Northwestern stadium: Evanston won’t benefit from rebuilt Ryan Field

Northwestern University President Michael Schill outlined the criteria for proceeding with NU’s pop/rock performance arena to replace its current football stadium. Trying to distance the project from burgeoning scandals surrounding the school’s athletic programs, he told The Daily Northwestern:

“Ryan Field needs to be resolved on its own merits and based upon the benefits that it will create for the community versus the costs that will occur.”

If Schill and the board of trustees actually applied that standard, NU’s plan would have reached the dustbin of history long ago.

Schill, a Princeton University and Yale Law School graduate, knows what a real cost-benefit analysis looks like. He also knows that consulting firm Tripp Umbach’s report — the sole basis for the stadium’s claimed economic benefits to the community — isn’t one. The opening pages read as if the billionaire sponsor of the project, Pat Ryan, had written them himself:

“In September 2021, esteemed Northwestern alumni Patrick G. Ryan and Shirley W. Ryan committed the largest philanthropic gift in Northwestern history….”

“Now, catalyzed by the unparalleled generosity of the Ryan family….”

It’s a puff piece, not a rigorous assessment of the proposed stadium’s economic impact on the community.

A cost-benefit analysis doesn’t ignore costs

In addition to numerous methodological pitfalls and plain inaccuracies in its underlying assumptions, Tripp Umbach’s approach considers only the benefits of the proposed stadium and ignores costs. Describing the underlying computer model (IMPLAN) used in the analysis, economist Jon Sanders explained, “[T]his is a model of sums — it is all plus signs. Despite what it says, it doesn’t measure the total economic impact; it measures only benefits…”

The report also ignores externalities — costs that the project will inflict on victims in Evanston and beyond. Examples:

• Northwestern’s acoustic consultant has mapped dangerous projected levels of noise pollution that will travel far into Evanston and Wilmette residential areas.
• Concert semi-tractor trailer trucks and shuttle buses emitting dangerous pollutants will damage roadways. Traffic congestion will delay anyone trying to reach the Level 1 trauma center at a hospital less than 2,000 feet from the stadium. (Here’s a video of the street separating Evanston and Wilmette shortly before a February 2023 basketball game at Welsh-Ryan Arena, which has one-fourth the seating capacity of the proposed stadium.)
• Northwestern’s planned arena will irreparably damage the quality of life in a residential community that includes parks, schools, playgrounds and churches. (Here’s a 2½-minute time-lapse video depicting the seven-day load-in and set-up for a rock concert at a comparably sized stadium in Dresden.) 

Hypocrisy at highest level

Fifty years ago, sociologist William Bruce Cameron wrote, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Northwestern Board of Trustees Chairman Peter Barris understands that principle. But he ignores it unless the project interferes with the quiet enjoyment of his property.

Barris has a Martha’s Vineyard home worth $24 million. It’s across the water from a century-old landmark hotel where the cast of Jaws stayed in 1975. Railing against an “assault on the very character of the neighborhood,” Barris sought to rein in the hotel’s 2021 expansion.

“Although our residence is a mile away by road, it sits directly across the harbor,” he wrote to his local government. “Sounds are very efficiently carried across the water, particularly when the winds are blowing out of the north.” His request: “Protect us from the unbridled development that puts at risk the very things that brought us here in the first place.” 

Asked about the letter In light of Northwestern’s assault on its community, Barris said, “The surfacing of this personal circumstance, which is distinctly dissimilar to Northwestern’s proposal, is an attempt to distract from our goals — to transform a century-old stadium into a community asset that will benefit all of Evanston….”

Benefits? Evanston jobs and tax revenue, Tripp Umbach claims. But it calculates that after construction, the new arena will create at most 323 new Evanston jobs, with no assurance that Evanston residents will fill any of them.

At most, concert events could generate additional annual tax revenue equal to about one-half of 1% of the combined budgets for Evanston and its two school districts.

The only other claimed benefits are intangible, as are those Tripp Umbach ignored on the cost side of the arena’s ledger. Meanwhile, residents will suffer from the externalities.

So in the long run, who really benefits? A billionaire who gets his name on another Northwestern building — and a disgraced athletic program in disarray.

All at another cost that isn’t in the Tripp Umbach report: a legacy of ongoing division inside and outside the university.

Steven J. Harper, a Northwestern University and Harvard Law School graduate, is an attorney, adjunct professor at Northwestern Law School, former partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP, and author of several books.

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