Unequal Impacts of Downtown Redevelopment: The Case of Stadium Building in Phoenix, Arizona

ABSTRACT

The public finance rationale for building sports stadiums has been assessed through city-level impact analyses. Conclusions suggest that stadiums do not typically produce aggregate economic benefits for cities that build them. An argument that stadiums will locally revitalize declining central cities continues to be made by private-public developers, yet questions about local impacts of stadium building have been inadequately studied. Bank One Ballpark (recently renamed Chase Field) is the centerpiece of a strategy for downtown redevelopment in Phoenix, Arizona. This paper examines the unequal local impacts of Bank One Ballpark. Results from a survey of neighborhood leaders reveal that the project's impacts have been unequally distributed between poor minority neighborhoods and more affluent white ones. Minority and lower-income groups have generally negative perspectives, while affluent white groups have positive perspectives on Bank One Ballpark. Three districts are delineated that have experienced very different fortunes through downtown redevelopment, illustrating how benefits and costs of urban transformations have been distributed in accordance with geographies of class and race. Economic, social, and environmental aspects of inequality are elaborated based on interviews with key informants. The paper concludes by introducing a heuristic theory of unequal impacts.

KEYWORDS:

• Downtown redevelopment
• neighborhood impacts
• social inequalities
• Phoenix
• AZ