Stadiums Are A Massive Worldwide Community Entity
Sports have been around for quite some time. While they were originally games humans played to sharpen skills and play with physics, they’ve taken a much more serious tone as humanity moves towards the technological age.
While large gatherings for sporting events is hardly anything new, the scale in which professional sports has taken with media becoming more available is staggering. It’s no wonder either, considering sports are generally an easy cultural connection when everyone around is in to them.
Personally, I’ve wondered for years how many resources it really takes to keep a weekly tradition of watching other folks play a game. There’s a lot to this beast considering it’s not as easy as just throwing out statistics.
As I move forward with my argument, I take it with a grain of salt. I don’t know everything and with so many businesses and money involved, there are angles I’ll never truly be able to see and I won’t assume they’re all harmful.
Regardless I believe it’s healthy to take a good cynical look at the things we spend this many resources on as a society.
Let’s dive head first into the actual costs of even having a place to house so many people watching the big game in person: stadiums.
There is something really neat about this many people gathering to celebrate the same thing.
Millions of People Can’t Be Wrong, Right?
Before I dig in to the nitty-gritty of my argument, I’d like to point out that I do not believe professional sports to be an inherently bad thing. My goal is to point out where our resources are going, and where they could be going. Professional Sports is something that has bothered me in many ways since I was a wee nerdling.
It started with feeling like there was an impossible amount of social pressure to like sports. Far too many times I’ve had people put zero effort into any conversation simply because I couldn’t talk about sports. I want to be upset with people like that, but the sad truth is that usually means that’s all they care about. Much like when I can’t stop talking about Minecraft because I really like how I textured that last build, some people just really don’t care.
For every person I’ve met that can’t talk about anything else, I’ve met plenty who simply use it as an ice breaker. Many people have found friends beyond sports because they found that common ground to begin with. It’s the same principle as me making friends on a Minecraft server. Never in a million years will I argue against such connection building, and that’s super important to remember as I pick apart some of our choices regarding the weekly ritual of the big game.
Stadiums are the houses of sports, and that’s why I’m interchanging the two at times. I am, in fact, aware that stadiums are used for far more than just sports.
Where Are Our Resources Going?
Yes, as is the case with living in a society that has yet to advance to post-scarcity, where our resources are going becomes the moral argument here. I cannot find one single reason to belittle professional sports as an idea beyond where are resources are going when poverty is still a massive problem.
That being said, I do take some serious issue with how grand of a scale we’ve turned this tradition into. I’ll spare you the arguments made over whether US Bank Stadium should have been built on government funds. I will however be using the numbers provided for the project to point out what we could have done with it otherwise as a community.
Having lived in the metro of Minneapolis/St. Paul my entire life, I can tell you there are some serious problems with the area. Not only is Minnesota ranked the 7th worst state for food insecurity, Minneapolis and St. Paul’s poverty rate is an astonishing 19.9%. Even more shocking is realizing the MN Department of Health reported 54% of residents in the metro visited a food shelf at some point. The metro is home to 3.3 million people. That means nearly 1.8 million people visited a food shelf in 2017.
As someone who’s lived through food insecurity and poverty and now deals with chronic pain every single day of my life because of it, this is disgusting. If I were to call the metro my community, I wouldn’t want to hear 1.8 million people in my community are potentially dealing with their own complications from poverty. Many will have complications for life. Perhaps the most troubling thing is realizing this is one metro area out of the entire country.
What does this have to do with stadiums? Quite a lot actually. This culture comes with resource costs and little to no return besides entertainment for the day. I’ll acknowledge many have made meaningful connections and possibly had their lives made better for it, but I don’t believe that those connections would have only been made if this culture exists.
Yes, I imagine this is where they’ll string me up for all to see for challenging this cultural behemoth.
The Cost Of The Space To Watch The Big Game
As a native to the metro of Minnesota we had the argument of the actual cost of stadiums with this bad boy: US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. I used to drive by it every single day and grit my teeth knowing there were rows of homeless folks in tents lined up not 2 miles from the stadium. I’d try to remind myself it’s not that simple, but it still just feels so wrong.
