Reply to Wizards and Caps could be moving to Potomac Yard

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Field of schemes is a great blog maintained by an economist who specializes in stadium deal. He tends to be more than a bit skeptical.

The Alexandria Economic Development Partnership revealed some new slides about the financing of the proposed $2 billion Washington Capitals and Wizards arena complex yesterday, and they are very clear-plastic-bindery indeed:
So according to that first slide, deploying a calculator to translate from percentages into actual dollar amounts, the $2 billion total cost would be repaid by:

$420 million in cash from the teams.
$420 million worth of future lease payments from the teams.
$100 million in cash from the city of Alexandria.
$460 million in kickbacks of taxes from the project.
$600 million in “private revenue streams,” which is presumably parking and naming rights, but the chart doesn’t say.
That would amount to just $560 million in taxpayer spending, which is a lot less than the $1.5 billion previously estimated. However, it leaves out some important pieces: $150-200 million in spending by the state of Virginia on transportation upgrades, plus around $380 million in property tax breaks, which would get the total subsidy comfortably back up over $1 billion.

Plus, of course, neither the pie chart nor that other Sankey diagram (which isn’t really used the way Sankeys should be, but it does look pretty) nor any of the rest of the presentation to yesterday’s town hall provides any indication of where the numbers came from, so they could all be just entirely made up. (It’s one of the many questions local residents asked at the town hall.) But here they are and we can’t unsee them now, so that’s some data viz money well-spent by the AEDC.

https://www.fieldofschemes.com/2024/01/09/20809/alexandria-releases-charts-showing-caps-wizards-arena-would-still-cost-public-1b-but-in-pretty-colors/[/quote]

Yes but Alexandrians would rather pay taxes on a bad stadium deal than on affordable housing in that space. A stadium won't have as much traffic as apartment complexs and won't make ACPS even more embarrassing and sad than it already is.[/quote]

No one is paying to build affordable housing on a super fund site, especially one with arsenic in the soil. [/quote]

Isn't there a housing development on a Superfund site in DC or MD? I wouldn't put it past the developers here, they are allowed to do whatever they want.[/quote]

It's not a matter of being allowed to, it's how much it costs to mitigate the site. Not all superfund sites are created equal and Potomac yards happens to be one that is extremely expensive to mitigate. No developer is going to do it unless the they can make a profit and there is not enough money in public and low income housing to justify building there. [/quote]

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