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Stanford economist Roger Noll says professional sports stadiums do not generate local economic growth as advertised. He also says the stadium costs that NFL teams expect local governments to contribute have fallen due to increased political resistance to subsidies for sports teams.

Mike Brake/ Shutterstock

When an NFL team wants to build a new stadium, it often argues that the facility would boost the local economy.

But that is not true, says Roger Noll, a Stanford professor emeritus in economics. A former senior economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisers, Noll is an expert on the economics of sports.

"NFL stadiums do not generate significant local economic growth, and the incremental tax revenue is not sufficient to cover any significant financial contribution by the city," said Noll, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He has written articles and books and given talks on the public financing of sports stadiums.

Currently, stadium proposals for NFL teams are circulating in St. Louis, Los Angeles, San Diego and Cleveland, while San Francisco and other cities and states like Wisconsin are considering public funding for new or improved sports facilities. Local officials in Oakland, California, are expected to respond to a "Coliseum City" proposal in August with a December deadline for closing any deal.

Noll said that because football stadiums are used so infrequently - two preseason games, eight regular season games and possibly a couple of playoff games - they do not realize a large economic benefit from those games alone. Realizing this, the San Francisco 49ers' new Levi's Stadium, which opened last year, has played host to several other events, including concerts and college football, soccer and hockey games.

"By comparison, other billion dollar facilities - like a major shopping center or large manufacturing plant - will employ many more people and generate substantially more revenue and taxes," Noll said.

Basketball and hockey arenas are a better deal for cities, he said. "Arenas are used more often."

Stadium proposals analyzed

Noll said thatfor both football stadium proposals for Los Angeles, the public contribution is accounted for by providing the site, infrastructure, and tax forgiveness, as Santa Clara did for the 49ers' Levi's Stadium.

"These items account for about 20 percent of the cost. In addition, the stadium authority, which is owned by local government, takes on debt that is used to finance stadium construction," he said.

He explained that the financial plan calls for the debt to be repaid from the sale of stadium naming rights, personal seat licenses, rights to concessions and profit from operations.

"If forecasts of these revenues (for both L.A. proposals) turn out to be optimistic, the local government may be on the hook for some of this debt. The maximum exposure to debt repayment is about $200 million above the $200 million or so for the site, infrastructure and tax forgiveness, spread (with interest) over 25 to 30 years," according to Noll.

For example, he pointed out, the cities of Oakland and St. Louis are still making substantial annual payments on the debts that remain for now-obsolete stadiums that were built to lure the Oakland Raiders and St. Louis Rams away from Los Angeles in the 1990s.

He expects one or two NFL teams to relocate to Los Angeles, though it's a dicey timing issue for the teams themselves.

"The L.A. proposals are much further along than the proposals for the Rams in St. Louis, the Chargers in San Diego, and the Raiders in Oakland," Noll said.

The NFL does not want all three teams to move to Los Angeles, he explained, but a decision needs to be made before any of them have a firm commitment for a new stadium in its current home city.

"The stadium debates in Oakland, San Diego and St. Louis reflect hesitancy in these cities to sign on to expensive new deals to keep those teams," he said.

An end to an era?

With public skepticism abounding, Noll said the current wave of stadium proposals may signal the end of an era in which pro teams periodically receive a subsidy to build a large "modern" stadium - as defined by a large number of luxury boxes, concession areas that resemble shopping centers, and a technologically advanced scoreboard.

"The remaining question is what the next era of stadium construction will bring" he said.

One possibility, according to Noll, is that as professional sports generate greater revenues from Internet distribution, real-world stadium attendance will shrink, leading to smaller but more luxurious facilities.

"Another possibility is that all future facilities will be embedded in larger commercial and residential projects, with the sports team being like an anchor tenant at a shopping center," he said.

In other words, if public subsidies for sports facilities continue, they will be used for multi-use developments like the Coliseum City (Oakland) and Hollywood Park (Inglewood) proposals, rather than stand-alone, football-only facilities like Levi's Stadium, Noll said.

Sports and affordability

Can American professional sports leagues afford to entirely pay for their own stadiums and the operations surrounding them?

"Yes," said Noll, "because most teams are owned by wealthy individuals who could pay for their own stadiums. But teams are businesses, and the additional profit to a team that is created by a new stadium is not worth the cost."

Most likely, if teams and leagues had to pay for their own stadiums, the stadiums would still be built, he said, but at a cost that could be repaid from the rights to personal seats, naming and concessions.

"A significant fraction of the cost of facilities such as Levi's Stadium and the proposed NFL stadiums in L.A. is accounted for by amenities that generate initial interest in the facility, but in the long run do not contribute much to revenues," he said.

When team owners threaten to relocate elsewhere if they do not get a new stadium, community officials should first make a sober assessment of how much a stadium deal will cost, Noll advised.

Most of the details of recent stadium deals and proposals are in the public record, and they establish a rough guideline for how much a city will have to pay to keep or to obtain a team, he added.

"Cities have very little bargaining power with an NFL team. As long as there are cities without NFL teams that are willing to subsidize a stadium, cities will have to pay part of the cost of a new stadium," he said.

Ultimately, Noll acknowledged, cities can decide whether to view these facilities as a form of "public consumption" rather than as financial investments.

Interestingly, he noted, the city of Pasadena turned down a proposal to convert the Rose Bowl to an NFL stadium - which would have meant adding luxury boxes and fancier concession areas, and reducing the number of seats by 20,000.

"In recent years, several cities have simply decided the price is too high," he said.

Media Contact

Roger Noll, Economics: (650) 723-2297, rnoll@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Stanford News Service: (650) 725-0224, cbparker@stanford.edu

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Sports stadiums do not generate significant local economic growth, Stanford expert says

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Stanford economist Roger Noll says professional sports stadiums do not generate local economic growth as advertised. He also says the stadium costs that NFL teams expect local governments to contribute have fallen due to increased political resistance to subsidies for sports teams. Mike Brake/ Shutterstock When an NFL team wants to build a new stadium, it often argues that the facility would boost the local economy.

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With the Super Bowl tomorrow being played in a stadium built with public money, the discussion of whether or when state and local governments should (help) pay for sports stadiums is back in the news. Once you understand the reality of what creates economic impact, the answer is easy. Governments should never finance a stadium with public money as it is simply a subsidy to rich team owners and a few businesses that stand to benefit from the events held there.

The argument is frequently made that all the visitors coming to spend money at and around sports events will produce enough economic impact to pay for the stadium. This argument falls apart when you realize two key points: economic impact is not the same as tax revenue and when evaluating such events you must account for visitors' budget constraints.

It is easily possible (and in fact quite likely) that a new stadium will produce more in related economic activity than the cost of any public financing (even if a government pays for all the costs). However, it doesn't matter if businesses take in more money than taxpayers shelled out to build the stadium; what matters is whether the taxes collected from all that activity are more than the up-front taxpayer cost. A visitor to the Super Bowl might spend $500 on an airplane ticket, $2000 on his hotel, $300 on food, plus $500 on the ticket to the game. That sounds like a lot of economic activity for just one visitor. However, the plane ticket generates roughly zero money for local and state governments (there may be some airport taxes but they will go toward running the airport). The hotel stay probably produces $200-250 in tax revenue, the restaurant bills another $20, and the game ticket another $35. That means the over $3000 in spending really amounts to around $300 in tax revenue.

Some of that tax revenue has to go toward government costs associated with the holding of sports events: extra police, traffic control, perhaps more public transit, etc. At the end of the day, only a very small fraction of total spending associated with stadium events is left over to help pay back the taxpayers for building a stadium.

