The Circus Maximus Syndrome

A Call To Action
The New York Times
June 11, 2005
By JOHN TIERNEY

If you love cities, this is a week to rejoice. Now that the stadium planned for New York's West Side is dead, no one can fantasize anymore about the Olympics coming to New York.

If the city had gotten the 2012 Games, its leaders would have basked for seven years in Olympic photo opportunities, and mayors across America would have watched enviously. They would have succumbed further to what I think of as the Circus Maximus syndrome.

The victims of this urban-planning syndrome believe, like some Roman emperors, that a leader's prime civic responsibility is to build entertainment palaces for the masses. American mayors haven't yet built anything quite like the Circus Maximus, where a quarter of a million Romans watched chariot races, but their combined output makes it look puny.

They've endowed downtowns with stadiums, arenas, theaters, concert halls, museums and aquariums. They imagine drawing hordes of out-of-towners to the new convention center, and when the visitors don't materialize, the mayors' solution is to build an even bigger convention center with a subsidized hotel next door.

The mayors hire consultants to project grand economic benefits from their projects, but these dreams virtually never come true. The only realistic way to justify one of these public projects is by considering the noneconomic benefits.

You have to ask if the project performs a core function identified by Joel Kotkin in his new book, "The City," a global history of urbanity starting with Ur. He finds that successful cities have always done three things, two of which are straightforward: protecting the lives of inhabitants and providing a congenial home for a commercial marketplace.

The third function is the creation of "sacred space" that gives people a sense of identity with the city. In Ur, it was the shrine of the moon god, Nanna, a 70-foot-high ziggurat towering over the Mesopotamian plain. In Athens, it was the Parthenon. In Venice, it was the Basilica of San Marco.

"In New York, it's Central Park and Fifth Avenue," Mr. Kotkin said. "In Chicago, it's the lakefront. In Los Angeles, it's the Hollywood sign and the sight of the hills ringing the city. It can be a signature building or a distinctive neighborhood - something iconic that makes the city special and binds people together."

Given the fervor of some cities for their sports teams, you could argue that a few stadiums qualify as sacred spaces worthy of subsidy, like the Packers' home in Green Bay. While Camden Yards has been a net economic loss for Baltimore, costing the average household about $15 per year, according to economists at Johns Hopkins, most city residents would probably say that's worth paying to keep the Orioles in town.

But does anyone think that New Yorkers will have an identity crisis if the Jets and the Olympics don't come to Manhattan's West Side? The proposed stadium would have been a generic hulk like most other new arenas and convention centers, sitting empty most of the time and preventing the surrounding area from becoming the kind of space that urbanites really revere: a neighborhood with homes and businesses and street life.

Those neighborhoods are hurt by grand public buildings that take up valuable real estate and must be paid for with higher taxes, which drive businesses and the middle class to the suburbs. Older cities have made comebacks the past decade by getting back to that core function of protecting people's lives, but most still haven't figured out how to restore their commercial marketplaces.

Instead, their leaders build projects whose economic benefits go to the Circus Maximus industrial complex: real estate developers, construction workers, bond traders, owners of hotels and sports teams. Aside from the thanks of these groups, politicians also get a pleasant distraction from their mundane duties.

It's more fun to pose next to a model of a model of a new stadium than a new water main. Announcing plans for the Olympics gets better coverage than announcing plans for bridge repairs. If you want immediate gratification, there is nothing like a circus, as a moralist named Salvian observed in the fifth century.

By then Rome bore certain resemblances to a lot of American cities. While emperors were investing in monuments, commerce and manufacturing suffered. The population declined along with the port, the roads, the bridges and the water system, but the circuses went on. "The Roman people," Salvian wrote, "are dying and laughing."

For Further Reading:

The City : A Global History by Joel Kotkin. (Modern Library, 256 pp., April 2005)
More from Joel Kotkin at www.joelkotkin.com.

“Space Available: The Realities of Convention Centers as Economic Development Strategy” by Heywood Sanders. (Brookings Institution, 35 pp., January 2005)

"Baltimore's Camden Yards Ballparks” by Bruce W. Hamilton and Peter Kahn. The Economics of Sports Stadiums, Brookings Institution, working paper.

E-mail: tierney@nytimes.com

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company