What Does It Mean to Have a Professional Football Franchise?

Voters will eventually decide the fate of a new Chargers stadium. And that decision won't be made by extremists on one side who are opposed to all progress, or face-painted fans on the other who want a stadium no matter the cost.

Instead, the future of the Chargers in the San Diego region will be determined by the large group of voters in the middle - many football fans, many not - who are looking at this issue with open minds and many questions.

And one of the biggest questions of all is this: What does it mean to a community, economically and culturally, to be home to a National Football League franchise?

Answers have been elusive because instead of probing the true civic value of an NFL franchise, the media have instead focused on a pure dollars and cents analysis.

To fill out their stories, reporters have "rounded up the usual suspects" - erstwhile university professors who have created virtual sound bite factories by criticizing government subsidies for sports facilities.

Simply put, the professors say NFL teams, their stadiums, and even Super Bowls, create no net economic benefits - and in fact cost taxpayers money once public subsidies are accounted for.

Now, I'm no professor, but when I read these arguments I wonder how it can be that despite such evidence, cities compete so fiercely for NFL franchises.

Why do cities as diverse as Washington, New York, San Diego, Miami and New Orleans (along with many others) fight tooth-and-nail to host the Super Bowl?

Are the academics right, and are elected officials who have sought NFL teams or Super Bowls wrong? Are all of the voters who approved taxpayer contributions for NFL stadiums just plain stupid? Or is there something more at work here that neither the professors nor the media have been able to grasp?

The search for answers to these questions demands that we view our cities as more than just the sum of the dollars and cents spent within their borders.

Many of our finest civic assets exist only because of large public subsidies, including Balboa Park and other open spaces throughout our region, the zoo, and many of our most important museums and institutions.

University professors would certainly have a hard time, using a purely economic analysis, justifying the subsidies that created these parks and cultural institutions.

Should an NFL franchise also be considered an important civic asset?

Once you step back away from the micro-economic calculations relied upon by academics and focus instead on the big picture, it also turns out that NFL franchises are good macro-economic deals, even for cities that heavily subsidize football stadiums.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia sponsored a study evaluating the impact of NFL franchises on rents and property values in cities with teams.

The authors of the study took a larger view and asked a bigger question: What does an NFL team mean to the overall economic health of a city, as measured by a city's rents and property values?

And the results of the study are strikingly clear. After trying to control for other factors, the study found that "cities that gain an NFL team have a higher quality of life than cities that don't, and this translates into higher rents."

The study concluded that increased property tax revenue in cities that won NFL franchises "is large enough to perhaps justify the provision of subsidies to NFL teams, especially in larger cities."

Indeed, after reviewing subsidies provided by cities for NFL stadiums, the study found that "the subsidy exceeds the present value of the potential increase in property tax revenue in only 3 of the 24 cities that provided subsidies."

In other words, in all of the other cities, the value of the increased property taxes was greater than the taxpayer subsidy used to build the stadiums.

At last, then, we have our answer.

Once we get our noses up out of the sterile spreadsheets used by our usual suspect academics and take a broader look, we find that NFL franchises belong in the same categories as parks and zoos and arts institutions: They are all vital components of what it means to be a vibrant, growing city that is attractive to current residents, newcomers and visitors alike.

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