Whether
they are at UT’s football stadium or at the United Center in Chicago, skyboxes have become a fact of life
in American culture. They played a prominent role at the Democratic and
Republican conventions. During the Olympic Games in Atlanta, skyboxes at the
track venue were renting for more than $100,000 per day.
Skyboxes have become the driving force behind a national stadium-building
frenzy which is leading to bigger and ever more expensive venues. Over the next
four years, investors and municipalities around the country will spend more
than $5 billion on new sports venues, and in many of those venues, skyboxes are
the primary rationale for their construction.
For instance, the Washington Redskins are building a new stadium in Maryland
which will have 280 skyboxes. The team’s current stadium, Robert F. Kennedy
Memorial Stadium in the District of Columbia, has none. Two stadiums are
currently being built in the Miami area — one for the NBA’s Miami Heat and one
for the NHL’s Florida Panthers — in part because the owners couldn’t agree to
share skybox revenues. The two new arenas are going up even though Miami Arena,
which was built just eight years ago at a cost of $53 million, still carries
$38 million in debt.
There is no question that for college and pro teams alike, skyboxes help raise
revenue. But what does their proliferation say about our culture? Increasing
numbers of Americans are living in gated communities, where armed guards,
security fences, and alarm systems protect them from the outside world.
Skyboxes are the sporting equivalent of gated communities. Available only to
the wealthy, they allow occupants to segregate themselves from the rest of the
public. Like those who live in gated communities, skybox tenants reside behind
physical barriers which insulate them from their neighbors.
Edward Blakely, dean of the planning and development school at the University
of Southern California, calls the skybox phenomenon “a creeping and disturbing
trend. It’s the privatization of public space,” says Blakely, who is writing a
book about gated communities for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “It used
to be the regular guy at the ballpark could sit next to the corporate CEO. Not
any more,” he said. “Fenway Park [home of the Boston Red Sox] is one of those
levelling places. All the seats are hard. But whenever I go, I always have an
experience with the crowd. People start talking to you. That’s why people go. I
think the team is almost secondary.”
But Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, are considered
anachronisms, and both teams are discussing the need for new venues. The trend
toward skyboxes is occurring throughout the sports world. A skybox at Texas
Stadium, which has more skyboxes than any other venue in America, can cost as
much as $75,000 per year. At the Fleet Center in Boston, a skybox can cost
$220,000 per year. The Richmond Braves, a Triple A baseball team in Richmond,
Virginia, has 15 skyboxes, which lease for $25,000 per year. Texas
International Raceway, now under construction north of Fort Worth, will have
205 skyboxes, which will lease for a minimum of $65,000 per year.
Obviously, skyboxes are not built for the average citizen, but it is often the
average citizen who helps pay for them. According to a story published August
18 in the Sacramento Bee, some $3.9 billion in public debt has been
issued for new sports venues since 1990.
Texas taxpayers are providing huge subsidies for privately owned sports
ventures. The new Ballpark in Arlington, home of the Texas Rangers, cost $191
million; 70% of that is coming from a half-cent sales tax increase. The
skyboxes at the stadium lease for as much as $200,000 per year. The owners of
the Rangers keep all the ticket revenue, and the $7 million per year earned by
the skyboxes. Texas Stadium, built in 1971 by the city of Irving and financed
with bonds issued by the city, has 380 skyboxes, more than any other sports
venue in America, and all skybox revenues go directly into the pocket of Jerry
Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys.
At UT, school officials are saying that the skyboxes will be built with
private donations. But they will be added to a stadium owned by the state, so
the university is leasing state property (albeit a small piece of property) to
citizens for their private use. The bonds that will be sold to finance
construction of the skyboxes are being backed not by the skybox owners, but by
the University of Texas.
The skybox owners get the skybox, and a healthy tax deduction. The school gets
hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional revenue. And meanwhile, less
well-heeled fans sit outside.
Wally Groff, the athletic director at Texas A&M, does not believe skyboxes
are setting a bad precedent. “I think the good definitely outweighs the bad
aspects of it,” said Groff. “The good seats have always gone to the biggest
contributors.”
Harry Edwards, a sociology professor at the University of California at
Berkeley who also acts as a consultant to several professional sports teams,
agrees with Groff. He says the trend toward skyboxes is simply furthering the
economic segregation that has long been present in college sports. “The people
who give tremendous amounts of money to the school athletic program, those
people have always been a privileged class in terms of these kinds of events
and accommodations,” he said. And Edwards says that the skyboxes tenants will
not be representative of the players on the field. The boosters for college
football are “overwhelmingly white males,” says Edwards. “But if you go to the
locker rooms, it looks like Ghana playing Nigeria.”
Skyboxes and gated communities are proliferating at a time when studies are
finding an increasing disparity in the earning power of American citizens. In
July, the U.N. Development Programme reported that between 1975-1990, “the
wealthiest 1% of the population increased its share of total assets from 20% to
36%.”
According to the “State of Working America 1996-97,” a report recently
published by the Economic Policy Institute, the average CEO in 1978 earned
about 60 times the pay of the average worker. By 1995, CEOs were making 173
times the wage of the average worker. Meanwhile, the EPI found that between
1989-1994, median family income fell by an average of $2,168. Thus, as the
middle class finds its income stagnating, the wealthy are earning more and
retreating to skyboxes and walled compounds.
In “Fortress America: Gated and Walled Communities in the United States,” a
paper written earlier this year for the Lincoln Institute, Blakely estimates
that some four million Americans are now living in walled compounds.
Ted Turner, in an interview recently published in The New York Times,
lamented the trend toward gated communities. “We’re getting to be like Mexico
and Brazil,” said Turner, “with the rich living behind fences, like they do in
Hollywood.”
Robert Baade, an economics professor at Lake Forest (Illinois) College,
testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year about the problems
associated with financing new sports stadiums. Like Blakely, he is disturbed by
the skybox trend. “Stadiums have a finite amount of space,” says Baade. “If you
devote more and more seating to preferential customers, what do you have left
for the ordinary public? I think it means sports spectating is becoming a far
less democratic activity.” n
This article appears in October 4 • 1996 and October 4 • 1996 (Cover).