Tag Archives: sports stadiums

Asking $9.8 million for one small home near Wrigley Field

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The property near Wrigley Field is getting quite valuable – at least according to the asking price:

In the world of real estate, location means everything. But does a property around the corner from Wrigley Field command $9.8 million? The sellers of 3710 N Kenmore Ave. realize that there is much more to the property than the two-story frame house that sits on it. The property has some potential to earn a few bucks and the listing agent is suggesting that investors consider erecting rooftop advertising (specifically a digital billboard) on the site. The Ricketts family have famously scooped up several of the surrounding rooftop properties, but this property is billing itself as one of the few that is not under the control of the Cubs organization. Broker Amy Duong of Jameson Sotheby’s Intl Realty tells us that the seller has been paying attention to sales in the neighborhood, notably the McDonald’s parking lot that the Ricketts family paid $20 million for. Duong also tells us that there’s no mistake in the price in the listing and the seller is fine with sitting on the house until a reasonable offer comes forth.

Perhaps the asking price was influenced by the success of the team this past season. More wins and young talent mean that property values may go up even more. In contrast, look at the land near U.S. Cellular Field on Chicago’s South Side. While that land is not easily converted to party/retail/restaurant space like the properties near Wrigley, imagine if the team was good for a number of years. Wouldn’t businesses and residents want to be part of the scene?

I’m guessing the property won’t sell soon for anywhere near this initial price but why not ask for the moon while the team is winning and the owners are spending money on property and renovations?

Building beautiful American sports stadiums

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One writer asks whether Americans can build beautiful sports stadiums:

So why don’t any of them look like the Nouveau Stade de Bordeaux? For a country with such a deep and abiding love for professional sports and lighting money on fire, the U.S. really isn’t in the business of building iconic sports arenas. Museums: Fine. Libraries: We’re golden. Those things are built to make the case for themselves and their cities. It’s different with stadiums…France’s latest soccer stadium, which opened to great fanfare in September, is the work of Herzog & de Meuron. It was designed with an eye toward Bordeaux’s landscape, according to the firm’s website, with heavy emphasis on elegance and “geometrical clarity.” At a glance, it looks like a juiced-up John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Herzog & de Meuron are what you would call elite architects. The firm is best known for projects such as the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg and 56 Leonard Street in New York. Not that they’re not known for sports architecture: The firm designed the unforgettable Bird’s Nest Stadium, a collaboration with Ai Weiwei that served as the centerpiece for the Beijing 2008 Summer Games. Herzog & de Meuron has also produced jewel-box arenas for Munich (Allianz Arena) and Basel (St. Jakob Park).

But Europe is home to lots of ballparks and arenas by smaller firms that, for better or worse, push the boundaries of what stadium architecture can be. In the U.S., most sports venues are designed by one of a handful of giant specialty firms, namely Populous, HKS, HOK, AECOM, NBBJ, and a few others. While these are fine firms—great firms, even—stadium designs for American clients trend toward the conservative.

The argument seems a bit convoluted: local leaders, taxpayers, and teams are going to build more of these stupid things anyway so why not make them better looking? This could go a few different directions instead:

  1. Iconic buildings – those with unique architecture and often designed by starchitects – can become draws on their own. Both status and tourist dollars are at stake here. Of course, there are issues with promoting such iconic structures as they can often have little connection to existing styles in the community.
  2. Any sort of major public building, from museums to libraries to parking garages to stadiums, should be pleasing to look at and contribute to the community. For example, New Urbanists argue civic structures should occupy prominent locations and be landmarks for the community. In other words, you could have a beautiful structure but if it is located next to a highway junction to best serve those trying to get to the park or in order to take advantage of cheap land, what’s the point?
  3. What counts as a beautiful or well-designed building is difficult to define. Who gets to decide if stadiums are ugly? The fans who regularly go there? A survey of local residents? Team owners? Could utilitarian structures be considered beautiful in their own way? The example discussed from Bordeaux appears to be the sort of modernist structure that never really caught on in the United States. (For example, it never really gathered much steam for houses.)