Businesses near the stadium like restaurants and hotels might win from the extra local spending, but why should taxpayers pay so that a few favored businesses can see greater profits?

On to the second point. When people spend money to go to a sporting event, they cannot just pull that money out of thin air (tragic, but true). Rather, the money comes from their family budget, meaning something else has to give. If I buy tickets to an Atlanta Hawks game, the result of that spending might mean several fewer trips to the movies, not going to a local amusement park, or not going to a local restaurant or two.

Stadium boosters like to point to all the money I will spend going to, at, and associated with my trip to see the Hawks, but they never focus on the fact that other businesses are going to lose a roughly equal amount of spending that I would have done instead. All that substitute spending would also have produced tax revenue. Those taxes associated to sporting events are not all new revenues, but mostly just substitutes for taxes that would have been collected on an alternate activity.

In fact, local and state governments get new tax revenue from stadium-related events in only two ways: steering purchases toward activities with higher tax rates and taxing out-of-town visitors.

Hotels and rental cars are examples of spending that generally is taxed at a higher rate than other types of spending. Hotel stays are usually taxed in the 10-12 percent range, much higher than ordinary sales taxes, so there is some gain there. But my pre-game meal before a game generates no more tax than a meal I might have eaten in my neighborhood if I had skipped the game.

Thus, the second hope for capturing new revenue is out-of-town visitors. I live an hour from Atlanta, in a different tax jurisdiction. So when I go to a Hawks game and eat a pre-game dinner in Atlanta (usually at Ted's Montana Grill), Atlanta gets some tax revenue and my hometown loses an equal amount. If the Hawks attract fans from far enough away to stay in hotels, Atlanta wins some more.

Once you look at things this way, you see that stadiums can only justify public financing if they will draw most attendees from a long distance on a regular basis. The Super Bowl does that, but the average city's football, baseball, hockey, or basketball team does not. Since most events held at a stadium will rely heavily on the local fan base, they will never generate enough tax revenue to pay back taxpayers for the cost of the stadium.

So support your local sports team, enjoy the Super Bowl, but never support public financing of a sports stadium. You as a taxpayer are virtually guaranteed to lose that game.

Follow me on Twitter @DorfmanJeffrey

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Publicly Financed Sports Stadiums Are A Game That Taxpayers Lose

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With the Super Bowl tomorrow being played in a stadium built with public money, the discussion of whether or when state and local governments should (help) pay for sports stadiums is back in the news. Once you understand the reality of what creates economic impact, the answer is easy.

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First there is this interesting bit of information.

Inglewood commissioned an economic analysis of that city's stadium plan that will be presented to the city council next month. Developers of the project - which they call City of Champions - have promised hundreds of millions of dollars in economic activity, but Victor Matheson, a sports economist at College of the Holy Cross, is dubious.
"A good rule of thumb that economists use is to take what stadium boosters are telling you and move that one decimal place to the left, and that's usually a good estimate of what you're going to get," Matheson said.

Economists say that sports teams just don't spur much if any new spending in the community. The money residents might spend at a football or basketball game comes from their already limited entertainment budget and therefore takes away from what they might have spent going out to dinner or another business where the money would stay in the community. When the stadium simply displaces spending that would have occurred otherwise, no net benefits are generated.

An analysis on the Staples Center commissioned in 2003 showed that economic activity actually increased in Inglewood when the Lakers moved out of town to the Staples Center in L.A. partly because all the crowds, traffic, noise and congestion of game days tended to keep people away from other events and activities.

That is, sales tax revenue went up when the Lakers and Kings moved to Staples Center in 1999.
"A case can be made for the fact that a cause and effect relationship exists between the loss of professional sports and a spike upward in the rate of economic growth for the City of Inglewood," the report said.

Chris Meany, of course, disagrees.

"To argue that Inglewood is better off because downtown L.A. took the Lakers and Kings is to stretch credulity," said Meany.

Studies and other scientific analysis do not support Meany's position. Brad Humphreys, a professor of recreation, sport and tourism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and colleague Dennis Coates, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, studied the issue closely and could not uncover a single instance in which the presence of a professional sports team was responsible for a boost in the local economy.

"Our conclusion, and that of nearly all academic economists studying this issue, is that professional sports generally have little, if any, positive effect on a city's economy," Humphreys and Coates wrote in a report issued in 2004 by the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. (news.illinois.edu).

The professors based their report on new data as well as previously published research in which they analyzed economic indicators from 37 major metropolitan areas with major-league baseball, football and basketball teams.
"The net economic impact of professional sports in Washington, D.C., and the 36 other cities that hosted professional sports teams over nearly 30 years, was a reduction in real per capita income over the entire metropolitan area," Humphreys and Coates noted in the report.

They also found a significant reduction in local retail and services sectors with an average net loss of about 1900 jobs. There was an increase in wages in the hotels and other lodgings sector (about $10 per worker year), but this was contrasted by a disproportionate reduction in wages in bars and restaurants (about $162 per worker per year).

Those employed in the amusements and recreation sector appeared, at first glance, to benefit significantly from the presence of a pro team, with an average annual salary increase of $490 per worker, Humphreys said. However, he added, "this sector includes the professional athletes whose annual salaries certainly raise the average salary in this sector by an enormous amount. As it turns out, those workers most closely connected with the sports environment who were not professional athletes saw little improvement in their earnings as a result of the local professional sports environment."

The NFL is the highest grossing sports league in the world, with revenue of close to $10 billion last season. And Commissioner Goodell, whose 2014 salary was $45 million, has set a goal of $25 billion in revenue by 2027. Knowing also that professional sports teams and their stadiums bring no economic benefit to their communities begs the question: why are the NFL and other leagues like the NHL, PGA and the USTA given tax exempt 501(c) (6) status? And why do state and local governments and taxpayers continue to subsidize them with bonds and reimbursements?

How could the NFL - which helps negotiate billions in media and promotion deals for its member teams and which itself reported an operating profit of more than $9 million and $326 million in "program service revenue" - be given nonprofit tax-exempt status?
According to the filing, the NFL claims its tax exemption under section 501c(6). The IRS regulations define eligible 501c(6) organizations as the following:

Business leagues

Chambers of commerce

Real estate boards

Boards of trade

Professional football leagues
http://blogs.reuters.com/...

The actual reason the NFL is tax exempt in the first place is complicated, and I am sure there are many other people who can explain it better than I.

The NFL League Office was established as a trade organization back in 1942, qualifying them for tax-exempt status. Even after 23 years the league was still struggling financially and was acting to save money and protect the players when it applied for non-profit status with the IRS. The application was apparently approved but "both the NFL and IRS have said that they can not find a copy of the original 1942 application." http://www.todayifoundout.com/...

A generation later, in 1966 the NFL and its upstart competitor the AFL announced a merger. To avoid antitrust laws, Congressional approval was required, and so a deal was cut with then powerful Louisiana Senator and Finance Committee Chairman Russell Long and Commissioner Pete Rozelle that ensured exemption from sanctions in exchange for New Orleans getting the next NFL expansion Franchise. The merger passed and the Saints became the next NFL franchise. With that 1966 statute the league's non-profit status was essentially "grandfathered" in because, regardless of its size, power and entrepreneurial activities, they administered the player's pension fund.

The N.F.L.'s eligibility for 501 (c)(6) status is not based on its characteristics but was instead set by Congress in 1966 when Public Law 89-800 passed, redefining tax-exempt organizations in section 501(c)(6) of the tax code to include "professional football leagues." The problem with that redefinition is that unlike a trade association, the N.F.L. promotes a league made up of 32 teams (or owners) and controls television contracts, licensing fees and other joint activities in which the member teams participate and from which they profit significantly.
The teams pay taxes, but the dues they pay to support the N.F.L.'s front office are not taxed. According to the N.F.L.'s 990 filing (required of all nonprofits), the total collected in "dues and assessments" and "coach/club fines" was $326.8 million in 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/....

