Book Review: Bulls Markets: Chicago’s Basketball Business and the New Inequality
The book Bulls Markets: Chicago’s Basketball Business and the New Inequality tells readers how business interests in this city trump the people.
The success of the Chicago Bulls and superstar Michael Jordan elevated the second city on the lake from its infamous connection to Al Capone and gangster capitalism in the Twenties to the city of Michael Jordan.
That worked out fine for the owner of the Chicago Bulls Jerry Reinsdorf who was able to use the NBA to get a number of concessions from the city, including massive tax breaks, driving out the poor, squashing the little peanut vendors on the streets before their games and sky high ticket prices that benefit mostly the white and wealthy and not the black and poor.
The Chicago Bulls participate in the National Basketball Association or NBA which acts more like a drug cartel than a free market sports enterprise. The NBA prevents competitors so that their teams can demand huge concessions from cities by threatening to leave if they don’t get what their rich owners demand - taxpayer-funded stadiums, aggressive policing and security and tax breaks that put millions and billions in their pockets at the expense of the city and its inhabitants.
The United Center that was built when Michael Jordan helped build a champion that would win six NBA crowns promised private funding and revitalization in a long-blighted neighborhood. The West Side where the Bulls play has always been dark and dangerous. I remember attending a Big Ten basketball game in the early 90s and a couple of neighborhood kids said to pay them to watch their car or I would not have a car after the game was over.
Now everything has changed. Gentrification has replaced poor people and peddlers with wine bars and creamy lattes. The poor and working people saw their schools closed and meager earnings further eroded while the Bulls owners engineered massive city tax breaks and shrewd political tactics that resulted in a billion dollar business bonanza.
The author Sean Dinces who is a professor in California documents how the Chicago Bulls never really benefited the city financially. It took far more from the people than it gave back. He writes that all the hoopla about the Bulls and Chicago was rarely if ever questioned by the fawning corporate media. He cited the only real criticism in a column by Mary Schmich who took aim at the Bulls claim to be community builders - “The Bulls win has very little to do with Chicago and everything to do with the band of high-priced nomads hired to sink a ball in a basket..”
Is it any wonder why this book has not been reviewed by any Chicago media?
Marketing and public relations were the key to making people believe that the Bulls were a plus and not a huge minus for the City of Chicago. Reinsdorf paid local grassroots and affordable housing groups to trumpet any little charity event to make it seem the Bulls actually cared about the community they were really helping to destroy.
Ticket prices are so high today that working class people who live near the stadium cannot afford to attend. “Instead of real Bulls fans, the Stadium now is a haven for yuppies to show off their money.” I remember watching a Sox game in the 80s in grimy Sox Park where fans in flannel shirts and faded jeans would be meticulously filling in their scorecards as batters blasted base hits or struck out, whereas recent outings at Wrigley Field feature young flashy corporate people drinking and laughing and paying no attention to the game.
The United Center is a basketball and hockey arena owned by Jerry Reinsdorf and Bill Wirtz that opened in 1994. Premium seating offered its owners expanded revenue streams. The author writes that the transition from Chicago Stadium (People’s Stadium) to the United Center encapsulated bigger trends in the history of stadium economics. Stadiums built after 1980 were built bigger, containing significantly more seats in luxury boxes and club sections and fewer nonpremium seats.
“Major leagues in the United States acted (and still act) openly as cartels, granting local monopolies to franchises - that is, crowning them as the sole sellers of a major-league sport in a specific locale - by typically allowing only one team per metropolitan area. This eliminates any direct local competition within a given urban market..”
Thus Reinsdorf, called a “con man” by a Sun-Times reporter, threatened to move his White Sox to Florida if the city didn’t pay for his new stadium.
The stadium was built and the new stadium displaced several low-income families.
“Why, then, did some Chicagoans suddenly start going out of their way in the early 1990s to describe Reinsdorf as a man who, in the words of one local community leader, was genuinely ‘concerned about (ordinary) people?’ Reinsdorf and Blackhawks owner Bill Wirtz had proved their humanity by developing a corporate-community partnership with the predominantly low-income Near West Side neighborhood around the United Center. They provided millions of dollars in resident-designed replacement housing, and no-interest loans to the local community development corporation for more revitalization efforts. In other words, they threw a few nickels at the local groups around them to toot their horn, while they raped the city for tens of millions which translated into closing public schools, shortening library hours and gutting public health because the city was ‘broke’.
I was surprised to learn that the Chicago Bears were planning to build a new Stadium on the Westside in the 1980s that would have destroyed the Henry Horner public homes. But what killed the deal was a rift between the local ruling class - Chicago Stadium owner Bill Wirtz, who had a very profitable liquor distributorship, fumed when he discovered the Bears terms allowed them to keep all revenues from parking lots that would be located on land he owned and Wirtz’s lobbyists stopped legislation that would have authorized state funds for the project. Class divisions within the African American community also played a crucial role that led to “a few well-off black people in the neighborhood who supported Reinsdorf."
