With the Pittsburgh Pirates’ and Steelers’ leases coming up for renewal at PNC Park and Acrisure Stadium in 2030 and 2031, respectively, speculation is increasing as to what’s next for the Houses that Taxpayers Largely Built 25 years ago.
Will the barons of sport, a score and five years later, snooker a new iteration of elected officials into once again believing that taxpayer-funded stadiums will lead to the latest Pittsburgh “renaissance,” one that, predictably, never arrived the last time?
Will the barons and pols ply their disingenuous and deceptive ways again to gain millions of dollars more in publicly subsidized upgrades or even new facilities altogether?
Who knows. But what we do know are the facts. And the repeatedly confirmed facts are that taxpayer-funded sports stadiums are not much, if anything, of an economic generator. Pittsburgh’s anemic population and jobs numbers are pudding-proof positive.
And as John Mozena, a senior fellow at the Reason Foundation, recounted just last summer:
Essentially all the 1990s-era stadiums “failed to deliver promised economic growth and prosperity surpassing their joyless predecessors, producing real-world results that rarely even came close to promises and predictions.”
“The three-decade-old stadiums [now or about to be] undergoing replacement or renovation at great taxpayer expense failed so catastrophically at economic development that they have united economists in rare, nearly unanimous condemnation.
“One prominent sports economist, Kennesaw State University Professor J.C. Bradbury, sums up that consensus bluntly: ‘When you ask economists if we should fund sports stadiums, they can’t say “no” fast enough.’”
Mozena says U.S. cities face the potential for “a perfect storm of stadium subsidies over the next few years as the 30-year anniversaries of a generation of stadiums and arenas combine with ballooning price tags for so-called ‘state-of-the-art’ facilities.”
“Yet despite the clear and virtually unchallenged evidence that these deals are neither necessary nor beneficial to the communities that host them or the taxpayers who fund them, elected officials across the country continue to set new records for the biggest subsidies in history.”
“As sports economists Bradbury, [Dennis] Coates and [Brad] Humphreys noted in their definitive overview of stadium subsidy economics [in 2023], we have all the research results and real-world evidence we need to say these are bad deals for our communities.
“The only remaining question is whether we can get our elected officials to listen before they sign deals committing taxpayers to another 30-year debt cycle in the name of being ‘big league.’”
But past being prologue, that likely will not be the case. The usual suspects will trot out all manner of mis- and disinformation, perhaps even with threats of moving elsewhere, either to another, friendlier local county or a distant city, and, in wide-eyed and rabid incredulousness, once again claim Pittsburgh will become a “backwater” footnote in history unless taxpayers yet again pony up to cover the capital costs that the franchises of sport alone should bear.
The bottom line is that professional sports leagues should pay for their own playgrounds and pay taxes on them as well. Now that would represent a real renaissance in sound public policy.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
