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FEATURED ESSAY URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / January 2000 FEATURED ESSAY THE POLITICS OF
BREAD AND CIRCUSES
Building the City for the Visitor Class
PETER EISINGER
Wayne State University City leaders in the United States devote enormous public resources to the construction of large
entertainment projects, including stadiums, convention centers, entertainment districts, and festival malls. Their justification is that such projects will generate economic returns by attracting
tourists to the city. Although this economic expectation is tested in the literature, little attention is
given to the political and social implications of building a city for visitors rather than local residents. A focus on building the city for the visitor class may strain the bonds of trust between local
leaders and the citizenry and skew the civic agenda to the detriment of fundamental municipal
services. “I feel like a Roman emperor. I can’t give decent city services, I want to close [city] health
centers, and I want to cut back on library hours, and here I am giving bread and circuses to
the people.”
Philadelphia Mayor Edward Rendell on the occasion of the opening of the
Pennsylvania Convention Center, 1993 (Bissinger 1997, 202) During the period of rapid urbanization in the late nineteenth century, the
great task of American municipal governments was to manage the politics of
city building for a burgeoning populace by providing the public services
essential to health, safety, and civic education. A century later, city
governments are consumed by a very different task. City regimes now devote
enormous energies and resources not simply to the basic and traditional
municipal functions but also to the task of making cities, in the words of Judd
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Charles Smith provided invaluable research assistance and commentary
during this project. I am also grateful for the comments of Bob Turner on an earlier draft of this
article.
URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW, Vol. 35, No. 3, January 2000 316-333
© 2000 Sage Publications, Inc. 316 FEATURED ESSAY 317 and Fainstein (1999), “places to play.” This undertaking entails the construction of expensive entertainment amenities, often in partnership with private
investors, designed to appeal primarily to out-of-town visitors, including the
suburban middle classes. This is true even in the nation’s poorest, most
decrepit cities, such as Detroit and Newark. Putting the best face on this urban
obsession, Sharon Zukin (1995, 2) noted that “culture is more and more the
business of cities.” But another way to view this development is to say that
increasingly, the urban civic arena is preoccupied by a politics of bread and
circuses.
Building a city as an entertainment venue is a very different undertaking
than building a city to accommodate residential interests. Although the
former objective is often justified as a means to generate the resources to
accomplish the latter aim, the two are not easily reconciled. For example, one
feature that distinguished the development of municipal services in the late
nineteenth century was their fundamental democratic nature: These were not
just for the well-to-do but also for the common people. Indeed, as Jon Teaford
(1984) pointed out, American city dwellers of all classes had greater access to
clean water, free schools, public libraries, parks, and public health facilities
than did even the comfortable urban middle classes in the great cities of
Europe. Today, however, the city as a place to play is manifestly built for the
middle classes, who can afford to attend professional sporting events, eat in
the new outdoor cafés, attend trade and professional conventions, shop in the
festival malls, and patronize the high- and middlebrow arts. Many, if not
most, of these are visitors to the city, and in the view of local leaders, they
must be shielded from the city’s residents. The city is no longer regarded as
the great melting pot, the meeting place of diverse classes and races. Thus, for
example, the proposal for a “Yankee Village” surrounding Yankee Stadium in
the Bronx would involve increasing parking capacity and constructing a new
mass-transit station within the confines of the stadium to ensure that no matter how they travel to the ballgame, “fans will not come into contact with
Bronx locals” (Fainstein and Stokes 1998, 160).
It is not surprising that political and civic leaders increasingly are intent on
spending their political and fiscal resources to support such entertainment
1
facilities. Such amenities not only offer literally monumental evidence of
mayoral achievement, but more important, local leaders believe that they
hold out the prospect of economic revival by bringing the middle class back
into the cities from which it fled long ago, not as resident taxpayers but at
least as free-spending visitors. Thus city leaders make entertainment projects
a keystone of their urban economic development strategy, hoping that they
will generate ancillary investment, high employment multipliers in the hospitality and retail sectors, and local tax revenues. 318 URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / January 2000 A substantial literature, however, suggests that such expectations are generally misplaced (Swindell and Rosentraub 1998). The economic effects of
stadium investments, casino projects, convention centers, and other entertainment amenities generally show up on the negative side of the balance
sheet, and in the few cases when they do not, their effects are highly localized.
