You're Paying for the Knicks Whether You Like It or Not

Most New Yorkers don't watch sports. 39% of US adults say they don’t follow sports. Only 16% describe themselves as serious fans. So the majority of people paying for these teams’ stadiums would rather be doing literally anything else on a Tuesday night.

That bill is not trivial.

Forty Years of Free Property Taxes

Start with Madison Square Garden, which hasn't paid a dollar in New York City property tax since 1982. That's not a typo, and it's not a loophole someone forgot to close. It's a special carve-out in state law for "real property used for professional major league sports," and it has cost New York City over $946 million in foregone revenue since Reagan's first term, expressed in 2023 dollars. Of that, roughly $185 million would have gone to city schools under existing funding formulas. At the current rate, the Garden's exemption is draining around $40 to $43 million per year from a tax base that funds everything from public housing to pothole repair, and funneling it as a silent gift to the billionaire family that owns the team.

And that's just for basketball and hockey. MSG hosts roughly 320 events per year, of which the Knicks and Rangers account for about 85 home games combined. The rest of the calendar is concerts, boxing, wrestling, and whatever else the Dolan family can book into the building. This summer alone, the venue is hosting 57 live music events between June and August. These are not community gatherings. The average ticket price for a live event at MSG runs over $1,150, and for major tours, floor and premium seats routinely push into the thousands. MSG Entertainment is a publicly traded corporation pulling in revenue approaching a billion dollars over nine months in the most recently reported period. The exemption written for "professional major league sports" covers all of it, all 320 nights a year, with no sunset date and no strings attached.

The Other Stadiums Aren't Much Better

Yankee Stadium and Citi Field are not much better. Both make what are called Payments in Lieu of Taxes, but here's the catch: those payments are structured to cover the teams' own bond debt, not to deliver actual revenue to city coffers. The Department of Finance assessed Yankee Stadium at around $2.6 billion and Citi Field at roughly $3.2 billion in early 2023. If those properties were taxed like any other comparable private asset, they'd owe approximately $115 million and $121 million per year, respectively. Instead, the Yankees walked away from fiscal year 2024 with a net tax benefit of about $38 million after their bond payments, and the Mets did even better, pocketing a net benefit of roughly $102 million once their payments were accounted for. One hundred two million dollars. Per year. For one baseball team.

Add it all together and you get to approximately $377 million in annual property-tax breaks across the city's four major sports venues, on top of $867 million in federal revenue losses from the tax-exempt bonds that financed three of those stadiums. Brookings researchers put New York's piece of a national $3.7 billion stadium bond subsidy problem in clear terms: this is not local generosity, it's a systemic transfer of public wealth to private franchises.

The NYPD Overtime Tab

The money doesn't stop at the tax line either. The NYPD's uniformed overtime bill is expected to hit $890 million in fiscal year 2026, and a meaningful slice of that is tied to exactly the kind of predictable, recurring events that stadium calendars create. Officials flagged that a single week of overlapping large events could cost up to $92 million in overtime alone. Some teams pay for on-site security through the city's Paid Detail Program, but that covers the arena floor, not the Penn Station platforms, the traffic pattern on Seventh Avenue, or the subway stations where everyone piles in at once.

The Studies Agree

Now, what does four decades of economic research say about all this? A 2022 survey of 130 studies in the Journal of Economic Surveys concluded that the evidence against stadium subsidies is "clear and unambiguous." The local economic boost that teams promise during stadium negotiations turns out to be largely illusory because people have fixed entertainment budgets. When fans spend money near the Garden, they're probably not also spending it at a restaurant in their neighborhood. It's substitution, not new economic activity. The public sector absorbs long-term infrastructure and policing costs while the gains flow upward to owners, corporate suite holders, and the relatively affluent segment of the fan base that actually attends games regularly.

What That Money Could Actually Do

This is the real estate angle worth paying attention to: the neighborhoods around these stadiums often bear outsized disruption without capturing the promised revitalization. Residents near MSG deal with pedestrian gridlock, event-night street closures, and commute delays every time there's a playoff run, without any corresponding relief on their rent bills or improvement to their local schools. The opportunity cost framing here is important. Every year that $377 million in property-tax revenue is foregone is a year it's not financing transit improvements, affordable housing construction, or school capital projects. Those are things that serve all New Yorkers, not just the fraction who want courtside seats.

So What Exactly Are We Paying For?

None of this is an argument that sports are bad. It's an argument that the public financing arrangement around professional sports is hard to justify once you run the numbers honestly. MSG's exemption was created in 1982 under the premise that it was necessary to keep the teams in New York. City budget analysts now openly acknowledge that given market realities, the Knicks and Rangers are not going anywhere regardless. So what exactly are we paying for?

Good question. Nobody in Albany seems eager to answer it.