Air Quality

The Post ‘Drops the Ball’ on Yankee Stadium Story

The Post had a story yesterday reporting on the last ditch effort to stop the Yankee's bad plan to build a new stadium with fewer seats for us Yankee fans but dump more traffic and emissions on the already suffering low-income neighborhoods of the south Bronx. Here's how the Post characterizes opponents of the plan:

By Aaron Donovan

11:11 AM EDT on August 12, 2006

The Post had a story yesterday reporting on the last ditch effort to stop the Yankee’s bad plan to build a new stadium with fewer seats for us Yankee fans but dump more traffic and emissions on the already suffering low-income neighborhoods of the south Bronx. Here’s how the Post characterizes opponents of the plan:

Stadium opponents, led by the group Save Our Parks, complained in court that the project will cost its Bronx neighborhood 377 trees and leave children in the area without a park for five years.

The paragraph successfully trivializes the opposition’s points. Trees can grow back, and the loss of the park will be only “for five years.” By characterizing the opposition as concerned with temporary results of the plan, the post paints them as opposing progress over nothing. I can just imagine Post readers scoffing at the opponents after reading this story: “377 trees? Wah wah wah.”

The Post missed or ignored mentioning the permanent problems with the Yankees’ plan:

The new stadium would have 4,000 fewer seats (so you’ll have to pay more to spectate)
Despite the loss of seats, the Yankees want to build 4,000 more parking spaces that will discourage transit ridership, wreck the neighborhood with garages that will nearly always be empty, and pour traffic and pollution into the already suffering south Bronx
The waste of $1.2 billion to build a new stadium when there’s a perfectly fine stadium already sitting right there

This Post story will shape public opinion to favor the construction of the new stadium and garages. Anyone looking for more information on the proposal should see OnNYTurf’s great information page on the Yankee Stadium proposal and Save Our Parks website.

Aaron Donovan

Before he began blogging about land use and transportation, Aaron Donovan wrote The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund's annual fundraising appeal for three years and earned a master's degree in urban planning from Columbia. Since then, he has worked for nonprofit organizations devoted to New York City economic development. He lives and works in the Financial District, and sees New York's pre-automobile built form as an asset that makes New York unique in the United States, and as a strategic advantage that should be capitalized upon.

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