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To put things in perspective, llets run the numbers. The Atlanta MSA has a population of about 5.4 million people currently, and an unemployment rate of right around 7% . . . that would indicate there are something like 380,000 people unemployed. Cobb is estimating this stadium is going to generate permanent jobs accounting for over 13% of the MSA's unemployed population, single-handedly lowering local unemployment from 7% to 6%.
50,000 people is the population of Smyrna. At full bore, they're estimating 1M sf of retail/hotel/office. Let's say for the sake of simplicity, we'll say it's all retail. The avg Walmart is 100k sf and employs 225 people. Obviously higher end stores would employ more per sf but be open shorter hours. 10 Walmarts would employ 2,250 people. If it's all hotels...300sf/room & 8-12 employees to support per 10 rooms, you're still only up to 4k people and that's assuming you have a reason to keep 3,000+ hotel rooms at the stadium occupied year round.
Let's say it's 1M sf of office space. If we assume 5x5 cubes, you only pack in 40,000 people and technically those aren't jobs you created...they're just housed there.
These numbers are way out of left field and I'm guessing they're using some very optimistic multipliers on indirect job creation which is also how Georgia spent $1B on a Kia plant and $200M for NCR.
Last edited by Mishap; 01-15-2014 at 03:28 PM..
Reason: Off by 10 on # of employees to man a hotel
I found a Brookings Institute report that for every 1 High Tech job (i.e. Apple), there’s 5 indirect jobs created. Let’s assume all the jobs created by the stadium are highly paid tech jobs. There’s ~3,141 on the payroll at the stadium + another let’s say 3,000 in the development. Then, 6,141 * 5 = 30,705 jobs created indirectly so about 37k total. Given a good number of the jobs at the stadium would be part time security, concessions, janitorial, etc and not making anywhere near the 125k Apple employees make this number is ridiculously optimistic. In fact the Braves payroll is shockingly low for the 3,141 employees who will make an avg of $11.4k/yr (35.8M payroll). Even Home Depot’s HQ probably doesn’t create 50k jobs in the area and they’re a $100B company.
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