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Why couldn't we buy this???

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So the Silverdome went to auction yesterday and sold for a whopping…wait for it…


$500K. The whole thing. everything inside, the land around it, and the stadium.

Could we have not bought it and brought it down in pieces? I would have helped!

Silverdome sale price disappoints | The Detroit News
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Re: Why couldn't we buy this???

I believe the main "lesson" in this should be:

"Nearly 35 years after taxpayers spent $55.7 million".

Any time you put the government in charge of ANYTHING there is extreme waste, frivolous spending, and poor management.

Sick and tired of being sick and tired of seeing this crap happen.

And, now, they want control of 20% of our GDP to throw away.

Ridiculous.

Ok, sorry, off the soap box now!

But, yeah, we could have boxed the thing up and moved it here, even paying 10M to do it, and come out ahead…lol

;D
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Re: Why couldn't we buy this???

Rick, I am almost positive that they paid off the stadium in those 35 years.

I looked up some info and Detroit averages 54,000 at games, and the average ticket sold is 66 dollars at Ford Field.  Multiply that by 8 games and that is $28.5 Million/year on Lions games alone.  Obviously this gets split with the team but seriously.. Now we have to remember that in the 1970's Detroit was bigger, and the Silverdome actually held more people than Ford Field, and the Lions were better, although prices were probably lower.  This is just ticket sales.  Add in revenue from concessions and the benefit of jobs created, not to mention concerts, wrestlemania, monster trucks, college football games, and anything else you can imagine and I am positive it paid itself off many many times over.  I ran the numbers at a 5% discount rate and the stadium only would have had to net $3.4 M/year to pay for itself, which frankly is small change.

That being said, yes the property and the actual stadium are worth more than $500,000, but the Stadium Authority doesn't really care what its worth, because its not bringing in revenue.  They paid it off and made plenty of money and jobs for the city and now they just want it to be useful again.  Word has it the investment group that bought it is looking to convert it to a MLS stadium.

I would love to see evidence that the Detroit-Wayne County Stadium Authority was extremely wasteful, spending frivolously, or poorly managed from 1975-2009.  I understand your disdain for bureaucracy but DWCSA is hardly some monstrosity of big government sucking up money.  In fact it is the opposite, creating jobs and revenue for a city hard pressed to pay for even the most basic of social services.

Florida Atlantic University Owls
2007 Sun Belt Football Champions 2007 New Orleans Bowl Champions 2008 Motor City Bowl Champions 2011 Sun Belt Basketball Champions No Bowls without Owls
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Re: Why couldn't we buy this???



Wow, this stadium looks pretty nice…I do wish we were on top of this, the seats are even the right color, and its 80,000 seats means it wouldnt have to be expanded EVER….and its even a dome like we wanted!  Heck we could take 3/4 of it, leave off the dome, and we'd have a nice horseshoe with like 65k seats.

Florida Atlantic University Owls
2007 Sun Belt Football Champions 2007 New Orleans Bowl Champions 2008 Motor City Bowl Champions 2011 Sun Belt Basketball Champions No Bowls without Owls
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Re: Why couldn't we buy this???

From everything I understand we're $2.5-3mil liquid in our fund-raising efforts, half a mil to buy that stadium, hire a few hundred people at $10 an hour (god knows there are people in Michigan that would line up for this) to help take the seats apart and to strip the inside, throw it in trucks and bring it down. What's that? $100k? Use the rest of the money to take it apart and bring it here!!

**obviously I know that moving a giant dome isn't a feasible idea**
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Re: Why couldn't we buy this???

SeminOWL2006 said

Rick, I am almost positive that they paid off the stadium in those 35 years.

I looked up some info and Detroit averages 54,000 at games, and the average ticket sold is 66 dollars at Ford Field.  Multiply that by 8 games and that is $28.5 Million/year on Lions games alone.  Obviously this gets split with the team but seriously.. Now we have to remember that in the 1970's Detroit was bigger, and the Silverdome actually held more people than Ford Field, and the Lions were better, although prices were probably lower.  This is just ticket sales.  Add in revenue from concessions and the benefit of jobs created, not to mention concerts, wrestlemania, monster trucks, college football games, and anything else you can imagine and I am positive it paid itself off many many times over.  I ran the numbers at a 5% discount rate and the stadium only would have had to net $3.4 M/year to pay for itself, which frankly is small change.

That being said, yes the property and the actual stadium are worth more than $500,000, but the Stadium Authority doesn't really care what its worth, because its not bringing in revenue.  They paid it off and made plenty of money and jobs for the city and now they just want it to be useful again.  Word has it the investment group that bought it is looking to convert it to a MLS stadium.

I would love to see evidence that the Detroit-Wayne County Stadium Authority was extremely wasteful, spending frivolously, or poorly managed from 1975-2009.  I understand your disdain for bureaucracy but DWCSA is hardly some monstrosity of big government sucking up money.  In fact it is the opposite, creating jobs and revenue for a city hard pressed to pay for even the most basic of social services.


I get that piece and agree with you!

And, of course, a stadium is considered to be an annuity in revenue streams, etc…

BUT to let an asset go like that for the price that was paid is a joke…
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Re: Why couldn't we buy this???

It's not a matter of what the price to build it was, it was that the city had to pay over $1 million per year in upkeep for a building that wasn't being used.  People read that they sold a $56 million building for $500K and shake their heads, but the building served it's purpose and was paid off long ago.  I don't think this speaks to government waste so much as it does for the horrendous state of the economy in Detroit.  
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Re: Why couldn't we buy this???

Agreed fauowls44…this stadium was just sitting there, costing money, not making money.  They auctioned it so that they could get some cash up front, but they also know that they will be getting property tax on it now forever, whereas previously it was government owned and thus tax free.  If the market says it was worth $500,000, then that is what it was worth…and if the stadium authority didn't want to sell it for that cheap they would have set a minimum on the auction.

Florida Atlantic University Owls
2007 Sun Belt Football Champions 2007 New Orleans Bowl Champions 2008 Motor City Bowl Champions 2011 Sun Belt Basketball Champions No Bowls without Owls
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Re: Why couldn't we buy this???

Anybody on here ever been to beautiful Pontiac, Michigan?  I am suprised it didn't sell for $80,000.

Teambeer is the most knowledgeable FAU sports fan I know, way smarter than me.
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Re: Why couldn't we buy this???

Why couldn't we buy this???

MLS sure as heck won't need an 80,000 stadium, maybe 30-40K max.

Buy the other 40,000 BLUE seats at a real cheap price ($50K or 10% of their original investment capital back already) and use them in our new stadium. Think how much cash that will save in building our new "home".

But don't ya wish we could just move that monster down here and plop it down on campus!
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