Cost overruns in the construction phase, high public subsidies for operating
expenses and debt service, sweetheart deals for professional sports team
owners, overoptimistic job creation projections, the unlikelihood of stimulating ancillary development beyond the immediate neighborhood, and the
absence of evidence that new entertainment venues actually increase total
regional entertainment spending mean that such projects almost never pay for
themselves (Rosentraub 1997; Sanders 1998; Gross 1998).
Although a great deal of attention has been paid to the issue of economic
impacts of entertainment amenities, little effort has been made to consider the
broader consequences for cities of pursuing a politics of bread and circuses.
What does it mean for cities to spend their money and their political capital in
pursuit of the discretionary entertainment spending of visitors rather than the
tax payments of a resident middle class? Does courting the middle class as
visitors mean the creation of a different sort of city than one designed either to
bring the middle class back as residents or to serve the diverse and often
poorer resident population? URBAN ENTERTAINMENT AMENITIES
IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Despite the need to build the basic infrastructure of urban settlements and
to provide for public health and safety in the late nineteenth century, local
governments in the United States did not entirely ignore the recreational and
cultural interests of their populations. The creation of New York’s Central
Park in 1857 and Chicago’s Jackson Park in 1893 bracketed a period of great
urban public park building. In the 1860s, Philadelphia created the first public
zoo in the United States (Teaford 1984). City playgrounds for children, with
swings and slides and climbing frames, appeared around the turn of the century (Sessoms 1984). Milwaukee built the first public indoor swimming pool
in the late 1890s, located, incidentally, in a working-class neighborhood
(Orum 1995). After World War II, leisure time expanded, and cities responded by building municipal golf courses and softball fields (Herson and
Bolland 1998). The construction of stadiums paid for by local taxpayers began in the 1920s, when several cities—Chicago, Los Angeles, and Cleveland—built facilities to accompany bids for the Olympic games (Danielson FEATURED ESSAY 319 1997). Thus the expenditure of local public resources for entertainment and
recreational amenities is not entirely new. Nevertheless, the current pattern of
local government entertainment investment is different from that in the earlier period in several ways:
1.
2.
3.
4. The pace and variety of construction have markedly increased
The demographic and economic context is different
The intended patron base has shifted from the city’s residents to visitors
The scale of entertainment construction is significantly greater PACE AND VARIETY Annual state and local expenditures for sports facilities and convention
centers rose from about $700 million in the mid-1970s to more than $2 billion
in the early 1990s (Sanders 1995). Table 1 shows the decade-by-decade
record of construction of major-league professional sports facilities for football, baseball, basketball, and hockey. The boom in stadiums and arenas
began in the 1960s as professional sports franchises expanded into the sunbelt states. By the 1990s, however, cities in all regions of the country were
building facilities for major-league teams. Over the same period, cities
invested heavily in convention centers and exhibition halls. In 1970, only 15
cities in the United States had a facility to host a trade show for 20,000 people.
By 1985, the number of cities that could accommodate such large crowds had
increased tenfold (Frieden and Sagalyn 1989). By David Laslo’s count, there
were 409 convention halls in 1997 in cities of all sizes with more than 55million square feet of exhibition space, up from 24-million square feet in 120
cities at the end of the 1960s (Laslo 1998).
