In my hometown of Tampa, Florida, there has been a big debate for a long time over the building of a new baseball stadium for our professional baseball team, the Tampa Bay Rays. Some people in the community have been eager to get a new stadium built, releasing plans for one with surrounding shops, restaurants, and apartments to provide benefits outside of just the stadium. The stadium could also be used as a venue for concerts, local celebrations, and anything else that requires a large space. However, they have had difficulty determining how much public money versus contributions by the team to use in order to fund the project. After our discussions about public versus private goods in class, this made me question whether this project or sports stadiums in general should be considered at least impure public goods (as Gruber puts it).
I would argue that a sports stadium project such as this should be at least considered an impure public good. It may seem like it would be rival in consumption, as there is only a limited capacity for a certain number of fans at every game/event that takes place. However, I believe it does have certain elements of non-rivalry because everyone gets to take part in the economic benefits awarded by having a new stadium (increased tourism, more notice of the area nationally, etc.) and in this particular case, no one is denied from using the new shops and restaurants developed in conjunction with the stadium. However, the stadium is excludable and cannot be a pure public good because the government/team can ban you from the stadium and there are capacity limits (tickets for the stadium and fire code for the restaurants/shops). But, the fact that a stadium such as this is both partially funded by the government and has elements of non-rivalry should at least make it classified as an impure public good.
1 comment:
John,
I think you bring up some great points about thinking of stadiums as public goods and I think your take on it is well aligned with the "Theory of Clubs" paper by James Buchanan in that stadiums can be thought of as existing somewhere on the private good vs. public good spectrum.
There is a similar storyline in the AL West where the Oakland Athletics were negotiating with the city of Oakland about funding for a new stadium. Another interesting property of public goods that is well illustrated with the baseball stadiums example is the notion that not all citizens consume public goods equally. There are many people in Oakland who have no interest in baseball yet their tax dollars will help to build the new Oakland Ballpark at Howard Terminal in the Jack London Square neighborhood of Oakland.
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