Cities across the nation have weighed the average costs on society for each homeless person. It can range anywhere between $20,000-$120,000 per person/year depending on location. In Minneapolis, the average cost per year is $40,000 per person/year in 2016. We could reasonably build basic 160 sq. ft. tiny homes for a high-end of $25k per unit. These homes wouldn’t be designed to be kept as an investment by the inhabitant, but more of a stepping stone to have a place to sleep and get back on their feet.
US Bank Stadium measures at around 1,750,000 square feet, and cost roughly $1.1 billion to build. Here’s the fun part folks: thinking exactly where we could invest that space and money. We can fit nearly 11,000 160 sq. ft. homes in that amount of space. As of January 2019, nearly 8,000 people were reported homeless in the entire state of Minnesota.
With $1.1 billion in funds, we could build 44,000 tiny homes at $25k/unit. Looking specifically at the midwest, between Minnesota, Wisconsin, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and even Michigan there are reported roughly 37,550 homeless people as of 2019. That means we could have housed every reported homeless person in the Midwest for the cost of this one stadium.
That’s kind of a big deal. While I recognize a lot of people’s livelihoods revolve around the sports industry, it makes you think about where we’re prioritizing our resources as a society. I can see plenty of people making connections by helping to build homes in their communities. Actually, that’s generally how that works.
But let’s take a step back and look at Food Insecurity in the state. Minnesota is one of the biggest farming states in the country. With that in mind, how is it that we are one of the worst states for food insecurity? If we repurposed those resources to create infrastructure to produce food, what could we get?
Farming towns are everywhere outside the metro in Minnesota.
Food Insecurity Is A Huge Problem In “The First World Economy”
If we look purely at the space cost of the stadium, we could do a hell of a lot to alleviate food insecurity. Using Aquaponics as an example, we can grow 220 pounds of food each year with one 16 square foot setup. This includes vegetables and fish that reproduce while helping to maintain the symbiotic habitat.
While I could make an argument for growing healthy foods over cheaper ones, I’ll keep it to basic numbers for the sake of simplicity. The average human eats around 4 pounds of food a day regardless of nutritional value. If the stadium is 1.75 million square feet, we could fit 109,375 aquaponic gardens in that space. That would produce 24,000,000 pounds of food in a year.
If the average person takes in 4 pounds of food regardless of nutritional value a day, we could ensure 16,438 people never had to deal with food insecurity the entire year. Now, that doesn’t seem like a lot of people compared to 1.8 million, but the truth is food insecurity varies month to month. Bills and jobs change. Family and friends give support, and not every month is a bad month.
Considering so many people visited a food shelf in the metro in 2017, there’s a lot left we could do. Patterns of food insecurity vary greatly, and it’s not as simple as keeping the same family on the meal ticket. During a 5 year study, only 6% of participants reported being food insecure for the entire 5 years. Half the participants reported being food insecure for a year or less.
So 24,000,000 pounds of food could absolutely help more than 16,000 people. That’s only with the method of aquaponics, and could vary greatly based on the methods we use. Even if we didn’t focus on feeding the needy, it could also help drive down food costs for everyone in the area.
In Conclusion
These statistics only cover the cost of the physical stadium. It doesn’t even begin to cover how much it costs to watch the game on TV, or the cost of transporting ourselves to the game. It doesn’t even begin to touch how much food we consume in the tradition of the big game either. Those are posts for another time since they’re cultural beasts in themselves.
While stadiums are hardly used exclusively for sports, they’re generally built specifically with a venue in mind. More often than not, it’s sports. Plus, sports are easy for me to pick on considering so many people watch them. What kind of change could we make if we took that fire and passion for the big game and directed it towards helping our neighbors?
I’d love to find out, but I get the feeling it isn’t going to happen on any large scale. My hope is folks at least begin to realize where they’re choosing to prioritize their community resources and time, and not just their money. A sharp economy is great, but we have little to no evidence to support the idea stadiums spur the economy in any real meaningful way. We’ve known this since at least 1997, and not much has changed.
While the argument is largely on whether the government should pay for it, I think we all should still consider the impact of society spending it’s resources on minimal-impact infrastructure like stadiums. Perhaps once food insecurity and homelessness are tackled we can consider building luxuries like these. Til then, there’s a serious discussion to be had on the use of these resources moving forward.