The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the 10-year cost of this practice to be approximately a surprisingly low $109 million to the taxpayer. Meanwhile, other professional sports operate and thrive without the trade association status: The National Basketball Association never claimed to be a 501(c)(6) and Major League Baseball abandoned the status years ago. While I'm not qualified to determine if the estimate of tax income is realistic, but the figure is less than I would think. Even if it is an accurate number, that doesn't make it right. With conservatives in Congress talking about cutting Social Security and other benefits to the disabled and poor every little bit helps. $109 mil is $109 mil. Additionally it would seem that the NFL's non-profit status certainly provides leverage in negotiations with municipalities desperate for a team in their city.

If your not convinced that the NFL's 501(c)(6) status is a sham here are a few more points of interest.

The league reported $1,276,000 in lobbying expenses, plus another $7,139,000 in fees to Covington & Burling, the powerhouse Washington law firm (on top of $9,030,000 to Paul Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, its New York firm). That's a lot of money being thrown around in Washington. What issues was the money spent on?
In addition to Goodell's $44-million paycheck, the league's "executive vice president for media," Steve Bornstein, took home $26 million, and general counsel Jeff Pash received $7,862,000.

That is an unusually high salary for a general counsel - let alone one working for a "nonprofit." It might be a good hook for a story reviewing the NFL's multi-front legal problems - from head injury litigation, to disciplining players accused of domestic violence, to maintaining the status of that tax exemption.

In all three cases, most of the money the executives received was listed as bonus compensation - $40 million for Goodell, about $23 million for Bornstein and $4.8 million out of $7.8 million for the general counsel. In light of the league's current troubles, a reporter - or a member of Congress at a hearing - ought to ask the league owners who set these executives' compensation, what the bonus criteria have been and whether they will now be changed to reflect the league's obvious need to worry about issues other than money. (Reuters)

I was listening to people complain today about their tax dollars going to subsidize childcare for working poor in California and couldn't help but wonder what kind of people resist supporting a working mother in need of a little help, but have no problem subsidizing the most successful sports league in the world? In an ironic twist, it is Oklahoma Senator, Tom Coburn (R), who is targeting the NFL's tax exemption.

Professional sports are a part of American culture, and NFL Football is clearly the most popular of those sports. It is completely understandable that Angelinos are pumped up about the prospects of one, two or even three teams calling Los Angeles home. Professional sports can promote a shared sense of community and create a lot of civic pride, and they undoubtedly generate a large sum for their leagues, owners, players and coaches, just not for their host cities. So people need to understand the economic realities when getting on the "build it and they will come" bandwagon.

So once again I have taken a bit of news and expanded it into a rambling diary. If you made it to the end you are to be commended. Thanks for reading.

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Sports Stadiums Have No Impact on Municipal Economies--So Why is it We Still Subsidize the NFL?

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Earlier this week, while driving to work as usual I had my radio tuned to KPCC, the public radio station out of Pasadena, and there was a feature on the moves being made to bring an NFL team to Los ...

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Huffington Post, Baseball Stadiums and Ebola

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Huffington Post, Baseball Stadiums and Ebola

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Ebola isn't entering the United States smuggled in by child refugees. But the rapidly spreading and currently incurable disease has killed hundreds of Africans and showed that it can potentially overcome the one drug that seemed to help.

We're currently in the midst of the biggest Ebola outbreak in history -- and according to experts like Laurie Garrett, the senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, we need to recognize that it poses a very real danger. In a forceful Foreign Policy piece published Aug. 14, she wrote: "You think there are magic bullets in some rich country's freezers that will instantly stop the relentless spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa? You think airport security guards in Los Angeles can look a traveler in the eyes and see infection, blocking that jet passenger's entry into La-la-land?" Garrett recommended immediate emergency help for the countries dealing with the disease.

Now the World Health Organization is ready to explain how it thinks that assistance should be organized. The WHO thinks the international community can prevent any further Ebola transmission within six to nine months if governments and other donors are willing to spend $430 million, according to a draft WHO strategy document obtained by Bloomberg.

More than half of that money is needed for under-equipped treatment centers in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and a WHO spokeswoman told Bloomberg the final request could still change before the final plan is released.

While Bloomberg notes that the latest ask is six times the amount identified in a previous WHO plan released on July 31, it's a sum that the United States and other developed economies could -- and do -- spend on causes a lot less pressing than an epidemic that has already killed nearly 1,500 people. Here's a selection of things that aren't terrifying diseases on which the U.S. has spent $430 million -- or more:

The Department of Homeland Security spent $430 million over nine years to fund what seemed like a great idea: radios for employees nationwide that could tune into a secure shared channel. Then it became clear that basically no DHS employees knew how to use those radios. (72 percent didn't even know they existed.)

Earlier this month, according to ThinkProgress, Virginia state legislators decided to spend $430 million on a new office building and parking deck for themselves. This is the same amount of money they could have obtained for their state's neediest residents had they accepted the Obamacare Medicaid expansion.

Mitt Romney used his first debate appearance of the 2012 presidential election to tell America he would cut federal funding for beloved network PBS. A U.S. News and World Report post on Romney's proposal noted that PBS and NPR combined received $445 million from the federal government in fiscal 2012 -- an amount that was smaller than the money allotted that year for Amtrak ($1.4 billion) and federal office acquisition ($864 million). Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson captured the popular reaction:

Cutting PBS support (0.012% of budget) to help balance the Federal budget is like deleting text files to make room on your 500Gig hard drive
- Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) October 4, 2012

The District of Columbia spent $670.3 million to build Nationals Park, a stadium that Philip Kennicott, the Pulitzer-winning architecture critic for Washington's hometown paper, called a product of "misplaced priorities" and "a colossal symbolic failure with national and international import."

The Department of Defense spent $454 million to operate the Guantánamo Bay detention center last year. This is, of course, the same prison that President Barack Obama promised to close back in his first term. He reiterated that promise in this year's State of the Union. Powerful Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) recently called the Cuban prison "a massive misuse of taxpayer money," given its cost per prisoner compared to even the most secure federal prison in the U.S ($2.7 million to $78,000).

A final bonus: Stopping this straight-out-of-a-movie epidemic would cost just a little more than the amount spent on the ultimate box office flop of 2013, "The Lone Ranger." For a film on which it lost around $190 million, Disney spent $375 million.

What else has cost more (or nearly as much) as stopping Ebola? Submit your ideas below or tweet them with the hashtag #StopEbolaOr. Here's a sample tweet:

We could #StopEbolaOr we could build half a baseball stadium for an oligarch http://t.co/jLFVKiycRq
- Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) August 27, 2014

BEFORE YOU GO

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Stopping Ebola Costs As Much As These 5 Things

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Ebola isn't entering the United States smuggled in by child refugees. But the rapidly spreading and currently incurable disease has killed hundreds of Africans and showed that it can potentially overcome the one drug that seemed to help.

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Bill Aimed At Stopping Baseball Stadium Construction Passes

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SB 100 gives the Indiana Department of Homeland Security the ability to issue a cease-and-desist order in certain circumstances.

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The 32 team owners of the National Football League met in Chicago yesterday, and a major part of their discussion centered on proposals by three teams-the San Diego Chargers, Oakland Raiders and St. Louis Rams-for new stadiums. The two proposals would build $1.5 billion stadiums in the Los Angeles neighborhoods of Inglewood and Carson, one for the Rams and a joint stadium for the Chargers and Raiders.

