Monday, February 04, 2019

Life around Stadiums


Hundreds of Millions and even Billions of dollars are spent to build new sports stadiums around the country and each time it seems that the new stadium is more elaborate than the last one to be built. In 2009 the New York Yankees bought a new stadium that cost a whopping $1.5 billion dollars while in 2017 Atlanta built a new stadium for the football and soccer teams which came in at $1.6 billion dollars. Today I plan to talk about the football stadium in Minneapolis that cost $1.1 billion and the baseball stadium that opened on 2010 that cost a measly $555 million. While the cost can seem astronomical I am not going to be talking about the construction cost but instead I am going to discuss the urban environment around the stadium.

    While sports stadiums seem to create a lot of excitement when they are proposed and cities are willing to throw whatever money they can to get a stadium built in their location, like convention centers they often sit empty a majority of the time and can create dead zones around them. While on a trip to Minneapolis last summer, I was able to a take a close look at the area around the stadiums and see exactly what the urban environment looks like today.