It is part of a destructive pattern in the city.

America’s largest cities are tentatively recovering from the pandemic, as business districts, transit systems, nightlife and the arts slowly recover. The patient is in stable condition, but has not yet risen. When relief funds run out and land tax revenues decline, cities will have to make painful decisions.

So, if you run an extremely valuable business whose downtown presence makes a lively, remunerative, and strongly symbolic contribution to a city going through difficult times, this would be a particularly cruel time to take off.

Enter the Chicago bears. On Wednesday, the team announced that it had agreed to spend $ 200 million on a racetrack 30 miles northwest of Chicago’s Soldier Field, the city-owned stadium where they have played since 1971. The statement The team was opaque, but the key word in the next sentence is “Chicagoland” – the vast suburban hinterland stretching from Wisconsin to Indiana: solid future. After 50 years of threats, the franchise really seems to be moving to the far-flung suburb of Arlington Heights.

It’s been less than two decades since the Bears requested and last received a series of renovations to the historic Chicago lakeside stadium. In 2000, Mayor Richard M. Daley agreed to spend around $ 660 million to install a modern stadium inside the stone colonnade at Soldier Field, which opened to negative reviews a few years later. Most of the money came from Chicago hotel taxes, with repayment being deferred so the city’s debt service will hit $ 86 million per year when the Bears’ lease expires in 2033. The team pays just $ 6.6 million annually to use the city’s stadium. , and could seal the Arlington Racecourse deal as early as next year.

It was a short marriage, but the Bears are suffering for the league’s new standard amenities: more luxury boxes, corporate naming rights, a rooftop, sportsbook, an O-sized hanging Jumbotron. ‘Hare. These needs are complicated by Chicago’s current budget deficit (not that it would be a good idea in a timely manner to donate public money to the NFL) and the stadium’s status as a war memorial (McDonald’s Soldier Field does not ring the bell. not fair).

As Chicago-born sports reporter Nick Greene told me, “The NFL is meant to be watched on TV, so the stadium needs to be closer to the experience of shrunken fans and inside a TV. giant.” Soldier Field is so not a giant TV that it doesn’t even have one have a giant TV, at least by NFL standards. The Hardscrabble Bears experience was once a point of pride, but wouldn’t it be even better if fans could drive drunk in the city sprawl and lose $ 1,000 in the raffle in an air-conditioned mall?

Chicago outlets like WBEZ and The Sun-Times are starting to dig into the back and forth between the city and the team, and I’m sure each side will be spreading dirt on the other in the days to come. . But in some ways the situation is very familiar.

The Washington football team and the San Francisco 49ers are two franchises that have left their namesake cities in recent decades in search of better deals in the suburbs. The 49ers now play 35 miles from San Francisco, in a whole different metropolitan area! Cities just won’t shell out for professional sports stadiums like they did 20 or 30 years ago, and neither should: the predicted economic benefits don’t materialize.

The sense of resignation over this development in Chicago reflects the fact that Mayor Lori Lightfoot, herself a Bears membership holder, has few good options. She may have fought tooth and nail in private to keep the team, but in public she told them to focus on “post-October relevance,” advice Team 1-2 doesn’t seem to follow. .

Do the Bears need a new stadium? Fans don’t like Soldier Field, as beautiful as it sounds in an airship shot with a snowy Chicago skyline behind it. What if the McCaskey family, who own the team, want to drop a billion or two on a new stadium in the middle of nowhere, so what? They’ll probably get a bunch of tax incentives from Arlington Heights, the 75,000-person suburb where the racetrack is. They will probably try to develop a huge tax-exempt sports hotel complex around the new stadium. And they will finally be able to strike a good deal by associating their house with Conagra or Boeing.

Economic activity in Chicagoland is not a zero-sum game; activities like college football or concerts can take over at Soldier Field that the Bears leave behind. The impact on Chicago will be symbolic rather than economic (the benefits of eight regular home games a year are not huge). Still, it is a symbolic blow and is part of a noxious scheme. A low-tax football entertainment complex will contribute to the race to the bottom that has characterized the suburbs around most of America’s major cities, in which volatile business interests force taxpayers to bid for their presence, and then turn around and leave when a more lucrative opportunity presents itself. himself. The Bears, like many commuters before them, will move to a place where they don’t have to pay for the urban qualities they still enjoy (in this case: the country’s third-largest media market). And instead of being part of bustling downtown Chicago, their stadium will be an isolated highway casino, a symbol of the city’s institutional abandonment.

What does Chicago have to do? Perhaps end a threat Richard J. Daley made when the Bears discussed their move to Arlington Heights in 1975: make them Arlington Heights bears (legal viability is unclear). Or a Richard M. Daley did 20 years ago: Bring another NFL team to play downtown. Soldier Field may not have a roof, but at least it has a town.