@restoreone Said 
Lie number one
You have not sold out your stadium Nearly every game as you state.The stadium holds a little over 41,000 people.The
Best Year you have had is an average attendance of a little over 33,000 per game. That over 8,000 empty seats per game. Try again I can provide a link to MLB stats if you would like me to prove my statement.
You really need to study fiance as I said before!!!!
Then we can move on to cause and effect of the entertainment dollar spent.
By the way I used to be all for building new Stadiums until I sit down and really looked at the numbers.
Honey, I have half season tickets, which works out to more than forty games a year. Do you honestly think I have time to go to all of them, and do you honestly think that I can sell my seats every time I don't go?
The overwhelming majority of the seats in the 100 and 200 sections are paid for by people like me, and quite frankly I'm surprised that it's only 8000 seats per game, because it seems like more than that when I'm there.
That said, You're claiming that having 33,000 people come into town 2 or three nights a week for 20 weeks is somehow a bad thing for the city. Let's take a look at that.
1)A large majority of fans take METRO, so the impact on roads and bridges is minimal, and the extra revenue to the mass transit system is a big bonus. These people also drink at bars, eat at restaurants, and shop in stores that didn't exist before the stadium was built.
2)33,000 people eating, drinking and shopping are paying 5.75% sales tax. I can guarantee that the people who visited the whorehouses that occupied the spot that the stadium is now on didn't pay sales tax. I can also guarantee that the numbers of attendees were far lower.
3)Property values (and therefore property taxes) in the area have gone up dramatically, some by as much as 800%, and one look at the number of tower cranes in the area building new apartments, hotels, offices and condominiums shows that trend is not over. The average sale price for a unit in the area runs between $320 and $590 per square foot
4)
That's a lot of new construction, which means a lot of jobs for people in the construction industry and lots of work for people who make and provide construction materials and equipment.
5)The area is no longer a food desert. Before the stadium was built, the few residents of the area had no grocery stores, and very limited access to any opportunity to buy fresh produce. The closest green grocer was nearly a mile away. Now there are a number of groceries, as well as clothing stores, pharmacies, restaurants, parks, and recreational venues for both the old and the new residents. Residents over the age of 60 are exempt from any property tax increases, so there's no danger of being forced out by gentrification, and residents of the zip code get steep discounts on tickets to games.
6)Crime has dropped dramatically. In less than 10 years, the area has gone from one of the worst in DC to one of the best. This means less use of city resources, and a better quality of life.
As for the cause and effect of entertainment dollars, there was "entertainment" there before the stadium, in the form of strip clubs and whorehouses... How much did they contribute to the local economy, and do you think the stadium, and the associated luxury condos, restaurants and shops, in addition to the boom in tourism works out better or worse for the city?
To sum it up, not all of the benefits of having a stadium come from the stadium directly, so I hope that you now understand that you can't simply look at "entertainment finance" and get a true picture of what a well placed and thoughtfully planned stadium can do for a city and it's economy.
I would have expected more from you, but I guess your hatred of me and your flaming desire to prove me wrong blinded you.
Jan 09, 2016 @ 15:32:17
