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University of Wisconsin Milwaukee

2014

D.C.

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3 Up, 3 Down: The Complex Relationship Of Professional Sports And Community Identity In Brooklyn, Milwaukee, And Washington, D.C., Peter Lund May 2014

3 Up, 3 Down: The Complex Relationship Of Professional Sports And Community Identity In Brooklyn, Milwaukee, And Washington, D.C., Peter Lund

Theses and Dissertations

This paper seeks to understand the role that professional sports teams play in influencing community identity. Specifically, it hypothesizes that community identity is one of the main factors in cities choosing to provide public funds as subsidies for the construction of sports stadiums and arenas. This influence is important, as economists generally accept that stadiums do not provide the economic contributions that popular rhetoric presents as justification for their construction. By looking at three cases where considerations of a publicly funded stadium resulted in a city losing its professional team, the larger discourse of public subsidies is augmented in complexity. …