Proponents of the deal say that stadiums can offer major economic benefits for the neighborhoods in which they are placed, but does this idea actually hold up?

West Virginia University professor of economics Brad Humphreys tells s Jeremy Hobson that sometimes, the opposite is the case.
On the lack of an NFL franchise in Los Angeles
"As a matter of public policy, we've allowed leagues to operate as monopolies. That means that they control where all the franchises are, and how many franchises there are in each league. So the fact that there has not been an NFL team in Los Angeles since 1994-a very long period of time-is a direct consequence of this public policy which allows the NFL to operate as a monopoly. If the NFL didn't have the power to control where teams were, there would have been an NFL franchise in Los Angeles the minute the Rams moved out."
On why he testified against the new stadium for the Washington Nationals baseball team
"It was a bad deal. Yes, it will spur development nearby in the area there, but you're simply moving economic activity from one part of Washington D.C. to another. So all the new bars and things that are there near Nationals stadium, the people that are buying drinks and meals and things like that in those bars and restaurants, they would have bought meals and drinks somewhere else in the Washington, D.C., area. So you've really just moved the economic activity from one place to the other, and in the meantime you've spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to do that."
On the drawbacks of gentrification in neighborhoods near new stadiums
"The tax dollars come from broad segments of society across the income distribution, and then you're using those taxpayer dollars to subsidize and to the benefit of people who are clearly in the very upper end of the income distribution: the team owners and the players. So that has to reduce income equality or increase income inequality."

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Do Sports Stadiums Help Or Hurt Their Communities?

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The 32 team owners of the National Football League met in Chicago yesterday, and a major part of their discussion centered on proposals by three teams-the San Diego Chargers, Oakland Raiders and St. Louis Rams-for new stadiums. The two proposals would build $1.5 billion stadiums in the Los Angeles neighborhoods of Inglewood and Carson, one for the Rams and a joint stadium for the Chargers and Raiders.

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The developer building Hartford's new $56 million minor league baseball stadium is now saying that a groundbreaking on the second phase of the revitalization project will be delayed until the spring.

The baseball stadium is only part of the roughly $350 million development in downtown Hartford. The city is paying for the stadium. But the developer is financing the second phase -- with retail, housing, and other amenities -- which was to have broken ground this fall. But that's not going to happen.

"We were nervous that, if we started [the second phase] prior to the completion of the ballpark, that it would dilute our commitment to the ballpark -- and that's obviously the most critical and time-sensitive event that we're working on," developer Bob Landino said. He expects the second phase of construction to start early next year. "We will break ground sometime in the spring, once the ballpark is completed."

Landino said the delay is well within the scope of his contract with the city. Immediate efforts to reach the city were unsuccessful.

"The difference between November and March or April certainly isn't enough time to reinforce skeptics," Landino said. "If the end of next year happens and we haven't done anything, then I think it's a legitimate point."

The second phase of construction includes 330 market-rate apartments on four floors above a single story of retail. One of the hopes for retail is for a supermarket. Landino said finding a supermarket operator over the summer was difficult for a variety of reasons. Now, though, there is an interested tenant who is going through due diligence.

Opening day for the stadium is scheduled for April. Landino said he's on target to hit that date.

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Developer Delays Second Phase of Hartford Baseball Stadium Construction

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The developer building Hartford's new $56 million minor league baseball stadium is now saying that a groundbreaking on the second phase of the revitalization project will be delayed until the spring. The baseball stadium is only part of the roughly $350 million development in downtown Hartford. The city is paying for the stadium.

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For more than a decade, Connecticut has failed to stimulate growth in its capital city. Now, its leaders hope to turn a vacant stretch of surface parking into a $60 million minor league stadium.

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

Hartford, Conn., is betting on baseball. It's a city that used to be rich with a big insurance industry, but now it has a poverty problem. Hartford hopes Minor League Baseball and a brand-new stadium will help undo years of neglect. It's hardly the first city to invest in professional sports. And as always, the question is will it work? Jeff Cohen of member station WNPR reports.

JEFF COHEN: Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra is standing at a construction site next to one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. All around him is a sea of parking lots that's been here as long as he can remember. But give it time, he says. An excavator is digging out home plate, and the hope is that the grass they'll put down in the fall will be green by April's opening day.

PEDRO SEGARRA: When all this is all built, you're really not going to know where you are, but you'll be in Hartford, and proudly so.

COHEN: Hartford is spending $56 million on a ballpark for a team called the Hartford Yard Goats, a name that doesn't have much to do with Hartford and has everything to do with marketing a team to kids who want to come to the games and buy a hat with a goat on it. Meanwhile, the city has also spearheaded a $300 million, privately-financed housing, retail and supermarket project to surround the ballpark. Mayor Segarra says that's what happens when you leverage public money.

SEGARRA: Once we had the stadium announcement, the development piece came together, and we had a lot more interest from developers to want to invest in this area.

COHEN: But wherever wealthy sports franchise owners get cash-strapped cities to build them a new gem, there's always the question of whether all of the investment will pay off for the people paying the bills. In Hartford, that question's acute. On the one hand, this is the state capital, with statewide importance. The team is moving from New Britain, a city just a few miles away. Its leaders say Hartford poached their team. But club owner Josh Solomon says a city stadium will draw more fans than a suburban one.

JOSH SOLOMON: The ability for folks to come from work, directly walk over, grab a beer or something on the way over, come into the ballpark, enjoy it while just walking here - it'll be a part of the fabric of downtown Hartford.

COHEN: But Shawn Wooden is also counting on a local impact. He's Hartford's city council president. This is where he grew up. He says people in this neighborhood need a boost.

SHAWN WOODEN: Just walk down North Main Street - 2, 3 o'clock on any weekday afternoon - and see the number of adults, when everybody should be working, with no economic activity being generated.

COHEN: So he looks around and sees construction jobs, stadium jobs and investment that will bring jobs. But Andrew Zimbalist isn't so sure.

ANDREW ZIMBALIST: The promoters always talk about it as the best thing since sliced bread for the local economy, and that's not true.

COHEN: Zimbalist is a professor of economics at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. He says the research shows that public stadiums by themselves typically don't generate much economic growth, if any. One recent study from researchers at Lake Forest College in Illinois and Holy Cross in Massachusetts concludes this way - sports may make a city happy, but they're unlikely to make a city rich. And Zimbalist says that's how this should be sold.

ZIMBALIST: Here's an activity, a wholesome, summertime activity that the community can enjoy, that can create a greater sense of community. This can be a plus. And I think that that's the most honest way to sell one of these ventures.

COHEN: And even if the numbers don't pan out, boosters are saying it's the kind of plus that Hartford needs. For NPR News, I'm Jeff Cohen.

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Hartford, Conn., Bets On Baseball To Revive Ailing Economy

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For more than a decade, Connecticut has failed to stimulate growth in its capital city. Now, its leaders hope to turn a vacant stretch of surface parking into a $60 million minor league stadium. MELISSA BLOCK, HOST: Hartford, Conn., is betting on baseball.

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As an absolutely impossible thing happened to Serena Williams on the way to becoming the absolutely guaranteed Grand Slam champion, it reminds us once again, on the field of play, there is no sure thing. But off the field, some things are, to coin a word: un-upsettable.

At the top of the un-upsettable list is that in American city after American city, either the voters or their elected tribunes will put up oodles of the citizens' hard-deducted tax money in order to fund a new stadium for the benefit of a filthy-rich team owner.

Never mind that this has long been recognized by all sorts of economists as bad business for the cities. Municipalities all over the country keep forking over for these athletic Taj Mahals.
Click the audio to hear the rest of Deford's 2 cents on this fiscal topic.

