Camden, New Jersey just decided to tear down a baseball stadium that is less than twenty years old. The stadium did not lead to economic development and no team has played there for several years:

Taxpayers spent more than $18 million to build the stadium that would eventually be named Campbell’s Field, as part of a minor league ballpark-building frenzy across New Jersey that saw similar stadiums erected in Newark, Atlantic City, and Somerset—all part of redevelopment schemes that attracted independent minor league teams (that is, minor league teams not affiliated with the Major League Baseball farm system)…

The sad saga of the Camden Riversharks—the Atlantic League team for whom the stadium was built prior to the 2001 season—will come to an official end more than three years after the team picked up and moved to New Britain, Connecticut, leaving Campbell’s Field vacant. The city tried to attract a new team, but after those efforts failed, the Camden County Improvement Authority signed off on a plan to demolish the stadium, according to NJ.com. The Riversharks and Campbell’s Field were supposed to revitalize the impoverished city by being the centerpiece of an economic development plan along the edge of the Delaware River. Now, the demolition of the stadium is the first step in a new $15 million economic development scheme that will turn the site into a complex of athletic fields for Rutgers University’s Camden campus, NJ.com reports…

In the team’s final two seasons, the Riversharks averaged about 3,000 fans per game—which is actually not bad by the standards of independent minor league baseball—but the team never turned a profit and abruptly skipped town in 2015 when negotiations on a new lease stalled.

By then, the ballpark was so deep in debt that it faced foreclosure because the team had missed several lease payments. To bail it out, Camden paid off $3.5 million in outstanding debt and purchased the property. The city planned to impose a new ticket surcharge to cover those costs, but the city only received one payment from the team before it moved away, NJ.com reported last year.

This is a consistent story with sports stadiums: they primarily benefit the teams and their owners, not communities. Local officials and politicians want to be the ones who can say they helped keep a sports team in town or they attracted a new franchise but using public dollars for this effort is not a good investment in the long run.

While the story is not quite the same with tax breaks for corporations, there are some parallels. Communities often want to jumpstart economic development. New businesses, particularly headquarters or large office buildings, as well as stadiums can appear to be good ways to do this. They bring jobs, something every local leader supports. They bring increased status for a community, a less quantifiable feature but still important as communities jockey to attract additional firms and residents. Thus, communities are willing to offer tax breaks in a variety of ways – sometimes to help construct infrastructure, sometimes provided per job created, sometimes to construct the stadium – to beat out other communities. The question of whether the community benefits in tangible ways in the years to come is not often raised.

A related earlier post: championships won by sports teams do not necessarily lead to better outcomes in cities.