The Vans Are Still Warm

Just after two in the morning on March 29, 1984, fifteen Mayflower moving vans pulled out of the Baltimore Colts’ complex in Owings Mills and scattered onto different highways so no single court order could catch them all. Maryland’s legislature had spent that week advancing a bill to seize the team by eminent domain, and Robert Irsay beat the bill out of the state. By sunrise the Colts belonged to Indianapolis, which had spent $77.5 million raising the Hoosier Dome on speculation, a nest built before Indiana had any bird to put in it. One landed. The city took its bows, Irsay took the building, and Baltimore took four decades of grief it can still recite by heart.

The nest lasted twenty-four years. Indianapolis dynamited the dome, by then renamed for RCA, in December of 2008 to clear ground for a convention center expansion, and the debt kept right on breathing. WISH-TV reported that the demolished building was paid off a full twelve years after the wrecking charges went, and Sportico traced convention-center refinancings back through regulatory filings to the original 1981 stadium borrowing. Even the replacement carries its own anchor, since Lucas Oil Stadium still had $633 million outstanding thirteen years after opening day. Indiana is the state now courting the Chicago Bears, and Indiana’s own ledger is the best appraisal of what the courtship costs.

The Bears have shopped for a landlord for five years. They own 326 acres in Arlington Heights, the grounds of the old racecourse. In 2024 they pivoted to the lakefront, offering more than $2 billion of family money toward a domed stadium south of Soldier Field that would run past $3 billion before anyone paved a parking spot, with the public expected to hold the borrowing and the infrastructure. Springfield yawned. In 2025, when Indiana legislators created a commission to lure professional teams to the state’s northwest corner, plenty of people in Illinois laughed at it, and team president Kevin Warren published an open letter assuring the faithful that widening the search was “not about leverage.” That sentence has a way of appearing only when it is.

This February the mask slipped in public. Governor Pritzker’s negotiators sat with the team for three hours and left believing a term sheet was days away; within twenty-four hours, Indiana lawmakers passed an amendment, twenty-four to nothing, clearing a Bears stadium in Hammond, and the team declared itself committed to seeing the Indiana deal through. Joe Pompliano’s Huddle Up newsletter laid out the whiplash, and Pritzker said he was blindsided. The Illinois property-tax bill the team wanted died in the spring. In June the Bears formally declared for Hammond, even as a rival bill creating suburban stadium authorities cleared the Illinois Senate at 3:39 in the morning and expired when the House went home without a vote. By this week the language had hardened into an ultimatum, with the team saying it has exhausted every path to staying in the city, that only Arlington Heights and Hammond remain on the table, and that its sole focus is Indiana, where one site called Lost Marsh has cleared review, a second called Wolf Lake Terminal is under study, and the two may yet be merged. Hammond’s mayor floats a September signing. Governor Mike Braun, who signed the incentive law, calls the negotiation the “red zone.” Chairman George McCaskey promises the name will read Chicago Bears wherever the concrete lands, and he offers the soothing detail that when he drives to Hammond, only a road sign tells him he has left Illinois. He offers it as comfort, and it lands as a confession: Hammond sits about twenty miles from Soldier Field, closer than Arlington Heights sits to the Loop, so the move on the table keeps every Chicago customer, every Chicago broadcast dollar, and the Chicago name while switching which taxpayers hold the mortgage. The league will bless the fiction, having blessed it for decades at the Meadowlands, where the Giants have kept a New York name on New Jersey turf since 1976, the Jets joined them in 1984, and New Jersey went on paying roughly $110 million of debt on Giants Stadium after wrecking crews leveled it in 2010. In this league the map answers to the marketing department.

Chicago should decline, and the city can point at its own books while declining. On November 15, 2000, Mayor Richard Daley summoned reporters to a Soldier Field skybox to unveil the renovation that would keep the Bears from wandering, promising the project would preserve the stadium’s “charm and dignity.” The rebuild cost about $660 million. The Bears and the league put in $200 million, and the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority borrowed roughly $398 million against a two percent city hotel tax to cover the rest, on a payment schedule backloaded like a balloon mortgage. NBC 5 Investigates ran the numbers in 2022: taxpayers still owed $640 million on that borrowing, with total payback headed for $1.13 billion, nearly triple the sum borrowed. Debt service runs $64 million this year and climbs to $90.5 million in 2032, the final year, per figures reported by Crain’s. When hotel taxes fall short, as they did through the pandemic years, the state docks Chicago’s share of income-tax revenue to cover the gap, so a levy sold as a charge on tourists reaches into the city’s own till whenever tourism sags. This season, with the team naming Indiana as its sole focus, the city still carries $356 million in principal on a renovation built for a tenant heading out the door. The team can leave. The debt stays.

