Since the late 1990s, the U.S. convention business has declined 40 percent. Cities that spent hundreds of millions on their convention centers are getting little or no payback. Boston’s new center will attract 50,000 visitors during its first year in operation, only one-sixth of original projections. Attendance at major events in Chicago is half of what it was in 1993, though the city spent nearly $1 billion to expand its center. “The overall convention marketplace is declining in a manner that suggests that a recovery or turnaround is unlikely to yield much increased business for any given community,� according to a Brookings Institution report by Professor Heywood Sanders.

Just when industry growth was skidding to a halt, New York was finally pushing the mob out of the Javits Center. Almost immediately, local hoteliers and state pols sought to expand Javits to cash in on all that convention-center business that they imagined New York could win but that didn’t actually exist. After all, they reasoned, everyone must want to come conventioneering to New York—though surveys have shown that the city’s high costs place it low on the list for many industry groups. Mayor Bloomberg subsequently made expanding Javits a centerpiece of his Far West Side/Olympics plan, even though predictions dating back 20 years that the original Javits Center would spark a stampede of new development had proven disastrously incorrect and the area around the center remained a virtual dead zone.

But convention centers, for all their hype and cost, aren’t the most unproductive publicly financed urban megaprojects, by any means. That honor goes to stadiums and arenas, with their big subsidies to rich team owners and rich players. Starting in the late 1960s, municipalities began churning out these facilities, thinking that they would generate additional tax dollars and prompt new economic activity, even in moribund neighborhoods. In the last three decades, cities and states have built 40 publicly subsidized stadiums and 52 arenas.

The one thing that is not controversial about these facilities is their low worth as economic engines. As Smith College economist Andrew Zimbalist has written: “Few fields of empirical economic research offer virtual unanimity of findings. Yet independent work on the economic impact of stadiums and arenas has uniformly found that there is no statistically significant positive correlation between sports facilities construction and economic development.� At least ten economists have reached the same conclusion, largely in peer-reviewed work, so that, as one reviewer of the literature recently noted: “It is virtually impossible to find an independent economist who views sports facility subsidies as good investments in local economic growth.�

So what do we find as the centerpiece of the Far West Side plan? A stadium/convention-center complex joining together what are universally recognized as two of the worst economic-development engines in urban planning.

the Far West Side plan got hijacked—not once, but several times. First, Mayor Rudy Giuliani decided that all that space on the West Side was perfect for a new Yankee Stadium. Owner George Steinbrenner suggested that his team might leave the city without a West Side stadium, arguing that he needed a Manhattan venue to attract corporate sponsorships and young women, the new groups baseball was trying to attract. Neither group would go to the Bronx, he averred.

Of course, things turned out differently. Last year, the Yankees broke their own attendance record, attracting nearly 3.8 million people to the Bronx, the highest number in the major leagues and 55 percent more than the league average.

Advocates of the Far West Side stadium acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that stadiums do not spur economic development, but they argue that what the city wants to build is something new and different, a sports venue that learns from past failures. Their models are new projects like one in Pittsburgh that encompasses two new stadiums on abandoned land along the Allegheny River, land that is beginning to attract residential and commercial development. How is Pittsburgh trying to overcome the deficiencies of stadiums as economic-development tools, according to the advocates? By paying attention to the basics. Officials are building a new light-rail transportation line to reconnect the area to downtown. The local development authority has rezoned the land to create new sites for office and residential building and has provided new access to the waterfront through a $47 million riverfront promenade. In short, government is doing everything that sensible urban planners would urge to unlock the potential of an underused waterfront area. But when a city does those things, it doesn’t need to make a stadium the centerpiece of its plan, and the stadium is not what propels redevelopment.

Mayor Bloomberg argues that New York needs a stadium to attract the Olympics, and it needs the Olympics to impel a host of new projects that otherwise wouldn’t get built....This is a strange argument, considering that right now there is more residential building going on in New York than at any time in the past generation, that commercial building reached a feverish pitch during the late 1990s boom, and that even long-delayed major infrastructure projects like the AirTrain and the renovation of JFK Airport are now proceeding apace.

A prime example is the beautiful waterside site opposite Manhattan’s East 30s known as Queens West, where boosters hope the Olympics village will rise. Controlled by three government entities, representing New York State, the city, and the Port Authority, the site has been under development for over 20 years, with just two apartment buildings to show for it on land that could accommodate a dozen. Infighting among the three government groups, together with obsessive micromanagement of the project, has hampered development, with the result that the site has missed several real-estate booms over the last two decades....

...the organizers of the city’s Olympics bid plan to use government-controlled land on or near the waterfront for everything from their stadium to the Olympics athletes’ housing to a shooting range on the waterfront in Pelham Bay to a beach-volleyball site at the former Eastern District Rail Terminal. On many of these beautiful sites, what began as an economic-development plan will leave the city with nothing but unproductive leisure facilities, rather than tax-generating office or residential space. And in one further ironic twist, the organizers of the Olympics use government’s laggard performance at Queens West as a justification for building the athletes’ village there because, they say, no one else is likely to use the land soon.

Of course, politicians love big projects because they make them seem like visionaries, and they create a physical legacy of their reign, like ex-governor Rockefeller’s massive and mind-numbing Albany Mall. Pols are supported in their fits of pharaonic building by a powerful constituency, including the financiers who will benefit from the giant bond offerings, the hotel industry that hopes to see even a marginal increase in its business—no matter what the cost to the city...

If state-sponsored megaprojects are not right for the Far West Side, then what is? How should the Far West Side be developed? For an answer, look at the rest of New York. The city did not spring up in one gigantic eruption. Neither midtown nor SoHo nor Harlem nor Greenwich Village is the product of a centrally planned vision; all of those districts have evolved bit by bit, layer upon layer over years, with diverse uses not only sharing these neighborhoods and feeding off one another, but also often competing vigorously in a way that ensures that the neighborhood will get maximum value and vitality out of the land.

Around the country, cities are discovering what is right in front of us in New York: that this is how districts grow. Increasingly, they are rejecting the megaproject, centrally planned–neighborhood approach, because it just doesn’t work. Certainly whenever voters get a chance to register a preference on these plans, they say no.

So the city’s first task should be to go back to the original intention of the Far West Side plan: to create the conditions for the marketplace to build on those 60 blocks of garages, parking lots, and other ramshackle structures only as and if demand requires it. Government should first of all continue the rezoning of the area for much denser residential and commercial uses. Too often, city officials wait until the end of an economic cycle to start such rezonings, and before their plan can work its way through the approval process, the economy has already turned down and the momentum to finish the rezoning evaporates. The city also ought to extend the Number 7 subway line into the district, since better transportation will spur its development, and that kind of infrastructure improvement is government’s proper sphere.