Still, I imagine there are some American stadiums that the general public would consider more beautiful than others. Whether Americans want daring stadiums, ones that don’t look like the typical American stadium, may be a tough sell…

Lesson of Glendale, Arizona: don’t put so much public money into sports stadiums

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The Super Bowl will be played in Glendale, Arizona but the suburb’s push to become a sports center has not exactly paid off:

As the Coyotes and Cardinals sought new facilities in the early 2000s and efforts failed to build them in other parts of the Phoenix area, Glendale stepped in. The city helped pay for the Coyotes’ arena with $167 million in bonds in 2003, and as the hockey team’s finances began to fade during the recession, Glendale went all-in to keep the team in Arizona. The city dished out $50 million earlier this decade to keep the team and continues to make annual payments toward the arena, but the money it is getting in return has not met expectations.

The football stadium was built in 2006, but Glendale was not on the hook for the costs of the $450 million retractable-roof facility. It was funded primarily with new taxes on car rentals and hotels in the Phoenix area, but that financing hit a snag last year when a judge ruled that the car rental tax was unconstitutional, leaving a major funding source for the Super Bowl venue in jeopardy. The issue is still being argued in the courts.

Glendale is far from alone. Cities and states nationwide have long struggled with how much public money to spend on stadium projects. The effort to build a new stadium for the Minnesota Vikings became embroiled in controversy over a financial commitment by the state that opponents said was excessive. The St. Louis Rams are at the center of a debate over whether to spend public money on a new stadium. Topeka, Kansas, is immersed in a fight over a motorsports track that has drawn comparisons to hockey in Glendale…

In the case of the Super Bowl, he believes the city is paying dearly. He said Glendale will actually lose a “couple million dollars” by hosting the event. It’s spending huge amounts of money on overtime and police and public safety costs associated with hosting the Super Bowl but getting very little in return.

Super Bowl visitors are mostly staying in Phoenix and Scottsdale and only showing up in Glendale on game day, meaning the city won’t see much of a boost in tax revenue. And the city was hoping the state would reimburse Glendale for its police overtime costs, but lawmakers have scoffed at the idea.

Teams and cities typically sell stadiums as engines for economic development. Think of all the fans who will be there! You can build around the new facilities! This will put your city on the map! But, such stadiums come with big costs including tax money that is often used as well as a whole host of other infrastructure concerns (from police to building hotel rooms). And the winners in such schemes are often the team owners who don’t have to pay completely out of pocket for facilities that can immensely boost the value of their team. (A thought: just imagine a team owner selling the team for a big profit – and many current sports franchises would turn such a profit today – and having to reimburse the community for costs incurred.)

But, if Glendale hadn’t built these stadiums, some other community might have fallen over themselves to make it happen…

Transforming sports stadiums into retail stores, a church, apartments, a water park

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Here is a brief look at seven repurposed sports stadiums around the world:

A 60 percent replica of the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt, this 20,000-seat arena that once housed the University of Memphis basketball program and the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies was put to pasture in 2004 with the opening of the FedExForum. At 32 stories tall, the third largest pyramid in the world is now reinventing itself. As a Bass Pro Shop. Set to open as early as December 2014 or spring 2015, the pyramid will contain a ginormous retail store, restaurant, aquarium, waterfall and potentially a hotel and museum…

In 1971 having the San Diego Rockets move to Houston launched a push to build a new arena. By 1975 the brand-new concrete-laden The Summit arena was the answer. But shy of 30 years later, when the Toyota Center opened in 2003, the Rockets no longer had fond thoughts of The Summit. Fortunately for the venue, Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church did. The church spent $95 million to renovate the basketball arena into a 16,000-seat worship center. After leasing the space, the church purchased the former home of the Rockets in 2010, giving Osteen an arena-sized home for decades to come…

London can make flats out of soccer stadiums. And Indianapolis can make apartments out of baseball stadiums. The 1931-opened Bush Stadium was a popular minor league park for decades, but went abandoned in 1996. The Art Deco stadium once served a purpose housing old cars from a federal Cash for Clunkers program, but now has quite a bit more intrigue as The Stadium Lofts, more than 130 apartments in the stadium that preserved key features, such as the ticket booth and owner’s suite. The three-story brick and steel structure has plenty of odd-shaped apartments and views onto the field…

You can find some of the world’s best architecture in Barcelona, so it would prove a shame to rip out a late 1800s bullfighting arena. Fortunately, Las Arenas found new life after ceasing to host bullfighting in the 1970s. With the interior unused, Barcelona officials still saw the value in the Catalonia-style cylindrical building with Moorish arches and preserved the façade of the building while creating a new shopping attraction. With a mix of retail stores, offices and restaurants under a new dome that spilled to an outdoor terrace, the beauty of Las Arenas lives on. Just not as a stadium.