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Spending Public Money On Sports Stadiums Is Bad Business

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As an absolutely impossible thing happened to Serena Williams on the way to becoming the absolutely guaranteed Grand Slam champion, it reminds us once again, on the field of play, there is no sure thing. But off the field, some things are, to coin a word: un-upsettable.

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Essay

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The Pawtucket Red Sox, left, and the Syracuse Chiefs at McCoy Stadium in 1996. Credit Credit Ed Nessen/Associated Press

The icy reminder of a baseball truth has blown down from New England, down from a Rhode Island city forever described as gritty, or struggling, or, more politely, challenged. No doubt you have seen signs for this brown-brick metropolis along the interstate, on your way to someplace else: Pawtucket, population 71,000.

Home of the historic Slater Mill, once a vital cog in the Industrial Revolution and now an obligatory class-trip destination. Home of the China Inn, the Modern Diner and the Irish Social Club; mention my name and they'll charge you double. Home of McCoy Stadium.

Now Pawtucket is also home to this familiar lesson: Beyond the game's innate poetry, which has seduced generations of hacks to summon their inner Whitman for every slam-bam double play, professional baseball is a cold business, as emotional at its core as an expectorated spray of tobacco juice.

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On Monday morning, a group of high-powered investors announced their purchase of the Pawtucket Red Sox, the Class AAA franchise of the Boston Red Sox, as well as their plans to build a shiny bauble of a stadium for the International League team in downtown Providence, the capital city just south of Pawtucket - but not Pawtucket.

During a news conference in Providence - and not Pawtucket - the new owners indicated their intentions to abandon McCoy Stadium in the next few years. Even if their hopes for a waterfront stadium in Providence should fail, the implication was: This great Red Sox Nation of ours covers a lot of New England turf.

"Our sense is that if the state wants us here, it should be the Rhode Island Red Sox," one of the lead investors, a lawyer named Jim Skeffington, told The Providence Journal. "We're all Rhode Islanders."

Not exactly. Skeffington may practice law in Providence, and a few other stakeholders may have Ocean State ties, but another principal owner is a Larry Lucchino, from Pittsburgh. You might have heard of him; he will continue in his role as president and chief executive of the Boston Red Sox. The group also includes a couple of minority owners of the parent club, as well as Fenway Sports Management, described as a "sister company of the Boston Red Sox and a wholly owned subsidiary of Fenway Sports Group."

The Boston Red Sox organization no doubt wanted complete control of its most storied farm team, which makes business sense. And it clearly understands the importance and marketability of Boston tradition.

But do the new owners understand Pawtucket tradition? Do they know why free parking matters, and having boy and girl scouts camp overnight on the outfield grass, and being able to take a family of six to a ballgame without stopping first to pawn an heirloom?

Have they sat in the shadowed lap of the old ballpark after another tough day's grind, shouting encouragement to up-and-comers and down-and-outers while amiable ghosts share your peanuts and steal sips of your beer?

Do they understand McCoy?

Construction of the stadium began in the late 1930s at the behest of Pawtucket's all-powerful mayor, Thomas P. McCoy, who had a fondness for shamrock-patterned ties and a red rose in his lapel. In choosing Hammond's Pond as the building site, he ensured years of employment for hundreds of laborers hired to stabilize the seemingly bottomless muck. Tales of vehicles and equipment swallowed overnight continue to this day.

By its completion in 1942, the 6,000-seat stadium had cost more than the construction of Notre Dame's much larger football stadium; more, even, than the assessed value of Fenway Park. But the mayor had little time to enjoy his expensive little ballpark; he died, suddenly, in 1945. At a dedication ceremony the next spring, the Boys and Girls Club serenaded his memory with "The Bells of St. Mary's."

Over the next quarter-century, Pawtucket saw its mills go dark as the textile industry went south. McCoy Stadium also struggled. A Boston Braves affiliate ended its brief tenancy, leaving the ballpark to scholastic events, vandals and decay - a place for the city to store heavy machinery and mounds of salt and sand.

Minor league baseball returned in the mid-1960s: first a Cleveland Indians franchise, then a Boston Red Sox farm team, run always on the cheap. One owner had baseballs fed into an odd, octagonal box filled with erasers; turn a crank and the balls would be scrubbed into passable game-day use. Another owner tried to distract from the sorrowful level of play by hiring teenage girls to clean the bases between innings.

That same owner briefly renamed the team the Rhode Island Red Sox, just as the new owners are now proposing. But within a year the team was back to being the Pawtucket Red Sox - as well as being all but bankrupt.

Its unlikely savior was Ben Mondor, a French-Canadian immigrant and self-made millionaire who knew a lot about turning around failing businesses, but almost nothing about baseball. Against his better judgment, he took over the team at the behest of pleading baseball executives. His first impression of McCoy could have been inscribed over the ticket window:

"What a dump."

Slowly, though, Mondor changed the stadium's reputation, giving the bum's rush to mugs who saw it as an open-air saloon, and inviting families to enjoy a safe and inexpensive night at the ballpark. He also wisely chose as his aides-de-camp a pair of young go-getters, Mike Tamburro and Lou Schwechheimer, both eager to sell pregame tickets and pick up postgame trash to make the venture work.

Mondor's daring business model - baseball at a fair price and in a family-friendly atmosphere - worked. Helping it along was McCoy's godsend of a claim as the setting for the longest game in baseball history: a 1981 matchup between the PawSox and the Rochester Red Wings that lasted 33 innings and featured, among other notables, the future Hall of Famers Wade Boggs and Cal Ripken Jr.

Pawtucket won that meaningless, meaningful game.

As the years passed, the city's infrastructure declined, its once-ubiquitous newspaper lost most of its circulation, and even its tired zoo - featuring a beleaguered local celebrity, Fanny the elephant - mercifully closed. The children and grandchildren of millworkers moved up and out, to Cumberland, to Lincoln, and across the Massachusetts line, to Attleboro. Other immigrants settled into the triple-deckers looming over narrow streets, seeking elusive stability during fits of protracted recession, while entrepreneurs imagined other uses for old mills.

But Pawtucket always had McCoy, where future Red Sox stars made their names, and often returned when on rehab assignment. In these ways, Boston royalty was granted to a city nicknamed the Bucket.

Mondor died in 2010, but Tamburro and Schwechheimer preserved his business model; improved on it, in fact. Countless children - many from Pawtucket - have camped out on McCoy green, received free medical checkups and goody bags, caught autographed baseballs lobbed from the field, tossed out the first pitch and saw their birthdays, weddings and military service celebrated on the Jumbotron.

For years, the stadium was near or at the top of International League popularity. In 2008, it had the league's highest total attendance, with nearly 637,000 visitors. But those numbers have gradually dropped; last year its total attendance was just over a half-million.

There have been other troubles. A structure built on a sinkhole more than 70 years ago by a roguish mayor may never be free of patchwork and periodic renovations, and its aesthetics are more in the mind than the eye. The stadium sits a couple of miles from the interstate, and the neighboring surroundings - of modest homes, triple-deckers and an industrial park - do not make for a "destination" experience. Even with that Dunkin' Donuts around the corner.

Maybe it was time. Maybe.

The parent club is calling home its prodigal Pawtucket child. Ben Mondor's widow, Madeleine, made the decision to sell from distant Florida, and the team's minority owners - Tamburro, the chief executive, and Schwechheimer, the vice president and general manager - went along, and will stay on.

Still, the ends to which the new owners avoided use of "McCoy" in their statements of scripted exuberance could only wound the Bucket faithful.

