Externalities of Professional Sports

I happened upon this post on Marginal Revolution regarding the externalities of professional sports teams. The paper that accompanies the post speaks to the externalities received by the residents of cities with professional sports teams, football teams in particular. It is claimed that housing values go up with the presence of an NFL team. The poster also talks about the other external benefits received by fans who live close to their favorite teams. He offers that he, and others he knows, would be willing to pay a small tax in order to keep the team nearby even though football teams only have eight home games. He feels it is worth the money to be able to go to games and follow the team closely. The cities also feel it is beneficial to have the teams in their city, shown by the hundreds of millions of dollars cities offer to shell out to build stadiums to lure teams. The teams create jobs for local workers and often revive the commercial activity of areas surrounding the stadium by rejuvinating the area. These are valuable commodities to the community and inhabitants that the team itself do not receive compensation for. It seems that all these externalities are positive and would make any city more than happy to have a professional team. But this does not explain Los Angeles' inability to maintain a professional football team. There are parts of Los Angeles that could do with some economic boosts. It has been shown that the building of a stadium, such as Coors Field in Colorado, can help to clean up a neighborhood to further help the nurturing of an increased commercial aura. Los Angeles is a very large city, there must be a great deal of people who would greatly benefit from being able to go to games, following and rooting for their team, introducing their kids to the thrill of sporting events. Los Angeles is capable of maintaining two basketball teams and a baseball team, how is it that one of America's primary cities does not wish to benefit from the same externalities as New York, Chicago, or Atlanta? This piece also does not account for some areas desire to not have a professional sports team. Despite strong support, there is also a large faction of opposers in Northern Virginia for the relocation of the Montreal Expos to their neighborhood. There are also negative externalities that accompany the presence of a professional team; construction (initially) and the noise and commotion that comes with it, increased traffic problems, increased cost of living, trash, scalpers, light polution, noise of the games. Perhaps the significantly larger number of home games for a baseball team could lead to more attention to these negative externalities, but football stadiums are often twice as big as baseball stadiums. The theory that the externalities of an NFL team benefits a community does not seem to take into account all the negative externalities as well, it seems to disregard non-sports fans. The voting structure for acceptance of these plans are obviously not unanimity because they would never pass due to the costs to some members of society. With a simple majority, whatever the opinion on the sports team of the median voter will determine whether or not a city will get a professional sports team.