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Rooting Our Way to Oblivion

I attended a baseball game last week at the still relatively new $1.3 billion Yankee Stadium, subsidized handsomely by taxpayers. It includes a Metro North rail station so people can get to the games more conveniently.

By Jonathan D. Miller | Updated on September 27, 2010

I attended a baseball game last week at the still relatively new $1.3 billion Yankee Stadium, subsidized handsomely by taxpayers. It includes a Metro North rail station so people can get to the games more conveniently. Across the Hudson, the brand new Jets-Giants stadium, another billion-dollar-plus goliath, just opened with a special rail link for fans, connecting into the city paid for by you know who. But coincidentally the New Jersey governor blocks construction of a new rail tunnel into the city which would serve everyday commuters trying to earn a living.

In Michigan, the state university has just added 10,000 seats and skyboxes to its football coliseum costing a quarter of a billion dollars, while nearby Detroit contemplates letting swaths of its debilitated urban core go back to seed. At the University of Florida, an institution not to be confused with any Ivy League school, the athletic director and his coaches have three private jets at their disposal to help recruit player talent and the women’s softball coach makes $250,000 a year. That’s all nice in a state where housing values have declined precipitously and the biggest private employer runs a giant theme park. Meanwhile, cities around the country still pay off costs on stadiums dating from the 1970s, which have been demolished and replaced by new taxpayer supported facilities.

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