A commissioned report released this past week revealed a fact you may find surprising. 

Rules stopping a stadium from hosting many events cause an enormous amount of forgone revenue over time. Amounts that can hit the hundreds of millions of dollars.  

What’s more, fewer people will show up to spend a night in hotels and spend money in restaurants if the stadium hosts fewer events.  

Usually, this kind of consultancy report is rolled out by people trying to convince government, council, or both that they should spend a lot of taxpayer and ratepayer money on a new stadium. Academic work suggests the numbers in those kinds of studies are vastly inflated.  

But it wasn’t subsidy-seeking stadium-boosters who commissioned the report. It was the Ministry for the Environment. The Ministry for the Environment more typically makes other people hire expensive consultants to prove obvious things.  

And nobody here seems to be seeking government funding. Just the opportunity for an existing stadium, Eden Park, to do normal stadium things: host events.  

It is all a bit ridiculous. But figures help make regulatory burdens more tangible. Other studies proving the obvious might help too. How many more broken teeth could be fixed if government didn’t make it hard for foreign-trained dentists to set up shop? 

Unfortunately, Eden Park’s neighbours could still claim they’d experience unmeasured but even larger harms from more events. Who could tell?  

I have a modest proposal.  

The reports propose increasing the allowed number of events, but only up to a limit.  

Instead, abolish the limits: noise, time and number of events, all of it. Let the stadium really be a stadium.  

Simultaneously, offer to buy out every adjacent neighbour at a small margin above current market value, but with a warning. No complaints about anything stadium-related would ever again be entertained from those addresses. Take this offer or forever hold your peace.  

Then, upzone the bought-out properties. Sell them to a developer at a profit for apartments, townhouses, offices, and maybe even ground-floor cafés and bars. The developer could make the nearby stadium a selling-point. 

Everyone wins.  

The stadium would have better neighbours. Neighbours who like being near a stadium. And who wouldn’t have to travel as far for events.  

People who hate stadiums get to move away.  

And maybe, just maybe, there would be fewer future fights about whether stadiums are good places for concerts.