Mayor Donald R. Grebien of Pawtucket told The Providence Journal that the new owners informed him last weekend of their plans to extract the PawSox from the city that gave the team its nickname. "I can't tell you half of what they said, because when they said, 'It's not going to be Pawtucket,' that just took the air out of the room," the mayor said.

The Pawtucket Red Sox have a state lease for McCoy that lasts until 2021, but leases are like hearts. The State of Rhode Island, itself in economic straits, is a motivated buyer of nearly anything proposed, given that the new owners told one Providence councilman they would "expand the arc of consideration into Massachusetts" if the waterfront plan faltered.

Baseball is a business. The Red Sox have to do what is best, and most profitable, for the future of their organization. The "nation" expects no less.

But the next time you're driving along I-95 in spring or summer, exit in Pawtucket. Risk the five minutes it takes to reach McCoy. Enjoy the free parking. Splurge for a $13 box seat. And buy the ghost beside you a beer, before all of this slips into the sinkhole of memory.

Dan Barry is the author of "Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball's Longest Game" (Harper, 2011), an account of the 1981 minor league game in Pawtucket that began in April and concluded in June.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: A City Braces for Its Ballpark to Go the Way of Its Mills. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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A City Braces for Its Ballpark to Go the Way of Its Mills

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Essay The icy reminder of a baseball truth has blown down from New England, down from a Rhode Island city forever described as gritty, or struggling, or, more politely, challenged. No doubt you have seen signs for this brown-brick metropolis along the interstate, on your way to someplace else: Pawtucket, population 71,000.

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Lou Schwechheimer, leader of the Caribbean Baseball Initiative, playing catcher in a game with children at Finca Vigía, where Ernest Hemingway lived. Credit Credit Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

HAVANA - A minibus of Americans rumbled through a city in transformation, past the run-down housing and round-the-clock construction, the sparsely stocked bodegas and chic new restaurants, to a reception at the residence of the American chargés d'affaires. The hint of change teased the November night.

A few guests wore golf shirts embroidered with the brand names of sodas and snacks and auto parts. But the business of these men arriving by bus, all in dark suits or blazers, was of a different order: to have a major league team's minor league affiliate based in Havana, perhaps as early as 2017.

Their plan was freighted with history. It would restore the professional baseball bond once shared by two countries long at odds, but it would be possible only in accordance with United States law and, these men insisted, with the full participation of Cuba.

In other words, when the time was right. But, as the common sight of a driver talking on a cellphone while in a 1950s-era Chevy suggests, time moves differently here.

More than half a century has passed since the Havana Sugar Kings, a Cincinnati Reds affiliate, played in the Class AAA International League. Since the giddy gunfire of followers of the revolutionary Fidel Castro grazed a shortstop and a third-base coach at a game against the Rochester Red Wings. Since Havana won the 1959 Little World Series against the Minneapolis Millers here at home.

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The notion of returning to those days, absent the gunfire, may sound like pie in the sky, given the longstanding American embargo against Cuba. But President Obama and the Cuban president, Raúl Castro, announced plans last December to restore full diplomatic ties - a first hesitant step toward normalizing relations - and some see a chance for an exemption from the embargo: a baseball "carve-out."

What's more, this group's enthusiastic leader, a veteran minor league executive named Lou Schwechheimer, has spent the last dozen years preparing for just such a moment.

He has secured the exclusive rights from Minor League Baseball to return professional baseball to Havana. He has assembled this group, called the Caribbean Baseball Initiative, which includes two highly regarded former American ambassadors. He has obtained the necessary licensing from the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control. He has raised considerable capital.

And, very quietly, he has built a baseball empire.

As of this month, the Caribbean Baseball Initiative owns controlling interests in the New Orleans Zephyrs, a Miami Marlins franchise in the Class AAA Pacific Coast League, and the Charlotte Stone Crabs, a Tampa Bay Rays franchise in the Class A Florida State League. The group also holds a minority interest in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders, a Yankees franchise in the International League.

None of these teams will be moved to Cuba, Schwechheimer said, although they may figure in various good-will initiatives he has in mind, including playing a Class AAA all-star game in Havana, providing much-needed baseball equipment, and sponsoring seminars on training and conditioning.

But he also said, "We have the financial resources to acquire additional minor league teams, one of which may ultimately wind up in Havana - but only at the appropriate time."

Until that appropriate time, Schwechheimer and his associates plan to continue their minibus missions to Cuba, listening, explaining and seeking a partner in a joint baseball venture.

"But only thoughtfully, respectfully and when Cuba is willing," he said. "We're not going to be the ugly Americans."
Looking to Past, and Future
Schwechheimer's Cuban mission sprang from a long-ago gathering of baseball lifers, swapping stories over drinks. A particularly informed hot stove league, you might say.

Since then, he has dedicated himself to having the International League once again live up to its name - a goal made all the more possible with Obama's surprise and daring announcement last December to "begin a new chapter" with Cuba.

"This is the moment in time," Schwechheimer said. "And we're closing in on it."

But Schwechheimer faces a few daunting obstacles, said Juan A. Triana, a professor of economics at the University of Havana. For one, the "vertical permission" structure of Cuban bureaucracy can be exhausting, he said. For another, some hard-liners here have little interest in restoring ties with the United States.

"It must be done step by step," Triana said. "It could take one year, two years, three years."

This was Schwechheimer's fifth trip to Cuba, and many others are planned, including one next month. His patient confidence, he said, comes from believing that baseball is the "common denominator" in the Cuban-American equation, as well as from the directive he has received in meetings with State Department officials: "Be bold and engage."

For five days, the men on the minibus kept to a crowded schedule of meetings with top-level American and Cuban officials, interrupted here and there with arranged moments of baseball good will.

They spent a good part of their time peering through tinted glass at the evolving Havana panorama: the New World utilitarian building blocks and crumbling Old World structures, the Che Guevara silhouettes and the restaurants with valet service, the northward view of the sea along the boulevard called the Malecón, toward Florida, 90 miles away.

All the while, their mantra was "respectful engagement," with a side of "tranquilo."

With Schwechheimer were a Rhode Island financier, a university professor of sports management, a veteran minor league executive, and three members of the Cohen Group, a high-voltage consultancy firm in Washington: Tommy Goodman, a Spanish-fluent lawyer who handled the trip's every detail, and two legendary American statesmen.

One, Marc Grossman, a former ambassador to Turkey, retired in 2005 as the State Department's third-ranking official, serving as the undersecretary of state for political affairs. In 2011, Obama called the retired Grossman into temporary service as a special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He roots for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The other, Jeffrey Davidow, has been the ambassador to Mexico, Venezuela and Zambia, as well as the assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs. He retired in 2003 as career ambassador, the Foreign Service's highest position, which, by law, can be held by no more than five people at a time.

He follows the Boston Red Sox.
An Emphasis on Patience
The two Foreign Service veterans had learned long ago how to hear what was not being said, how to deconstruct a handshake, how to deftly use the tool of time. They understood the value of patience.

For the rest of the five-day trip, a meeting with Antonio Castro seemed imminent. There were periodic cellphone calls to Goodman to stand by, prompting the American visitors to change out of casual clothes and into suits and ties. All the while, the two former ambassadors kept their expectations low.

The meeting never took place, further underscoring the sense that not all is what it seems in Cuba.

But Schwechheimer was unperturbed. A chat with Castro was never part of the original schedule. Besides, the group was already making headway in substantive meetings with Cuban officials in the ministries of culture and sports - as well as with the Cuban Baseball Federation, which governs the sport - and this would not be its last trip.

"Tranquilo," Schwechheimer said. "We'll be back."

