Lets argue about publically financed stadiums next (Nigel, you are implicated in this)

Consider the next home of the Atlanta Braves, SunTrust Park, which is being built about as far from downtown Atlanta as the Braves are games out from the Washington Nationals. (Fine, fine: SunTrust Park is going up in Cobb County, just outside the Perimeter, northwest of Atlanta.) The new location is a planning nightmare, with nowhere near the transit capacity necessary to host a professional sports team. In fact, the Braves are planning to build—honest to goodness—a giant, arching, pedestrian bridge over all-umpteen lanes of I-285 to connect the facility with a mall. As Curbed Atlanta explains, the Atlanta Braves are concocting a trafficpocalypse:

Even with the bridge it looks like the stadium has serious traffic, parking and pedestrian concerns to work through. SunTrust Park will seat 41,500 people and has just 6,000 dedicated parking spaces. While there is 17 percent less seating compared to Turner Field, there is also 30 percent less dedicated parking, and no car-less options to reach the stadium.
That’s one parking space for every seven fans at a sold-out game (which is, admittedly, quite unlikely). For this, the Braves get a slimmer park. Fewer seats means better ticket prices for Braves fans who are able to stick out the traffic that will arrest I-75 for each and every single home game. If the stadium is anyone’s problem, it’s Cobb County voters’ problem, since they are paying $397 million for the pleasure of hosting this delightfully messy team.

And Cobb County voters will pay that $400 million again—and again—any time the Braves’ owners decide to call the ticket up, because the only thing worse than professional sports teams moving to the suburbs is a professional sports teams leaving a particular suburb. This is how they get you: Teams promise illusory economic gains in exchange for public subsidies, then threaten to take what few benefits they deliver if those subsidies are not renewed on an increasingly accelerated schedule.

xsanguine wrote:The rich getting politicians to do their bidding with the redistributed wealth taken from the taxpayers? This can't be true...

No argument from me; Coercion is as coercion does.

Other Teams Pursuing That wrote:I'm with x

xsanguine wrote:Yes, OTPT and I are dating over a shared love of weed and lsd.

It's a pretty deep connection.

xsanguine wrote:Dude! I hear Red Rocks is amazing... you lucky son of a bitch!!!

MILWAUKEE—It has become widely accepted that publicly-financed sports stadiums are a bad deal for cities.Yet in Milwaukee, located in a state that recently cut $250 million from its higher-education system, the state has agreed to to pitch in $250 million for a new arena for the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team. The new building, to be built just a few feet from the current arena—the BMO Bradley Center—will break ground in late June. There are plenty of examples to suggest that this might be a bad idea. Take the example of St. Louis, some 400 miles to the south of here. In 1995, the city, county, and state spent $258 million to build a stadium hoping to attract a football team, eventually luring the Rams from Los Angeles. It didn’t come cheap: Stadium maintenance—which was written into the contract—was expensive, to the tune of $6 million a year. That’s far more than the city was making from games. Now, the Rams are headed back to Los Angeles, and St. Louis is stuck with $144 million in debt and ongoing maintenance costs, according to Reuters.