80 home games a year. The Browns, in contrast, play eight or nine. Does that frequency—how often a stadium is actually used—matter to the businesses around it?

That’s one of the things us economists have found pretty consistently. But stadiums also deter other types of businesses from opening up. So the very fact that you have game day disruptions actually means other types of businesses don’t open up.

Really?

Yeah.

The area in downtown Atlanta where Turner Field used to be is now one of the coolest places in the city. Tons of new shops, restaurants, lots more housing. They built a grocery store there, tons of apartments—in an area that was mostly just parking lots for 50 years! Now it’s sort of a cool place to live.

I think you’ll have some of that energy move out to Brook Park. But I don’t think it’s really going to be overall damaging for downtown Cleveland. Other opportunities may open.

Well, you were here this summer, no? Did you put any thought to what might replace our lakefront stadium when it’s toppled in 2029?

Oh, absolutely. I think downtown Cleveland’s a pretty cool place to be.

Developers get involved for their own interests. People lose interest in things, and tastes change. Same thing in Atlanta. Turner Field was a strip of vacancies that were renovated into cool, old buildings where people started moving into.

That’s what will happen in Cleveland’s downtown. People will find another reason to be there. You don’t have to be so worried about the football game disrupting things.

Let’s talk taxes again. A few years ago, Rocket Arena and Progressive Field both relied on a $40 million public bailout for necessary repairs. As the Haslams build in Brook Park, their lakefront stadium still needs millions in repairs. Do you see the public paying for repairs or an ‘upgraded’ stadium 17 miles away as the same value?

No, it’s indefensible from the Haslams’ point of view. I mean, come on. They’re wealthy billionaires. They should be personally embarrassed to be taking this welfare from taxpayers.

Here’s why you build a new stadium. It’s for a surge in consumer demand us economists call the Novelty Effect. That effect lasts, let’s say, five to 10 years after you open a new stadium. A lease is up. You want to go out and build a new stadium, even though the old one is perfectly fine. We all know repairs are much more cost-effective than building a brand new stadium. It’s much cheaper. Even when these stadiums continue to lose money since the day they opened.

That’s why I called my book, This One Will Be Different. It’s that mentality of, ‘We know what we’re doing now; we’re going to fix this.’ And it never works out because all you’re really doing is replacing existing spending. Not new spending.

Will it be different in Brook Park?

Absolutely not!

I investigated the entire history of public stadium finance in the country: professional sports stadiums, major league sports, some minor league. But mostly major league sports. And I was unable to find a single public venue that was able to pay for itself. Not one.

Wow.

Not a single one!

There’s always this idea that, ‘We’re going to build this stadium, everyone’s going to come downtown, we’re going to revitalize downtown,’ or, ‘We’re going to have more people coming to stay here, we’re going to be known as a world-class city.’

And every single time, the promises fall flat. They never come true. I’ll say this right now. If you look at the area outside The Battery and Cobb, it’s still mostly just strip malls with vacancies around the stadium.

What about hotels? I feel that the Haslams village is going to take a lot of reservations Downtown Cleveland would otherwise.

Well, no. The hotel business is largely displacing other people who would otherwise be coming there. Basically all they’re doing is when they don’t come there, then the hotel just fills it with other people. So it’s not net new people that are coming to the stadium.

What about parking lots? Do people still tailgate around Turner Field?

Remember, those areas that were used as parking lots became other things: apartments, townhouses, um, a grocery store.

Yeah, we need one of those now.

I’ve heard.

Say you were playing advisor to Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. What would you measure over the next decade to guage whether or not the Haslams’ deal in Brook Park worked?

I would look at net new expenditures in the area. Property taxes, sales tax expenditures. How did that change in Brook Park relative to other areas in Cleveland?

Last question. I hear this all the time: Why should the Browns get a new stadium if they’re not actually winning? Do you see any correlation between the Novelty Effect of a new stadium and a team just doing better?

[Laughs.] Oh no, absolutely not.

You would think, ‘Well, you win more, you get more money, you spend more money on players.’ That’s not really what happens. What happens is the team makes more money and the owners put it in their pocket.