Cities also began to invest with private partners in festival malls, riverfront
walks, and urban entertainment districts. Boston’s subsidy of the Faneuil
Hall–Quincy Market complex in the mid-1970s served as the prototype urban
festival mall project, in which developers, with city assistance, combined
architectural renovation, high-end retailing, and a wide array of restaurants
and cafés as a way of drawing people into the heart of the city. Quincy Market
was so successful economically and aesthetically that nearly 250 communities were prompted to copy the model in one way or another over the following dozen years (Walters 1990). One variant of these developments occurred
along urban riverfronts, often in decaying industrial districts. Cleveland,
Chattanooga, Columbia (South Carolina), and Louisville are among the cities in which planners have sought to transform these wasteland areas by combining parkland, mixed-use commercial and residential development, and
entertainment venues to create a riverside version of the festival mall (Jordan 320 URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / January 2000 TABLE 1: Number of Urban Professional Sports Facilities Constructed with 50%
Public Financing or More, by Decade
1920-1929
1930-1939
1940-1949
1950-1959
1960-1969
1970-1979
1980-1989
1990-1998 a 3
—
1
2
10
16
7
19 SOURCE: Rafool (1997).
NOTE: Professional sports facilities include baseball and football stadiums and basketball and
hockey arenas. Publicly financed suburban facilities, such as the New Jersey Meadowlands complex, are not included here.
a. Although each of these three stadiums was built originally to bid for the Olympic games, all
were eventually used by professional sports teams. 1997). Yet another type of city gathering place in the 1990s is the downtown
urban entertainment district, typified in some cities by a high concentration
of multiplex movie theaters, sports complexes, bars and cafés, and “theme”
retailing, such as Disney and Nike stores. Downtown Phoenix and New York
City’s Times Square are the pioneer models (Fulton 1997). In other cities, the
entertainment is more sedate: Newark’s New Jersey Center for the Performing Arts and Philadelphia’s Avenue of the Arts complex are examples of the
approximately 60 officially designated arts-based cultural districts in cities
across the country (Strom 1998; New York Times, 18 November 1997).
CONTEXT The era in which cities began to build public parks, the most common sort
of nineteenth-century recreational amenity, was a time of rapid urban population and economic growth. Later, when cities first began in earnest to finance
professional sports facilities, it was primarily the new and prosperous cities
of the South and West that did so. Prior to 1970, of the 14 cities that built publicly financed sports facilities, 10 (71%) were growing in population.
After 1970, however, municipal investment in entertainment amenities
became a universal urban undertaking. Of the 30 cities that undertook stadium or arena construction in the next quarter century, only 57% were growing. Thirteen of the cities were experiencing population losses, some of drastic dimensions, such as Detroit and St. Louis. Even more striking is that 26 of
the 30 cities that built sports facilities after 1970 were experiencing an FEATURED ESSAY 321 increase in the number of people living in high-poverty neighborhoods—that
is, census tracts in which 40% or more of the population lives below the federal poverty line (Jargowsky 1997, 222-32). In Houston, for example, the
number of people in high-poverty tracts rose from slightly over 4,000 in 1970
to more than 119,000 in 1990. In Detroit, the increase was from just over
64,000 to 363,000, and in Cincinnati, it was from 2,200 to almost 20,000. In
short, in the contemporary period, many local governments have been making large public investments in entertainment facilities at the same time that
the municipal tax base is declining and social welfare needs are rising.
PATRON BASE In the nineteenth century, urban recreational facilities were designed for
the urban populace. Although the great city parks built after the Civil War
were often far from the immigrant quarters and thus beyond the easy reach of
slum dwellers too poor to pay the carfare, for “middle-class urbanites and
their working-class cousins . . . the great parks were accessible refuges from
the drabness of the city, and thousands flooded the municipal preserves each
weekend” (Teaford 1984, 257-58). Even exceptional events such as world’s
fairs relied heavily on local visitors. Cronon (1991, 343) noted that of all the
people who came to Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, “the largest
share undoubtedly came from Chicago itself.” Writing about what were at the
turn of the nineteenth century admittedly largely privately financed ballparks, midways, dance halls, vaudeville theaters, and movie palaces, Nasaw
(1993, 2) stated that “the world of ‘public’ amusements was . . . where the
city’s peoples came together to have a good time in public.”
