Silverdome sold off, for a steal
City officials have auctioned off the Pontiac Silverdome for just over $500,000, even though it cost millions to build. Steve Henn reports.
A classic photo of the Pontiac Silverdome, which housed the NFL's Detroit Lions from 1975-2001. (Al Messerschmidt/Getty Images)
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TEXT OF STORY
Kai Ryssdal: The Detroit Lions have one win and eight losses this year. Over the past two seasons they are 1-24. Dismal as that is, though, the team's former home has suffered an even greater indignity.
TV ANNOUNCER: You're watching the auction network.
Thirty-four years after taxpayers spent more than $55 million building the Pontiac Silverdome, city officials have sold the stadium to the highest bidder, as Marketplace's Steve Henn reports.
STEVE HENN: How often do you get a chance to buy a stadium?
Marketing TAPE: Thanks to the city of Pontiac you have the opportunity to own this internationally-noted structure, its contents and the land surrounding it.
You might think that an 80,000-seat sport arena is out of your league. But yesterday the Silverdome sold for just over $500,000.
RAYMOUND SAUER: I'm still stunned.
Raymound "Skip" Sauer writes the Sports Economist blog. In today's dollars he says that dome cost more than $200 million to build.
SAUER: That's a lot of money to have gone into thin air.
Another bidder filed suit to stop the deal today.
But Andrew Zimbalist an economist at Smith College says when the Lions move to downtown Detroit, the city of Pontiac become the latest casualty in a sports arena arms race.
ANDREW ZIMBALIST: The tax laws as they have existed have encouraged cities to bid against each other.
And that's left Pontiac -- a small, depressed city with a yawning budget gap -- stuck spending $1.5 million a year on upkeep for a massive stadium no one wanted to use.
In Washington, I'm Steve Henn for Marketplace.
Comments
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From oakland, CA, 12/01/2009
another great american failure and example of corruption
11/26/2009
That stadium has to be worth a couple million in scrap alone. This deal sounds shady.
From atlanta, GA, 11/18/2009
Hello,
What's the song playing at the beginning of story?
thanks
From Stillwater, OK, 11/17/2009
While I was doing my Undergraduate Degree (BGS in Paleoanthropology, Theatre and Critical thinking) at Oakland University in Rochester Michigan (just outside of Pontiac) in the late 70s and early 80’s (when dinosaurs roamed the earth), and writing sports articles as a side job for the Pontiac Waterford Times, I knew the Silver Dome was a mistake. It was not really in Pontiac, where it might have impacted the economy of this city (named not for the car but for the Chief of the Ottawa Nation), but in Auburn Hills, a nearby suburb.
At that time Pontiac (where I lived) had the distinction of one of the largest earning differential between a City and the County (Oakland which includes some of the richest areas in Michigan) that encompassed it.
A half a million seems cheap, but the cost was dear. Plenty were used for few.
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