These are some clever uses. Two of the seven examples were planned as Olympic venues designed to be used for the Olympic sports and then transitioned into something else. It strikes me that a number of these are located in more densely settled areas as opposed to suburban stadiums surrounded by parking lots.

Yet, I suspect the seven cases here are rather unusual. Most American stadiums don’t get an exciting second life, perhaps because they would cost too much to convert or no one can envision a profitable use or the land could be put to better uses. When building a new stadium for the major sports, I wonder if architects spend much time thinking about future uses.

Taxpayers pay 70% of NFL stadium costs, owners pocket 95% of the revenue

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Gregg Easterbrook summarizes the research on who pays for and benefits from the construction of new NFL stadiums:

Judith Grant Long, an urban planning professor at Harvard, has shown that about 70 percent of the cost of building and operating NFL stadia has been paid by taxpayers — many not even sports fans. About 95 percent of the revenue the stadia generate is kept by team owners. It’s a deeply disturbing arrangement. Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College, has shown that NFL investments never generate the promised job totals or local economic activity. If there’s public money to spend in Buffalo, investments in infrastructure — schools, transportation, a replacement for the dilapidated Peace Bridge, improving Delaware Park — would have more of an economic multiplier effect than an NFL field.

This said, if there is one city where public investment in an NFL stadium might be justified, it’s Buffalo. Should Atlanta or Miami lose its NFL team, that would be a shame, but these cities would still have strong economies. Should Buffalo lose the Bills, this could be perceived as the “last one turns out the lights” moment, reducing the odds of a Buffalo urban recovery.

Public investment in an NFL stadium might be justified only if the facility is located downtown. The Buffalo News reports that 15 sites are under consideration for a new stadium. Two are in Toronto. Several are suburban, including an abandoned shopping mall property an hour’s drive from the city. One is near Niagara Falls, where the tourist activity is on the Canadian side, not the American side. One is on the Buffalo Outer Harbor, which is cut off from downtown by a freeway and doesn’t contribute to the pulse of urban life. Only downtown locations should be considered if public funds are spent.

Nobody would have believed 20 years ago that Pittsburgh and Cleveland could bounce back and have trendy downtowns. And nobody believes that about Buffalo now. But already underway on the north side of the city is a complex of a teaching hospital and medical research center that will be among the world’s largest and best equipped. Thousands of professionals will move to the city to staff the center. Add the NFL to downtown, and Buffalo might acquire the cachet it needs to rebound.

In other words, the research from recent years is consistent: building a publicly-funded stadium is not really a good deal for taxpayers. Major league teams will appreciate it and the owners certainly benefit but the money does not flow back to taxpayers. Yet, since the political calculus is such that no major leader wants to be the one that let the favorite team get away plus there are still sites that existing teams can threaten to move to (in the NFL, Los Angeles is perhaps more important as a potential city rather than an actual home for a team), taxpayers are likely to continue to help foot the bills for new stadiums.

How do you preserve the first sports dome that voters rejected?

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The fate of the Astrodome in Houston is unclear though the National Trust for Historic Preservation still holds out hope:

Prior to Election Day, it was widely speculated that demolition would begin almost immediately if Harris County did not pass Proposition 2, a bond measure to turn the Dome into the world’s largest special events space.

Fast forward to today, and we have a failed ballot initiative, but only the building’s non-historic features have come down. The intense “should it stay or should it go” chatter has quieted, and the Dome was noticeably absent from the agenda of the county’s last meeting…

Because the Astrodome is Harris County property, all eyes are on the judge and the county commissioners — the five elected officials who, sooner rather than later, will have to make the call. Since Election Day, this group has taken great care to consider the three most likely options: private development, a public-private partnership, or demolition.

In that time, they have not only expressed disappointment over low voter turnout, but that they still want to hear from people who want to save the Dome. Still.

I have to wonder if this kind of preservation effort is similar to efforts regarding Brutalist structures or modernist single-family homes. Is the Astrodome aesthetically pleasing? Is it worth trying to make something out of a building that was primarily for sports? The Astrodome might be significant because it was the first but that isn’t necessarily a good reason for having it around even longer. One has to appeal to a bigger cause – like the idea that midcentury architecture is worth preserving:

The Astrodome’s exterior is wrapped in a steady, repeating rhythm of slender columns, the space between them filled with concrete screens in a delicate diamond-shaped pattern. Seen from the parking lot outside, the dome resembles more than a few lightly ornamented postwar buildings around the country, including William Pereira’s Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which opened the same year…

Even if its attitude toward the environment now strikes us as deeply naive, the Astrodome deserves to be protected simply as a singular monument to the American confidence and Texas swagger of the 1960s. The stadium doesn’t so much symbolize as perfectly enclose a moment in time.