In contrast, today’s entertainment facilities, marketed vigorously by tourism promoters, are designed to bring visitors into the city (Kotler, Haider, and
Rein 1993). Tourism is a way of importing spending and exporting the tax
burden. These are the obvious objectives behind the construction of convention centers. An estimated 80% to 95% of convention-goers stay overnight in
the host city, paying hefty room taxes in the process. They represent a highly
desirable type of visitor because they tend to spend considerably more per
day than ordinary tourists or attendees at cultural performances or sporting
matches (Petersen 1996, 6). These latter events are aimed at other sorts of
out-of-town visitors besides convention-goers. For example, New Jersey’s
Performing Arts Center, located in the heart of Newark, drew 70% of its audience in its first year from suburban counties around Newark (New York Times,
6 July 1998). Even in a city as large as New York, the fan base at sporting
events is heavily suburban: 85% of those who go to Yankee baseball games
are suburbanites (Fainstein and Stokes 1998, 159). In fact, baseball teams 322 URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / January 2000 justify new stadiums in part on the grounds that such facilities will increase
out-of-town fan attendance. In making the case for a new stadium for the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team, consultants pointed out that the Minnesota
Twins and the Toronto Blue Jays built new facilities and promptly saw their
nonmetropolitan attendance grow by 47% and 52%, respectively. The consultants predicted a similar effect of a new Brewer stadium (Arthur Andersen &
Co. 1995, 9). In short, the objective of the new politics of entertainment
amenities is primarily to attract visitors.
SCALE Facilities built today are more expensive and bigger than in the past. Soldier Field in Chicago, built in 1924, cost the equivalent of only $20 million in
1995 dollars. Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium of 1950 cost only $38 million,
adjusted to 1995 dollars. The generation of stadiums from the 1960s—for
example, Candlestick in San Francisco, Jack Murphy in San Diego, and RFK
Stadium in Washington, D.C.—rarely cost more than $125 million in 1995
dollars (Rafool 1997). Contemporary stadiums, however, with their retractable roofs, elaborate concession areas, luxury boxes, closed-circuit television transmission, and high-tech scoreboards, begin at well over $200 million
and range to a projected $1 billion or more for a proposed new Yankee stadium on Manhattan’s congested West Side.
For certain classes of entertainment facilities, size has also increased.
Convention centers built in the late 1960s in Atlanta and Denver had 70,000and 100,000-square feet of exhibition space, respectively. Replacement
facilities built in those cities more recently have 950,000- and 300,000square feet, and they must compete with Chicago’s upgraded McCormick
Place with its 2.2-million square feet of space (it was originally only oneseventh that size) and New York City’s 750,000-square-foot Javits Center
(Kotler, Haider, and Rein 1993; Sanders 1998). BUILDING A CITY FOR VISITORS
The amount of fiscal and political resources and the level of energy that
local elites must devote to the realization of large entertainment projects are
so great that more mundane urban problems and needs must often be subordinated or ignored. In pursuing big entertainment projects, local elites create a
hierarchy of interests in which the concerns of visitors to cities—including
commuters, day-trippers, tourists, and business travelers—take precedence
over those of the people who reside in the city. Visitors must not only have FEATURED ESSAY 323 easy transportation access to the city, but once there, they must at least have
parking or mass-transit access to the city’s attractions, police protection,
clean and well-lit streets in tourist districts, sanitary restaurants, honest taxi
service, and fireproof hotels. Proponents of big entertainment projects justify
the allocation of public resources and civic energies to big projects and the
services that support them on the grounds that the projects themselves generate big economic development gains for residents of the city in the form of
jobs and tax revenues. It is this claim that has attracted the attention of analysts. Yet the effects on cities of the mobilization of resources to build big
entertainment amenities are likely to extend well beyond economic development outcomes. One of the potential unexplored effects of entertainment
projects is that they threaten to strain the bonds of trust and accountability
between citizens and their leaders. A second possible effect is that the effort
to realize these projects can easily skew or distort the civic agenda.
