That’s what I figure the folks in Pontiac got from building the Silverdome, which cost$55.7 mil and just sold at auction for a whopping $583K. It was probably even worse, as I’m sure the cost didn’t include the cost of borrowing the money. “Yeah, but consider the jobs”. Hokay, how many jobs were “saved or created” by giving the Lions a new home? For that kind of dough, we could have paid 52 guys $30K a year for 35 years to sit around and play cards. That’s even worse performance than Detroit’s housing stock, the value of which is rapidly chasing zero ($7.5K median home value, and the National Association of Realtors won’t even report sales prices.) As a commenter on Say Uncle asked, “I can’t help but wonder when it’ll be turned into a giant Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT) facility.”
Thanks to Beck for keeping me current with my MI homies.
UPDATE: If the good citizens of SE Michigan had used that money for a solid gold statue of Coleman Young, it would be worth over $354m today
A but your math is incorrect. The Lions made enough off their time at the silver dome to pay for Ford field, wich is worth more then the Silver Dome cost. Look at all the union labor to build the two parks pluss all the dues those boys paid to the Democrat party..
And you must also consider all the graft that was paid to the movers and shakers. And what the hell, if they hadn’t built it we would have paid the taxes anyway and they would have blown it on something else….
Jimbo