Lights fog up the sky around a massive building awkwardly jutting out far higher than any of the surrounding structures, begging for attention and recognition from passersby with its hundreds of windows and LED displays. And being so gaudy and unmissable, it will be seen. Instead of spending money on improving everyday people’s quality of life, governments and private interests alike instead commission huge, elaborate projects those individuals are forced to see. And UTD is no exception to this wastefulness.
UTD’s upcoming student success center and student union complex, dubbed “Big Momma” by UTD’s facilities vice president Calvin Jamison, is a replacement for the Student Union building and other existing parts of campus. Even though “Big Momma” will render parts of UTD’s campus almost useless and updating preexisting structures would save space and time over constructing an entirely new complex, UTD seems unnecessarily committed to the estimated $292.5 million cost.
Those millions could be placed into the campus’s mental health services, improving the conditions of the University Village apartments or placed directly into lowering tuition and increasing financial aid, but UTD deemed a new building more pressing than any of those things. This wasteful prioritization is happening all over the world on a broader scale. Millions of lives are being affected by needless vanity projects meant to serve the community in some indirect way, at the expense of even a glimpse of direct help. Money from taxpayers, investors and wealthy donors are burned for something that’s at best a short-lived sensation or slightly more visually pleasing than its surroundings.
Olympic stadiums are one of the most common large-scale vanity projects, perfectly exemplifying their pitfalls. Governments pour billions of dollars into making massive structures to outcompete each other in grandness and aesthetics, disguised under a promise that tourism will help the economy and the city’s prestige. Ultimately, many of these just end up rotting away in disuse. In 2016, Brazil spent $29 billion on hosting the games — Rio de Janeiro had to pay $13 billion of that. To host the Olympics, Brazil removed over 4,000 families from their homes and now the infrastructure for the games sits mostly abandoned.
The most egregious recent example is the Vegas Sphere. Made of 1.2 million LED lights and standing at 336 feet tall, the $2.3 billion construction cost now allows the Vegas skyline to be filled with ads for the NFL or Paramount. The Vegas Sphere was meant to provide unique futuristic and immersive experiences to its audience, but the closest most Vegas residents will get to it is passing its blinding lights on the way home from work. But as long as some people get to view movies inside a ball, the project’s architects and funders decided it was worth the near-doubling from the original $1.2 billion cost estimate to $2.3 billion.
With the sphere notorious for losing money, it’s impossible not to wonder whether those financial resources could have been put anywhere else. Las Vegas’ Clark County has revealed that homelessness is at a ten-year high with a 20% increase from last year. Currently, there is only one navigation center for unhoused people. Additionally, Nevada repeatedly ranks within the bottom five in funding for education. Some reports place the Las Vegas area specifically as second-worst for school quality among the 50 largest metropolitan areas. That $2.3 billion could have gone toward alleviating any of these issues and benefitted society much more than a Paramount ad outside a spherical movie currently does.
The sphere doesn’t stand alone. Plenty of people and groups feel an obnoxious building is the best way to force people to give you attention. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman went all the way with his project Neom in Saudi Arabia.
Neom was intended to be a collection of urban futurist areas perfect for investors. The most well-known branch of this project is The Line, a walled city arranged in a straight line over 105.6 miles long with the outside covered in mirrors. The whole project has been estimated to cost over $1 trillion, all to create a paradise for investors and the wealthy. Saudi Arabia has not released recent statistics on its poverty rate, but it is estimated somewhere between 2 and 4 million people live below the poverty line, never to see any real benefits of this extravagant concept.
All these projects have been defended by claims that the prestige and potential tourism they will bring makes the whole endeavor worthwhile. People are allowed to spend their money how they want, but billions of dollars don’t just appear from nowhere. Ordinary people’s money that has been placed into taxes or investment firms is placed at stake for what is ultimately just a spectacle.
Real people are being pushed aside in exchange for putting up a structure that will forever stand the test of time, immortalizing their creators and funders. If these vanity projects continue garnering attention, more will be built. If everyday citizens want to see their money better spent, then sensationalizing these projects and giving their creators the legacies they’re after must stop, and a concerted political push to better spend that money elsewhere must begin.