STRAINING THE LINKS BETWEEN
LEADERS AND THE LED In seeking to build publicly subsidized entertainment projects to attract
visiting spenders, local elites risk deepening distrust of government, creating
deep polarities, and breeding cynicism among residents in the city. Consider
first the democratic challenges of public financing of huge capital projects for
entertainment purposes. Because these efforts are both so costly and so
important to local elites, the preference is to shield the funding decision from
the uncertain outcome of a public vote. Sometimes a bond or tax referendum
is unavoidable if the project requires a levy on local taxpayers, however. This
is a minor risk for local elites because more than half the time, voters refuse to
pass such referenda. However, a negative outcome is rarely a permanent
obstacle to the eventual commitment of public subsidies. It simply delays the
project as leaders search for ways to detour around voter disapproval. In such
cases, if resorting to means other than a public vote to use public funds does
not stoke the fires of voter frustration, then other factors associated with large
capital expenditures for entertainment amenities are likely to do so. These
include the high opportunity costs associated with making such large investments, the potential for driving up the cost of public borrowing for other projects, and the diminution of local fiscal flexibility.
Referenda on whether to commit public funds to the construction of big
entertainment amenities are not in fact the norm. Although the National
Council of State Legislatures has determined that public financing was used
for the construction of major-league sports facilities in 71 cases through
1996, there was no public vote in 54 of these (Rafool 1997). When referenda 324 URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / January 2000 are held, they result, more often than not, in negative votes. The same is true
of votes on convention and civic centers. Herson and Bolland (1998, 352)
noted that in the late 1980s, voter support for bond issues for these sorts of
projects fell, on average, below 44%. By way of comparison, support for
bond issues for water and sewer systems in the same period ranged from 69%
to 77%.
A negative referendum outcome does not always lay the issue to rest. As
the mayor of Chandler, Arizona, once commented on an approaching referendum on whether to provide public funds to build a new spring training site
for a major-league ball club, “If the voters pass this, we’ll move forward. If
the voters don’t pass this, we’ll still move forward” (quoted in Fort 1997,
146). There were at least 30 sports-facility-funding referenda between 1984
and 1997, of which 19 produced negative votes in 14 different cities (Sekwat
1996; Fort 1997). However, in 7 of the 14 cities—Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, San Jose, and Seattle—new stadiums or arenas
were subsequently initiated using public funds other than simply local levies.
State legislatures in Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Washington
provided funding packages for the stadiums in Milwaukee, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, and Seattle, thus essentially bypassing local electorates. In a typical
scenario, the state of Pennsylvania came to the rescue of stadium proponents
when Pittsburgh-area voters in 1997 resoundingly defeated a ballot measure
that would have imposed a half-percentage-point sales tax for seven years to
finance two new stadiums for the baseball and football teams, expand the
convention center, and pay for projects in Pittsburgh’s cultural district. In the
wake of the defeat, state and local politicians and team officials immediately
began to meet privately to work out what came to be called Plan B. This
involved committing public funds through a bond sale backed by a county
sales tax already in place and a hotel tax, as well as securing $150 million
from the state of Pennsylvania. Stadium construction is going forward. In the
state of Washington, voters turned down an increase in the state sales tax to
fund a new stadium for the Seattle Mariners, but the state legislature, declaring an “emergency” to block another public referendum, passed an alternative public financing plan in a special session called by the governor.
The sales tax in the Pennsylvania case, although county based, is administered by the Allegheny County Regional Asset District, a special authority
created in 1994 to raise tax revenues for the present stadium, the zoo, and
local libraries. The use of special authorities to administer taxes and borrow
money for stadium financing and operations is widespread. Major-league
sports facilities are managed by special authorities in at least 14 other cities
besides Pittsburgh (Rafool 1997). Although stadium and other big-asset projects are not always controversial, one virtue of special authorities, from the FEATURED ESSAY 325 point of view of project proponents, is that their governing boards are typically insulated from the voters. For example, the mayor of Pittsburgh and the
members of the Allegheny County Commission select the seven members of
the Allegheny County Regional Asset District, one of whom must be chosen
from a list of nominees supplied by the private development community.
Likewise, the King County executive and the governor of the state of Washington appoint the seven members of the Washington State Major League
Baseball Stadium Public Facilities District, and in Michigan, the Wayne
County executive alone chooses the six members of the Detroit Stadium
Authority.
The sums involved in financing big entertainment projects, particularly
stadiums, are so large that they inevitably raise issues of the apparent opp...
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