This town has watched the play from the South Side, too. In 1988 Jerry Reinsdorf toured St. Petersburg, where Florida had poured the Suncoast Dome on speculation, another empty nest waiting for another unhappy franchise, and the White Sox owner let Springfield feel the draft. On the last night of June the Illinois legislature stopped the chamber clock at midnight to pass a new Comiskey Park funded by that hotel tax, and Reinsdorf admitted the visit’s purpose afterward: “a savvy negotiator creates leverage.” Thirty-six years on, in 2024, the state was still paying down the 1991 ballpark when Reinsdorf came back asking about a billion-dollar home in the South Loop, and Axios reported that Illinois had borrowing capacity for one new stadium at most while the Sox and the Bears raced each other through Springfield’s corridors. The shakedown keeps its own maintenance schedule, and it never syncs with the mortgage.

The economics of this question closed years ago. Robert Baade and Richard Dye began comparing metropolitan areas with and without new stadiums in the late 1980s and found no growth signature. Working across twenty-five years of metro data, Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys found effects hovering at zero and sometimes dipping below it, with per-capita income in some host regions landing lower after the subsidized buildings arrived. John Siegfried and Andrew Zimbalist consolidated the record for the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2000, and the Brookings volume Sports, Jobs, and Taxes had already priced job creation at Camden Yards at roughly $127,000 per job while Maryland’s ordinary development fund created them at nearer $6,000 apiece. Those are Clinton-era dollars. In 2023 the Journal of Economic Surveys published the field’s capstone, in which Bradbury, Coates, and Humphreys reviewed more than 130 studies spanning 1974 to 2022 and reported that local economies are, on the whole, unmoved by professional sports venues, “and the level of venue subsidies typically provided far exceeds any observed economic benefits.” Even when researchers add civic pride and quality-of-life value to the scale, the measured welfare gains fall well short of the public outlays. Their review also lands on a finding every frightened mayor should tape to the desk: franchise departures show no association with negative economic outcomes. The gaudy numbers on the other side of the argument come from impact studies commissioned by teams and tourism bureaus, documents that tally gross spending as if every hot dog were incremental and none of the money would otherwise exist. Surveys of the profession line up behind the literature, since an American Economic Association poll in 2005 found 85 percent of members favoring an end to sports subsidies, and a 2017 panel run out of the University of Chicago, of all institutions, found 80 percent agreement that stadium subsidies cost taxpayers more than any local benefit they generate.

The reasons are almost insultingly simple. A household’s entertainment budget is a fixed pie, so the eighty dollars a family drops on parking and nachos at a game is eighty dollars that skips the bowling alley in Berwyn, the taquería in Pilsen, the movie house in Evanston. Economists call it substitution, and it means a stadium mostly relocates spending across a metro area without enlarging it. Scale does the rest of the damage to the fantasy. Michael Leeds, the Temple University sports economist, has estimated that if every professional team in Chicago vanished overnight, the city’s economy would shrink by a fraction of one percent, and he likens a big-league team’s economic footprint to that of a midsize department store. Nobody in the City Council has ever proposed a billion public dollars to retain a Macy’s. An NFL calendar makes the comparison worse: ten home dates a year, give or take, a building dark most nights, and game-day jobs running heavily to part-time shifts pouring beer and waving cars into lots.

A stadium dollar also lives a short local life. Nearly half of league revenue flows to player payroll under the collective bargaining agreement, and players, like owners, bank, invest, and winter wherever their accountants advise, while the profit skimmed off the top follows the ownership out of town. A dollar spent at a neighborhood restaurant cycles through local wages, local suppliers, and local rent in a way a luxury-suite dollar was never designed to do. Then there is the quiet federal layer. Because stadium bonds ride the municipal tax exemption, buyers of the debt collect interest free of federal tax, and Drukker, Gayer, and Gold documented in the National Tax Journal how that exemption turns every stadium borrowing into a small national subsidy. Sportico put it plainly during a Final Four at Lucas Oil: a retiree in Key West helped pay for that roof through the tax code without ever seeing a snap.

Boosters always answer with Indianapolis, and the Indianapolis books answer back. Lucas Oil Stadium cost $720 million, and the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis records the public covering $620 million of it, 86 percent, through taxes spread across Marion County and nine surrounding doughnut counties, where restaurant meals still carry a one percent surcharge for the building. The Colts’ announced $100 million share was itself softened, with two-thirds of it financed through government-issued bonds, and the team pays $250,000 a year in rent while collecting the concessions, the non-football event revenue, and the $121.5 million naming-rights sale. Indianapolis got Final Fours and a Super Bowl out of the arrangement, and those weekends photograph beautifully. The unphotographed question is what $620 million in transit, teachers, or untaxed dinners would have returned across those decades, and by 2021 the building still owed $633 million while its lease carried a clause letting the Colts reopen the whole deal if the franchise fails to rank among the league’s five most valuable by 2030. The model city is a customer who has never once finished paying.

