Jan 16, 2016 4 min read

In the 21 years the St. Louis Rams existed, they managed one Super Bowl win, in 1999, five trips to the playoffs, and also a humiliating stretch of defeat between 2007 and 2009 that saw them winning only six games while losing 42. Their last winning season was in 2004.

Yet, when faced with the prospect of the Rams packing their bags and migrating back to Los Angeles, where the team made its home from 1946 to 1994, the city said it would open its purse for them, promising at least $150 million from city coffers for a shiny new stadium. This in spite of the fact that close to one-third of St. Louis residents live below the poverty line. More would come from the state, city officials pledged.

It wasn’t enough. It was announced last week that the Rams would, in fact, go back to Los Angeles, lured in part by the expectation of a $3 billion, glass-roofed stadium that, to the credit of the team’s owners, will mostly be paid for by them.

Fans who had stayed with the Rams through a stretch of thick and a whole lot of thin are undoubtedly gnashing their teeth and rending their gold and blue jerseys. But city officials might want to be glad the Rams didn’t take them up on their offer – despite extravagant guarantees to the contrary, there’s a growing body of evidence that new stadiums don’t do much to boost economic development in the communities where they are built, and taxpayers rightly feel more than a little irked about having construction and infrastructure costs for stadiums placed on their tab, while owners and players waltz away with pockets stuffed with cash.

Come to think of it, outrage over threats by team owners to move teams elsewhere could be one of the few issues that unifies conservatives and liberals – it angers conservatives because a large chunk of public money is involved, and it raises the blood pressure of liberals because all the money that is eagerly handed over for state-of-the-art scoreboards and skyboxes could instead be earmarked for things like education and health care.

And even if the money doesn’t go to these areas, it could be better spent on other economic development projects, some economists say. Dennis Coates of the University of Maryland told The Wall Street Journal last March, “You’re not going to get income growth; you’re not going to get tax growth; you’re not going to get employment growth.”

Nevertheless, that hasn’t prevented taxpayers from coughing up an average of $262 million for each NFL stadium built between 1990 and 2010. In 1996, Cleveland officials made a splashy announcement about a new stadium on the same day that $52 million was cut from the city’s schools and 160 teachers were handed pink slips.

And these new stadiums are becoming increasingly disposable, which means that they often won’t even be fully paid for by the time they are reduced to rubble. In Atlanta, for instance, both the Falcons and the Braves are getting new stadiums, even though the old ones were constructed back in those long-gone days when George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were in the White House. Consider, by contrast, that Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field lasted all the way from 1909 to 1970.

According to David Williams, president of the conservative Taxpayer Protection Alliance, “Unfortunately, beneath all of the glitz and glamour, these venues are nothing more than monuments to corporate welfare and taxpayer handouts. These stadiums have been built on the backs of taxpayers who had no or little say in the matter and in many cases have benefited little or not at all.”

While there’s nothing wrong with looking forward to the prospect of seeing the Steelers back at Heinz Field next fall, or enjoying the view of the Allegheny River from PNC Park, it should come with a corresponding hope – that each team will be playing at these decade-old stadiums for a long, long time to come.