Reinsdorf and Wirtz also gave money to the construction of new homes around their stadium, but the amount fell far short of that needed to build 2,000 units for low and moderate families. Church leaders who were brought on to greenlight the affordable housing project saw the Community Development Block Grant money catered to homebuyers outside the neighborhood, going from $80k to $200k homes, a redevelopment that depended more on displacing longtime residents than on protecting them. By 2010 huge numbers of low-income folks who lived around the new arena when it opened were gone.
The Bulls and Blackhawks owners did everything to monopolize the local economy when the stadium proved an impediment to vibrant pedestrian traffic.
“For team owners like Reinsdorf and Wirtz, peddling stadiums as miracle cures for underdeveloped neighborhoods during the 1990s was critical to sustaining popular faith in the idea that the sports business played a positive role in urban development.”
It did anything but. Even their vast sea of parking lots outside the Bulls Stadium were an impediment to redevelopment. While this hurt the city’s economy, it made perfect sense to the owners to generate profits because they were pulling in $2 million a year in parking receipts. They did not want to see restaurants, bars and other entertainment facilities near the United Center because it would have thwarted their efforts to monopolize the local market of food and drink sales on game nights in West Haven. “The United Center’s dominance of the landscape limited the neighborhood’s livability, not to mention its ability to support additional commercial development. The only clear winners in this story, then, were the team owners.”
The chapter ‘Peanut Envy’: The United Center’s War against Sidewalk Vendors was an eye-opener into the depravity of these billionaires who control the courts, politicians and even the public streets where small vendors once made a living selling peanuts to fans. They, like the low-income people living nearby, disappeared as profits skyrocketed for the Bulls. Reinsdorf and Wirtz waged an aggressive campaign against the peanut vendors in their quest to monopolize food sales and carefully policed the space around the new arena. They were able to disappear the vendors on public streets thanks to federal judges in the pocket of corporations who endorsed monopolists freedom to operate unhindered by government intervention, no matter how predatory their business practices.
They got 27th Ward Alderman Walter Burnett, a former gangbanger, to sponsor a city ordinance to make it illegal to sell peanuts on sidewalks near the Stadium. They pushed him to do something his predecessors would not do - destroy the livelihoods of the people who lived and worked in his ward, for peanuts.
Burnett said, “(The owners) tried to make it look like it wasn’t just greed …, but it was clear from the beginning that what they really wanted was the peddlers’ business … I’ve never been pushed so hard on anything in my life.” And Burnett got peanuts in return - Reinsdorf and Wirtz agreed to employ a handful of his constituents to work at the United Center concessions stands and they donated $2,000 to his election campaign a few months before the introduction of the ordinance. Between 1996 and 2015 they donated $41,500 to campaign committees controlled by Burnett.
What difference does it make selling dope or peanuts - it’s the big guys who decide who sells what where. In this case, the billionaire sports owners paid off the government to get their gang - the Chicago police - to protect their turf.
“The passage and enforcement of the thousand-foot ordinance yielded consequences borne overwhelmingly by low-income people and people of color. The law wiped out the livelihood of a group of predominantly African American small-time entrepreneurs and it went so far as to criminalize their presence.”
This was a result of the federal courts embracing monopoly power and the cities privatizing public space (parking meters, tollways, etc.). Dinces retells the fascinating story of Mark Weinberg, an attorney who sold a program to Blackhawks fans outside the Stadium on game nights, but was chased out by the owners. He then wrote a book that made fun of Wirtz who said it was ironic that his Jewish grandparents were once peddlers as well, the very people whose livelihood he was hell bent on destroying. One of his programs featured a cartoon depicting Mr. Peanut handcuffed and escorted out of the United Center at gunpoint by security. Weinberg filed a lawsuit against the owners, alleging that the food ban violated the Sherman Antitrust Act’s provisions against ‘predatory’ monopolization. He would have to prove that the monopoly resulted from improper means, such as exclusionary, anticompetitive or predatory conduct. The courts sided with the rich defendants, who reasoned that the peanut ban was not predatory because it applied to food in general rather than peanuts alone.
“(The Ruling) coincided with the federal courts’ increasing embrace after 1970 of monopolists’ ‘freedom’ to maximize profits at all costs.”
The author also charges racism. “Getting rid of the mostly African American vendors was just another part of fortifying the parking buffer and insulating fans from inhabitants of the ghetto surrounding the arena.” Sox Park today is surrounded by a similar sea of parking on the Southside that one Sun-Times columnist recently wrote should be redeveloped.
Interestingly enough, Weinberg, who lost his anti-peanut lawsuit, was successful in suing the city because he asserted his First Amendment free speech rights. “Within the Seventh Circuit, claims to individual freedom gained more traction when they did not directly threaten the profits of people like Reinsdorf and Wirtz.”
“The Bulls also benefited from huge tax breaks, as corporations successfully secured more and more generous government subsidy programs under the guise of incentives for private investment. The explosion of corporate money in political campaigns in the final quarter of the twentieth century drove up the price of running successful political campaigns, and it became more and more difficult for candidates to keep up with opponents unless they took corporate money.”
The Bulls may have told the public they used their own private money to finance the United Center, but in reality they engineered complex subsidy deals to ensure that the public bore the bulk of the investment risk.
“In the end, while Reinsdorf and Wirtz priced out most Chicagoans from the United Center, they demanded that those same Chicagoans subsidize the facility through schemes largely hidden from public view.”