Southern Ohio ran the control experiment and published the results in its property-tax bills. In 1996, Hamilton County voters approved a half-cent sales tax for two new stadiums after Bengals owner Mike Brown threatened a move to Baltimore, the market Indiana had emptied twelve years earlier; a stolen team becomes the club swung at the next city, and the extortion compounds like interest. Voters were promised a 30 percent property-tax rollback as the sweetener. The Wall Street Journal in 2011 rated the arrangement the worst stadium deal any local government had ever signed. Sales-tax growth was projected at three percent a year and delivered closer to 2.1 by the commissioners’ own accounting, so the county trimmed the promised rollback again and again, raised property taxes outright in 2019, sold its stake in a public hospital for $15 million in 2011 to plug the stadium fund, and honored a lease clause obligating it to buy the Bengals a $10 million scoreboard. For 2026 the rebate shrinks from $31.4 million to $5 million, about four and a half cents delivered on every promised thirty. Hamilton County was supposed to be the proof of the stadium as a revenue machine. It ended up as the autopsy.

Buffalo just cut the ribbon on the newest edition, and the reviews arrived by morning. New York pledged $850 million toward a new Highmark Stadium in 2022, $600 million from the state and $250 million from Erie County, the largest public contribution to any NFL stadium at the moment of signing and still the second largest ever handed over. The building opened this month at a cost past $2.2 billion, with the Pegula family absorbing the overruns, and it holds 60,108 seats, more than eleven thousand fewer than the 1973 stadium it replaces, under a canopy yet open to the western New York sky. Admission to the smaller room came with a new toll, since nearly every chair carries a personal seat license, a one-time fee running from $750 in the upper deck to $50,000 in the clubs, and all 54,628 of them sold for roughly $260 million while one longtime suite holder learned that keeping his eight seats would cost $400,000 and a fan in the cheaper sections told a reporter, “I’ll probably never see a game here.” The debut headlines counted railings and stair towers slicing views of the field, video boards fans judged undersized, an upper deck pitched steep with no bathrooms at the top and no escalators to reach it, and a get-in price over $600 for the September opener. Taxpayers in one of the league’s smallest markets wrote a record check for a smaller room and a cover charge at the turnstile. Terry Pegula bought the franchise for $1.4 billion in 2014, and the franchise is valued past $6 billion today.

The freshest data arrived last winter, gift-wrapped. In April of 2024, Jackson County, Missouri voters rejected a sales-tax extension meant to fund a new Royals ballpark and renovate Arrowhead for the Chiefs, a rare referendum in this national racket where citizens got a direct say. Within weeks, Kansas convened a special session and authorized STAR bonds covering up to 70 percent of a stadium’s cost. Missouri answered with a package north of $1.5 billion, by Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas’s public accounting. Then on December 22, 2025, Kansas legislative leaders cleared a standing-room crowd from the meeting, went behind closed doors for under half an hour, and emerged to approve $1.8 billion in STAR bonds. Out came the Chiefs’ announcement that day: a $3.3 billion stadium and training-complex plan in Wyandotte County, with nearly another billion sought for a headquarters in Olathe, the largest such project Kansas has ever attempted by an order of magnitude. The team will cross State Line Road and remain inside the metro area whose money it already collects. No new fan is minted, no new dollar is conjured; the customers change highway exits, two states’ taxpayers absorb the bidding war, and a 2019 truce that had ended years of Kansas-Missouri incentive poaching dies on the table. The Bears studied that scoreboard all winter. Hammond is Kansas with a lake view.

Las Vegas is where the auction was always headed, and the franchise that wrote the auction’s rules led the way. Al Davis beat the league’s veto in an antitrust courtroom in 1982 and hauled the Raiders from Oakland to Los Angeles, establishing in law that a franchise moves like any other asset, and Irsay’s vans rolled through the door Davis opened two years later. Oakland borrowed nearly $200 million in 1995 to buy its team back, stacking onto the Coliseum a wall of upper-deck seats that fans named Mount Davis, a structure that blotted out the Oakland Hills while the seat-license revenue meant to service the bonds fell short and taxpayers covered about $20 million a year in an era when the city was laying off police. Mark Davis moved the team anyway in 2020, into a $2 billion Las Vegas dome carrying $750 million in public money from a hotel room tax, the largest public stadium subsidy in American history at the time and a record since broken twice, and the league charged him a $378 million relocation fee payable to the other owners, the dividend the cartel collects on its own extortion. The new fans absorbed $549 million in personal seat licenses. Oakland and Alameda County made the final payment on roughly $340 million of Coliseum and arena debt only this year, three decades and three departed franchises after the wager.

