Braves ditching The Ted for suburbs

Yeah, that was my thought. Seems cheaper than buying a whole new plot of land in Cobb County. I'm probably in the minority, but I liked Turner Field. Hell, I even liked Fulton County Stadium back in the day. Old ballpark feel and smell to it.

 

Lot of folks are crying "white flight" but everything in Atlanta gets turned into race.
And anybody who's ever been to that ballpark knows the audience there is about 98 percent white.
So that isn't going to change much in Cobb.

 

Yeah, there is just so much undeveloped land that maybe it's cheaper to move a few miles further out and build whatever you want to build there. I was driving to Wal-Mart today (suburbs) and saw, you guessed it, more construction.... some office building and apartment complex, a good 25 miles from downtown.

This seems to be the trend, much to my dismay. People moving further and further out of town, buying enormous houses with large chunks of land. Then the car dealerships, strip centers, shopping malls, schools, churches and hospitals follow suit and before too long, you've basically got your own small town adjacent to another town (whether it legally becomes a separate town with mayor and such is almost irrelevant). And, yes, these areas do tend to be racially segregated. In fact, I would hazard a guess race and public schools play a big reason why people move there to begin with.

 

Lot of truth to that and it's not completely unique to Atlanta, either. I see this quite regularly. A lot of white folks, especially older, well-educated, affluent Republican white folks do not want to mingle with ethnic minorities under any circumstances. They don't want them in their schools, their churches, their ballparks, their shopping malls or anywhere else.

Once slavery was abolished about 150 years, the use for them pretty well ceased to exist and now they are regarded as a nusance at best and dangerous at worst. Generation by generation, they took over what white folks long assumed to be theirs and the only recourse was for the white folks to move out to the suburbs. Thus, the whole "white flight" syndrome affecting so many metropolitan areas. It's not exclusively a southern phenomenon. Detroit, Chicago, New York and other metro areas have experienced it as well. We are still quite often a very segregated society.

In regard to the Braves and other sports teams, it's interesting that this is the path they have chosen, chasing the greater dollars in the suburbs rather than staying closer to the inner city.

It's also worth noting the Republican county chairperson mentioning taxes. I hear this over and over and over again. No one wants to pay for a damn thing, other than their own $50,000 SUV. Yet, they want to have the best schools, ballparks, roads, etc.

 

Someone with more knowledge about these things, please correct me if I'm way off base here. Whenever we have these types of deals, aren't the government's costs usually associated more with infrastructure (roads, access, sewage, water, etc.) than the actual construction of the stadium itself?
So if it's a $500 million project, the stadium would cost, say $200 million (paid by the team) and the roads and everything around it costs $300 million (paid by the local or state government)?

 

Or that Milwaukee County Stadium was finished before the Braves moved to Milwaukee?

Or that while Bud Selig was a part of the Braves' ownership group in the early 60s, he fought tooth-and-nail to keep the Braves in Milwaukee and divested his stock when the move was made final?

 

We're still quite often a segregated society thanks to people like you, btw. But hey, thanks for the lesson on race relations. Always good to have a racist's point of view to balance things out.

 

Not necessarily. Usually, the government pays for the roads, and, depending on how much of a sweetheart deal it is, splits the cost of the stadium with the team. Not to mention, the government may give away tax breaks and loans out money to the teams with low-to-zero interest rates, and, in some infamous cases (Chavez Ravine and the JerryDome), use eminent domain to steal the land from homeowners to build the stadium.

 

Depending on what you read, it those areas -- the far suburban fringe -- that are actually peaking and ready to decline quickly. High gas prices, collapsing home values and a general distaste for living out where, as my late mother-in-law used to say, God lost his shoe all play a part. Of course, for the moment, exurban growth is still greater than a lot of areas, especially in places (such as my hometown of Carmel, Ind.) that have re-invented themselves to be more than mere bedroom communities. By the way, keep that in mind when you think about why Cobb County leaders would want to spend so much tax money on a ballpark -- they want to market and keep their own identity, making Atlanta, in their mind, only a place you go to use the airport.

 

I don't have an issue with a business (or a sports team) looking to move closer to its customer base. If more of the "red" (from page 2's ticket sales graphic) is north of the downtown core, consider moving it.

Baseball isn't the NFL - you need to find a way to reach your customers in 2013. Outside of New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles and Boston, MLB is a "local market sport". Atlanta remains of the lousiest sports towns in the nation as so many people in the metro area are from somewhere else.

Better to make the move now, if you are the Braves, while you still have the leverage. If their attendance ticks down over the next five years, maybe other towns won't be as willing to pony up for a new palace.

 

I doubt that, because there's always a willing sucker. For that matter, states, counties and cities are always willing suckers for any corporation that promises unicorns and rainbows if they get tax breaks, and hellfire and devastation if they don't. That's because state, counties and cities -- and corporations -- know that there's always a willing sucker if the incentives don't come. Missouri's governor is calling for a truce in its border war with Kansas, but even if it happens, so what? Someone will probably start one with another border state, or just another state that declares itself "open for business." And that's even though commentators and thinkers across the political spectrum say these deals never result in the job creation that's promised.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/13/us/missouris-governor-calls-for-end-to-contest-of-incentives.html?_r=0

https://heartland.org/policy-documents/research-and-commentary-state-tax-incentives

 

Exmediahack, to your point about moving closer to fans: one question is, are those fans commuting from home? From work? If so, where are their jobs based? Braves attendance will spike because in the first few years there are always curiosity-seekers to a new stadium, but after that, I can't imagine attendance will be any better than it was at Turner Field. Two things aren't changing: that much of Atlanta moved from somewhere else and brought their loyalties with them, and that the area's road-choking traffic and lack of viable public transportation options to the ballpark are barriers to getting even devoted fans to games.