November 29, 2004
Real Estate Bust
The price of Skydome keeps falling.
The Toronto Blue Jays agreed to buy SkyDome, the team's ballpark, for about $21.2 million.
The 50,000-seat stadium, which opened in 1989, cost about $375 million to construct and was mostly funded by taxpayers. The Blue Jays, who are owned by Rogers Communications, will acquire the ballpark from Sportsco International LP, a Chicago-based group of investors who bought SkyDome out of bankruptcy court in 1999 for about $74 million.
"We're getting it for a very fair price," said Blue Jays president Paul Godfrey, a former city politician who was instrumental in getting the building funded by taxpayers.
Just another reason not to use taxpayer money to build stadiums.
Update: Skip at The Sports Economist believes the $375 million figure is incorrect, and gives a thorough explanation why.
Posted by David Pinto at
07:41 PM
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That's, what, about 6% of the initial cost? Wow!
However, w/o taxpayer money the Blue Jays would of been long gone from the great city of Toronto.
Most likely, they would have been snatched up by some American city desperate to be "world class" and easily duped into spending THEIR taxpayers' money. So if a few cities decide not to spend public dollars on stadiums, they might lose their teams to cities that do pony up public funds. But what would happen if there weren't any cities willing to pay them public bucks, and they had to actually make a profit on their own? Contraction? More movement? Less movement? Lower player salaries? More expensive tickets?
Adam:
Where are they going to go? I don't see a lot of cities lining up for MLB teams. It took the Expos 5 years to find DC and there is still no stadium deal there.
Excellent - in just a few more years, if everything keeps going at it's recent pace, I'll have saved up enough pennies to buy the Skydome myself. The Jays will love me as a landlord.
Isn't there an argument (and I say this knowing nothing about the tax system in Canada) that by having the team own the stadium instead of the gov't (and I know Toronto didn't own it most recently) that there's a tax benefit? When the gov't owns the building, there's no tax assessed - when regular business owns it, at least there's some tax revenue (and the gov't doesn't have to pay the maintenance, etc).