Besides, the visitors had more than enough to do in trying to navigate the decades-old distrust between the two countries, even in the limited sphere of baseball.

Once these issues are resolved - perhaps through an exemption to the embargo - Schwechheimer expects to be at the front of the line, offering affordable family entertainment, as well as jobs, to Havana. And, yes, Cuban ballplayers would be welcome to play in these minor league games - if they made the roster.

Schwechheimer said his group was not lobbying to change Cuban or American law. Its mission, he said, is to present its motives as honorable should Cuba someday say yes to the possibility of a minor league franchise, and to celebrate, through gestures of good will, the commonality found through a game.

"What Lou's trying to do makes sense," Davidow said. "It more than makes sense. It's a good thing."
Baseball's Complex Role

"I had many proposals myself when I was in my 20s," Tabares said, perspiration beading on his shaved head. "But
I would never do that to my family. What I would have lost for the major
leagues. ..."

As for the prospect of minor league baseball one day returning to Havana, Tabares said he welcomed it, of course.

"It has to be that way," he said.

One day the American baseball ambassadors were given a tour of Estadio Latinoamericano, home to the Industriales. In the bowels of that worn 70-year-old stadium were pieces of Cuba's baseball past: a marble tablet engraved with the names of "Inmortales del BaseBall"; the busts of two legends, Martín Dihigo and Adolfo Luque; a wall-size painting of Fidel Castro, in military fatigues, standing at the plate, bat in hand.

The Cuban baseball officials leading the tour allowed that they would one day like to build a hall of fame. Well, Schwechheimer responded, perhaps the Caribbean Baseball Initiative could help with that.

Another day, the minibus of Americans made a pilgrimage to Finca Vigía, the hilltop house where Ernest Hemingway lived and wrote - and carved a crude baseball field among mango trees, so that his two sons and children from the area could play the game he loved. Often he would pitch to the boys, who were called the Gigi All-Stars.

Some new all-stars, young members of a local Little League team, were taking batting practice while waiting for their American visitors. Schwechheimer bounded out of the bus, grabbed a glove and assumed the role of catcher.

For a little while, other matters were set aside. The logistics for the next trip. The plans for more meetings with top officials, including Antonio Castro. The challenge of getting past the diplomatic impediments, the bureaucratic obstacles, the more than half-century of mutual suspicion.

For a little while, before the rains came and the minibus of Americans left for the next appointment, the scrawny Minnie Minosos and Tony Olivas and Yasiel Puigs of the future smacked balls into the mango trees, and the former ambassador Davidow caught a foul ball in his straw hat, and Schwechheimer presented the boys with dozens of much-needed baseballs. They said "bueno" and "gracias," but the shared language was this game.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section SP, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Pitch Framed by Diplomacy. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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HAVANA - A minibus of Americans rumbled through a city in transformation, past the run-down housing and round-the-clock construction, the sparsely stocked bodegas and chic new restaurants, to a reception at the residence of the American chargés d'affaires. The hint of change teased the November night.

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From left, Tim Lee, the Cobb County chairman; Terry McGuirk, the Braves' chairman; William Rogers, the SunTrust chief executive; Gov. Nathan Deal of Georgia; and the Hall of Famer Hank Aaron on Tuesday. Credit Credit John Amis/Associated Press

ATLANTA - Beneath a tent erected over a patch of gravel, two dozen nicely dressed dignitaries wearing Atlanta Braves batting helmets plunged custom-made shiny shovels with bat handles into a pit of dirt Tuesday.

The elaborate groundbreaking ritual, which commenced with an opera tenor belting out the national anthem to a few hundred invited guests who munched on peanuts and Cracker Jack, marked the start of construction of a stadium that has delighted some area residents and irritated others.

The Braves stunned metropolitan Atlanta last November by announcing they would pull up stakes downtown, their home since migrating from Milwaukee in 1966, and move to Cobb County.

Some city dwellers, accustomed to the convenience of all three of Atlanta's major professional teams stationed downtown, expressed outrage that the Braves were headed elsewhere and were doing so only after secret talks with various Cobb County officials.

To those residents, the new ballpark may be only 12 miles from the city center but might as well be light-years away. And while Cobb County inhabitants generally welcome the new stadium, which is scheduled to open in 2017, some took offense that they were kept in the dark throughout the negotiations and that the county's decision to issue as much as $397 million in stadium bonds was not subject to a referendum.

The Braves have said that part of the reason for the pending change of address was to gain closer proximity to the team's heaviest ticket base, which is in the suburbs north of downtown.

Coincidentally, Tuesday's ceremonies came as the Braves are fading out of the National League wild-card race, with a record that has fallen to .500. It also came amid the furor over the recent revelation of a 2012 email by the Atlanta Hawks' majority owner in which he voiced concerns that his team was drawing too few white fans and separate, racially charged comments by the team's general manager, Danny Ferry, that have led him to take an indefinite leave of absence.

The Braves, like many major league franchises, have a fairly high proportion of white fans, and the new location is closer to some predominantly white areas that are seen as baseball hotbeds.

In making the move, the Braves are also envisioning that the stadium will be part of mixed-use development that will include retail outlets, restaurants, entertainment sites and residential areas. Turner Field, the Braves' home for the past 18-plus seasons, failed to ignite a growth in neighborhood businesses that would induce fans to spend money before and after games.

Instead, the Braves will now fund the mixed-use project connected to the new stadium, acting in conjunction with private partners.

"It's cutting edge," said Rob Manfred, who will soon take over as baseball commissioner and who was in attendance Tuesday. "Everybody in baseball is watching the development closely."

He said that a ballpark residing in an entertainment district "is much better than a stadium out there by itself."

Ted Turner, the former owner of the Braves and the Hawks, championed the downtown area for his teams. The Hawks have remained there, and the N.F.L's Falcons broke ground in May on a downtown dome situated a long pass from their existing haunts.

The Braves had braced themselves for less than overwhelming applause for the move.

"I don't expect everybody to always be happy," Terry McGuirk, the team chairman and chief executive, said. But he characterized most Braves followers as overjoyed.

The ballpark's design emphasizes intimacy, with a significant portion of the 41,500 seats close to the field.

An independent poll of Cobb denizens conducted by the University of Florida had determined that 78 percent would have preferred a referendum on the bond commitment, while 55 percent would have voted in favor.

Citizens for Governmental Transparency, a local advocacy group hastily formed after the Braves' stadium announcement, unsuccessfully demanded a public vote, and two individuals have lodged appeals to the state Supreme Court in a long-shot attempt to prevent the bonds from being issued without a referendum passing.

Tim Lee, the Cobb County chairman who steered negotiations with the Braves, said Tuesday a vote had been considered for the 700,000 residents of a county historically cautious about government spending. Ultimately, there was no referendum, just an agreement that the county chip in about 45 percent of the actual construction cost, with the Braves picking up the rest.

"This will be good for the region," said Lee, who contends that the investment will pay off in increased property and sales tax revenue.

As construction crews drove earthmovers and laid massive pipe outside the tent, one nugget of news emerged from Tuesday's festivities: The stadium will be called SunTrust Park, with the Atlanta-based banking chain signing on as a title sponsor for a quarter of a century.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: To Mixed Reaction, Braves Begin Work on Stadium Outside Downtown. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Braves Begin Work on Stadium Outside Downtown Atlanta, to Mixed Reaction

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ATLANTA - Beneath a tent erected over a patch of gravel, two dozen nicely dressed dignitaries wearing Atlanta Braves batting helmets plunged custom-made shiny shovels with bat handles into a pit of dirt Tuesday.

