Newark is the promised land for the Devils and the Nets, a future urban refuge from shared tenancy in the Meadowlands. A deal to have a new arena by 2004 is idling, if not stalled. And as the building cost rises, so will YankeeNets' belief that the subsidy should increase. That's astonishing considering that two-team arenas stage enough basketball and hockey games and other events like wrestling shows, concerts and circuses to have traditionally made private financing relatively easy. Chicago's United Center and Washington's MCI Center were built entirely with private funds, but they received city contributions for infrastructure improvements.
Every project is different, of course, and Newark is an interesting case.
For Raymond Chambers and Lewis Katz, who bought the Nets in 1998 and merged with the Yankees a year later, the arena is a major element of their charitable endeavors. He said that government help to build the Newark arena would relieve the state of some of its annual subsidies to the Meadowlands complex. Mark Rosentraub, dean of the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University, said substantial public aid to a Newark arena could be rationalized if the negatives about the city were as considerable as they used to be. But the success of the Performing Arts Center suggests, to some extent, he said, the willingness of people to go to Newark for entertainment pursuits in numbers that did not exist in years past. We have rising costs of running the teams.