Baseball is following the football money down the same highway. John Fisher, an heir to the Gap fortune, secured up to $380 million in Nevada public money in a June 2023 special session for a 33,000-seat dome on the old Tropicana ground, a project that has swelled from $1.5 billion toward $2 billion, and he pulled the Athletics out of Oakland after fifty-seven seasons, parking them in a Sacramento minor league yard for three years while the desert building rises toward a 2028 opening. The team wears no city name at all right now, the Meadowlands arrangement carried to its logical end, a brand floating free of the map while it waits for the next zip code. Nevada’s room tax bills roughly forty million visitors a year, so a legislature can hand a billionaire the public’s check while telling voters the tourists cover it, and in Las Vegas the trick even cashes, with collections running ahead of the bond schedule, while the teachers of a state sitting near the bottom of the national school-funding tables organized to pull the money back toward classrooms and got nowhere. The state levies no income tax on a payroll, the casinos want year-round content for the floor, and the leagues that once treated the town as contagious, banning its advertisements and exiling its gamblers, moved into the sportsbook’s house the moment the betting money changed sides. Sin City stayed put while the price of absolution moved.

The racket persists because the leagues built scarcity into the product. Thirty-two NFL franchises face far more than thirty-two cities that want one, and the authors of the 2023 survey point to that monopoly power as the standing explanation for why subsidies survive the evidence against them. Las Vegas has industrialized the role St. Petersburg played in 1988, the permanent threat with its lights already on. The costs are diffuse, a few dollars a year hidden in a hotel bill or a restaurant tab, while the benefits concentrate in one family’s trust, and the ribbon-cutting draws every camera in town while the unbuilt rail line and the unstaffed classroom pose for nobody. Under it all sits fear, because every mayor in America carries the Baltimore morning of 1984 somewhere behind the sternum. The record answers the fear directly, showing that metros losing teams display no measurable economic wound. Grief follows a departure. Recession does not.

The honest defense of a stadium is pleasure, and pleasure is a real thing cities may buy. Teams supply identity, ritual, a shared Sunday, and so do lakefronts, libraries, and an opera house, and nobody pretends those pay for themselves. Economists have priced the intangible too, asking residents in structured surveys what hosting a franchise is worth to them in dollars, and Bradbury and Humphreys report that the totals come in well below the public costs typically on offer. The clean instrument for measuring civic love is a ballot. Kansas City used one, the Chiefs’ own county said no, and the owners went shopping for a legislature willing to say yes in a half hour behind a closed door. As for the construction-jobs argument, any billion dollars of concrete employs builders, and a school, a rail line, or a water system employs those trades just as well and then keeps generating value after the last beam is set, while a football building settles back into ten dates and a sea of striped asphalt.

When the returns are real, billionaires keep them for themselves. Stan Kroenke put more than five billion private dollars into SoFi Stadium because Los Angeles pencils out for him, Robert Kraft financed Gillette Stadium on his own, and the Giants and Jets split a bill of roughly $1.6 billion for MetLife. A public ask is a confession of arithmetic, an owner reporting that the building fails his own investment test. The Bears pledge more than $2 billion of family money for Hammond and still require Indiana’s incentive statute, land assistance, and tax certainty, while the whole Illinois fight turned on freezing property taxes for the Arlington acreage, and a forgiven tax is public spending in a quieter suit. The family math sharpens the picture. George Halas brought the team to Chicago in 1921 with $5,000 in seed money from a Decatur starch maker who wanted the Staley name worn for one more season. Last September the league approved a minority-stake sale that priced the Bears at $8.9 billion, the highest valuation any NFL sale has yet carried, and Forbes’ valuation model credits a slice of any franchise’s worth to the size of its market. Chicago spent a century building that value, and the invoice now travels in the wrong direction.

So say the word. Around this desk the motto runs that yes is hard and no is easy, and for once the ledger agrees with the easy answer. If Hammond wants the honor, Hammond can inherit the mortgage, and Indiana has carried debt on a demolished stadium before, so it knows what that weighs. Chicago keeps the market, the airwaves, the tax base, and, by McCaskey’s own guarantee, the name across the jerseys, along with the $356 million in principal it owes on the last renovation no matter where the team snaps the ball. Stand outside Soldier Field on a Tuesday night in February. The colonnades hold up nothing warmer than the lake wind and the turnstiles hang chained. Downstate, a hotel-tax ledger ticks toward 2032, still paying for the stadium we were told would pay for us.