MILWAUKEE — This fairy tale began with two Prince Charmings.
Last spring, a pair of New York hedge fund owners came to this grand old dame of a city by Lake Michigan and bought the Milwaukee Bucks, a once-proud basketball team fallen on hard times. The N.B.A. and many residents celebrated; what’s not to like about billionaire love?
The league made a demand of its new princes: Within three years they had to build a new downtown arena, with luxury boxes, artisanal this and that, and digital everything. The princes nodded. They put up a combined $100 million toward the half-billion-dollar cost.
“We have a moral responsibility” to Milwaukee, one of the owners, Marc Lasry, had said months before in a statement quoted by Bloomberg News.
Prominent business leaders applauded and lined up to buy their own small pieces of the team. The team’s former owner Herb Kohl — who purchased the Bucks in 1985 for $18 million and sold the franchise this year for $550 million — put up another $100 million.
Then, as wealthy sports owners are wont to do, our princes turned to the people of Wisconsin and spoke of civic obligation: The public must ante up $200 million or so for this arena. Otherwise, it would go unbuilt, and the N.B.A. had a right to buy back the franchise and cart it off to a more welcoming, not to mention pliable, city.
So the fairy tale glow faded, and the princely smiles offered a hint of steel.
Facts intrude here. A new arena might spur revitalization of downtown Milwaukee, as the chamber of commerce insists. But the Bucks remain a private enterprise, and at least modestly profitable. The N.B.A. itself leaks money out its pores. Its new labor contract is remarkably friendly to the owners, and the league just signed an extension to its television contract worth $24 billion, which by the roughest reckoning gives the new Bucks owners a revenue stream of $89 million a year.
Some years back, N. Gregory Mankiw, a professor in Harvard’s economics department, drew up a list of 10 things on which (almost) all economists agree. No. 7 on that list? Local and state governments should eliminate subsidies to professional sports franchises.
Fortunately, Milwaukeeans brim with ideas for restoring the magic to their relationship with the princes.
I got the Milwaukee Common Council president, Michael J. Murphy, on the telephone, and he acknowledged that investing precious dollars in an arena triggered his gag reflex.
“A lot of people forget these owners make out like bandits because we pick up much of the cost,” he said.
Perhaps, he said, the city should make a loan. Or demand an ownership share. If the team triples in value, the taxpayers could share in the riches.
The Bucks’ new owners, Lasry and Wesley Edens, have in fact promised to work in “partnership” with the city. They did not make clear if their notion extended to letting the public take a dip in an N.B.A. owner’s many revenue streams.
Alas, when I called Timothy R. Sheehy, president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, which has taken the lead in pushing for the arena, his interpretation was constrained. “Partnership gives us a chance to invest in retail and housing,” he said. “Wes Edens has a history of thinking big on real estate.”
I’m sure he does.
Then there’s another proposal. Southeastern Wisconsin Common Ground — a splendid coalition of churches, community groups, mosques and synagogues — stifled the temptation to shout “No!” to the prospect of funneling precious tax dollars to billionaire owners and millionaire players and coaches.
We like pro hoops, they said. But our children’s playing fields and recreation centers and schools are in dreadful shape. (The Milwaukee school system projects a $32 million funding cut this year). If we’re to invest in an arena, let’s insist on a roughly similar amount for our recreation centers and public school playing fields.
Keisha Krumm, an organizer for Common Ground, offered brutal realism. “They are going to get their arena — I don’t have any doubt about that,” she said. “So let’s get something out of it.”
They took me on a tour. Milwaukee has a glorious art museum and river walk. But too many of its neighborhoods are wounded beauties, the homes neatly tended but the streets as cracked and rutted as dirt roads.
The N.B.A. insists, de rigueur, on replacing its arenas every 25 years; one of Milwaukee’s best-known high school buildings is a century old.
Earl Ingram, a baritone-voiced man and the head of a youth football league, led us out into Lincoln Park playing field. Every step threatened a turn of ankle. The end zone curved up a hill. The restrooms, which 1,500 young football players would use the next day, consisted of dilapidated old stalls.
Where, I asked, were the goal posts?
“Goal posts?” He snorted. “Goal what?”
The scene was no better at a nearby elementary high school, where the baseball diamond was a rock-hard field of weeds and the backstop was near collapse. Or at Washington High School, where the running “track” was cracked and potholed concrete.
“Our children are twisting their ankles, hurting their knees playing here?” Ingram said. “And they want us to build an arena for the N.B.A. athletes even as they say they can’t afford this?”
When Common Ground released its proposal last month — based on a careful study of recreation centers and fields in the city and surrounding suburbs — the owners told the press they would happily talk with the group.
That has not happened. Common Ground members spoke of receiving heated phone calls from Ted Kellner, a prominent business leader and minority owner in the Bucks, wondering why they were complaining. In the schools, a woman spoke of having her contract dropped after officials complained she was working with Common Ground.
I asked Kellner about the Common Ground proposal. He was not enthusiastic. He noted that a few of the organization’s members sat on a task force and would at least get heard. “For the public to have a seat at the table is appropriate,” he said.
Word filtered back to the group’s leaders that they could perhaps have a talk with Lasry’s son Alex, a newly minted Bucks vice president. When a Twitter user last April wrote, “Stop whining and pay the arena freight,” the younger Lasry posted his own approving note: “Not much to disagree with here!”
Common Ground’s leaders have held out for a meeting with the owners.
I found myself confused. Could these billionaires and millionaires really not afford to build their own hoops ziggurat? Less than three months before Marc Lasry bought the Bucks, he snagged a handsome $33 million penthouse on Central Park West.
The Bucks insist that the arena, if built with private dollars alone, will “not pencil out.” I requested dollar figures.
A short while later, Sheehy, of the chamber of commerce, replied with an email.
“It does not pencil out,” he wrote. “If the estimates are accurate, there is not enough cash flow to support the cost. That’s how real estate works.”
Or, as the case might be, how real estate does not work.
In an earlier conversation, Sheehy had spoken of the intangible benefits of an N.B.A. franchise. He noted that the league set inviolable rules for cities desirous of retaining franchises.
“The way I look at this, I don’t write the rules,” Sheehy said. “The marketplace writes the rules.”
That marketplace, not surprisingly, prefers public risk and private gain.
The Sports of The Times column on Friday, about the battle for a new downtown arena for the Milwaukee Bucks, misstated, in some copies, the given name of a former owner of the team. He is Herb Kohl, not Herman.