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NASHVILLE - A powerful surge in construction is reshaping the physical character and economy of this 236-year-old river city, and fueling a deepening public conversation about essential civic values that many residents worry could be lost.

More than 100 new projects, together valued at more than $2 billion, are underway in Nashville or planned to start next year, according to city figures. Most of the big projects - four hotels, five office buildings and eight high-rise residential towers with a total value of $1.5 billion - are in the downtown core, a number of them rising on former parking lots, according to the Nashville Downtown Partnership, a business development group.

These include a 30-story, $220 million office building under construction on Fourth Avenue that will serve as the new headquarters of Bridgestone Americas, the United States division of Bridgestone, the world's largest tire and rubber company. Under construction nearby is 222 Second Avenue S, a 25-story, $100 million, 350,000-square-foot building with 25,000 square feet of retail space.

So many construction cranes are operating in downtown Nashville that they appear on the skyline as a flock of big birds, their extended beaks tugging at steel cables. A 454-room, 27-story, $120 million Westin is one of the high-rise hotels under construction. Just beyond downtown is OneCity, a $400 million mixed use project under construction that encompasses a million square feet of office space, 120,000 square feet of retail space, a 170-room hotel and up to 600 apartments.

Even Music Row, the renowned neighborhood of recording studios and understated 20th-century music industry office buildings, has been affected. At the center of the temperate enclave, which once was set apart from the escalating construction clamor, is a 96,000-square-foot, five-story, $31 million office building nearing completion that will serve music production companies and talent representatives, including Sesac, a performing rights group that is moving from its old headquarters a block away.

Never has this southern city of 660,000 residents experienced such a swarm of new projects, said Richard C. Bernhardt, who recently retired as director of the city's planning department. The city, which spent all of the 20th century spreading out horizontally in low-rise apartment, retail, hotel and office buildings, is now going vertical. Nashville's disparate, uneven skyline, highlighted by the twin spires of AT&T's 33-story, 617-foot-tall "Batman" building, which was finished in 1994, is about to add enough height, complexity and sharp angles to rival downtown Charlotte or Denver.

The shift in urban design responds to Nashville's consistent attractiveness as a place to live and work, especially to young professionals and musicians, and to the millennial generation's allegiance to active, walkable urban neighborhoods, Mr. Bernhardt said. Nashville has grown by an average of 11,000 residents annually this decade, more than three times the average annual growth during the last decade.

One critical move Nashville made in response to the growth, and to encourage more new construction, was adjusting the city's zoning code to enable builders to combine residential, office, retail and entertainment spaces in their projects. "What we're seeing now is the result of 20 years of preparation," Mr. Bernhardt said. "This was a conscious effort to move the city forward, to make Nashville a more attractive place for investment."

Another significant step the city took was to invest in public parks. An 11-acre riverfront park opened this year to tie Nashville more closely to the Cumberland River. And Centennial Park, Nashville's 112-year-old central park, is undergoing an extensive renovation to restore its broad lawns, walking paths and gardens.

"Most people will tell you they like what's happening," said Sylvia Rapoport, a Nashville native and president of the Conservancy for the Parthenon and Centennial Park, which helped Metro Parks fund the $9 million restoration. "There's an excitement about Nashville that we've never had. Young people are coming here to settle."

Nashville's unleashed growth, though, has stirred civic concerns about how to solve the region's swelling traffic problem, and about the city's identity. City leaders and many residents agree that Nashville is in dire need of an improved transit system. Mayor Megan Barry, who took office in late September, campaigned on a platform that included promoting more bus and rail options.

The transition to a city with livelier street life and much taller buildings has also unnerved some residents and spurred a discussion about Nashville's distinctive way of life.

"The flavor of Nashville is changing," said Bob Bernstein, the founder and owner of Bongo Productions, who moved from Chicago in 1988 and owns a collection of popular Nashville restaurants and coffee shops. "Real estate prices, rents, they are going nuts. New, shiny stuff is happening all around. People who don't own real estate, small operators, are being priced out of businesses they built."

"The city is on fire," added Richard Lloyd, an associate professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University. "There's excitement about the big city thing. But there's anxiety, too. Some of it has to do with whether we are losing some part of our soul. Nashville always had this tension. It wants to be taken seriously, be big time. But it doesn't want to lose the homeyness."

Still, in a departure from the polemical debates about growth in other American cities, which typically involve either unleashing developers or putting up high barriers of civic opposition, Nashville's pursuit of a much denser urban experience is being undertaken with a kind of pragmatic wariness.

That approach worked for Bridgestone Americas, which settled in Nashville in 1992 and now employs 1,100 people in a leased office tower near the airport. Facing the expiration of its lease in 2017, the company began a national search in 2012 for new space that could have led to Bridgestone's leaving Nashville. By November 2014, when Bridgestone announced that it would lease an angular glass and steel tower developed by the Raleigh-based Highwoods Properties, Nashville's downtown makeover was well underway.

In 2013, Nashville opened Music City Center, its $623 million, 1.2 million-square-foot convention center on Fifth Avenue. Nearby, in April, the city opened a new 8,500-seat, $47 million baseball stadium for the Nashville Sounds, the AAA affiliate of the Oakland Athletics.

"We looked closely at a lot of cities while we considered our move," said Christine Karbowiak, the chief administrative officer and executive vice president of Bridgestone Americas, who is supervising the company's relocation. "We chose Nashville. There's a certain vibe downtown now that will be very appealing to current and future employees."

To some extent, Nashville can thank the commercial and cultural success of The Gulch, once a 60-acre stretch of vacant parcels and light industrial buildings along the CSX rail yard downtown that MarketStreet Enterprises, a local developer, turned into one of the city's most active neighborhoods.

The company started the project in 1999 with land purchases. In 2001, the city approved its master development plan. In 2008, MarketStreet Enterprises completed the 22-story Icon in the Gulch, a 418-unit residential building that included space for retail businesses and restaurants. Similar high-rise residential buildings followed, which provided the customer base for the new neighborhood's trendy retail businesses and popular restaurants.

The project's newest phase is office construction. In May, MarketStreet Enterprises opened Gulch Crossing, an eight-story, 205,000-square-foot, $78.5 million office building with 16,000 square feet of street-level retail space. A few blocks away, Eakin Partners is building a 15-story, 285,000-square-foot, $95 million office tower with 26,000 square feet of retail space. MarketStreet Enterprises, which estimates that it has built 70 percent of the Gulch, also has a joint venture with AJ Capital Partners and the Berger Company to construct a 12-story, 224-room Thompson Nashville Hotel in the Gulch.

To date, MarketStreet Enterprises has spent $750 million to construct 460,000 square feet of office space, 280,000 square feet of retail space and 1,480 residences, according to company figures. "We needed residential and retail to get people into the area," said Jay Turner, managing director of MarketStreet Enterprises. "Now we're into the office phase. We're a local firm and we're pretty patient. We wait for the right signals. We didn't want to just create a big neighborhood from scratch in three years."

A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: A Building Boom Is Reshaping Nashville, and Its Skyline. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Nashville's Skyline Being Reshaped by Building Boom

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NASHVILLE - A powerful surge in construction is reshaping the physical character and economy of this 236-year-old river city, and fueling a deepening public conversation about essential civic values that many residents worry could be lost. More than 100 new projects, together valued at more than $2 billion, are underway in Nashville or planned to start next year, according to city figures.

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Janet Marie Smith Lecture, Lowell Lecture Series, 2012-2013, Boston Public Library 

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Janet Marie Smith Lecture, Lowell Lecture Series, 2012-2013, Boston Public Library 

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Janet Marie Smith -- 2012-2013 Lowell Lecture Series: Common Ground, Boston Public Library