I would think the biggest reason for saving the Astrodome would be that it is a big piece of Houston history, a city that has come a long way in recent decades. It could serve a function similar to the Water Tower building on Michigan Avenue in Chicago: a reminder of an earlier era amidst bigger buildings.

We’ll see if the Astrodome is preserved and then what is done with the building.

Atlanta Braves bucking the baseball trend by moving to the suburbs

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While the new baseball stadiums of recent decades tend to be located in urban neighborhoods, the Atlanta Braves made an announcement that they are moving 15 miles outside of the city:

On Monday, team president John Schuerholz and two other executives told reporters that the franchise will build a new stadium in Cobb County, roughly 15 miles away from Turner Field, and begin playing there in 2017, after their current lease expires, with construction to start in mid-2014.

That’s a shock, in that the Braves have only been playing in Turner Field — which was built for the 1996 Summer Olympics — since 1997. Such a move will make it the first of the 24 major league ballparks to open since 1989 to be replaced, and buck the trend of teams returning to urban centers. The proposed park is in the suburbs and closer to the geographic center of the team’s ticket-buying fan base, a much higher percentage of which happens to be white. US Census figures from 2010 put Fulton County at 44.5 percent white and 44.1 percent black, while Cobb County is 62.2 percent white and 25.0 percent black…

So instead of sinking $350 million into fixes to modernize Turner, the Braves are spending $200 million for a new park, with much of that cost likely to be covered by the development of the surrounding area and the sale of naming rights. Notably, Turner is one of just eight venues that doesn’t have such a deal in place. According to a New York Times piece from July, the Atlanta Hawks get $12 million a year for the naming rights to their venue, currently known as Philips Arena. The largest baseball deal is that of the Mets for Citi Field ($21 million per year), though the dropoff from that figure to the second-largest, Houston’s Minute Maid Park ($7.4 million), is steep.

The new venue is at the intersection of Interstates 75 and 285, said to be a major traffic snarl, “the place so congested we Cobb Countians know to avoid if at all possible,” as the Journal-Constitution‘s Mark Bradley described it. The county has resisted the expansion of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) into its domain since its inception in 1971, so it’s not served by light rail, and while the team claims “significantly increased access to the site” via Home of the Braves, it offers no specifics on the matter.

While this goes against ballpark trends, it also fits some other trends:

1. Suburban expansion in Sunbelt cities. Many of the new ballparks have been built in Northern cities, Rustbelt places where downtown development is needed. Think Camden Yards in Baltimore or Jacobs Field in Cleveland or PNC Park in Pittsburgh. In other words, Sunbelt cities have different settlement patterns including beltway highways around the city and not that dense of an urban core to begin. Turner Field wasn’t exactly in an urban neighborhood and other reports suggested it would have been quite difficult to expand parking and nearby amenities.

2. Matching ballparks with nearby development projects that can also bring in money. A baseball team can be profitable but developing nearby real estate can be even more profitable. For example, look at the deals suburbs tried to make with the Cubs earlier this year: you can have land and access to transportation and we would be more than happy to develop land around your ballpark. And the Cubs are trying to do this with Wrigley Field as well by developing nearby properties into a hotel to increase their revenue streams.

3. It sounds like Cobb County is giving the Braves a good deal by financing some of the project. This is a longer trend: companies, sports or otherwise, moving to where they can get a good tax deal. This has happened with urban ballparks – cities have financed parts of those stadiums because they can’t afford to let the team out of the city. In this particular case, it sounds like the Braves thought they got a better suburban deal whereas other cities have pushed harder to keep teams with incentives.

I suspect this is a more isolated case of ballpark construction in the suburbs.

Suburbs wooing the Chicago Cubs highlights the regional nature of sports teams and stadiums

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The Chicago Cubs moving out of the city seems unlikely. But, that hasn’t stopped several Chicago suburbs from suggesting they would be willing to work out a deal with the Cubs to build a new stadium:

What the soliciting suburbs believe — and sources close to the Cubs confirm — is that the siblings of Cubs Chairman Tom Ricketts are souring on Chicago and growing increasingly concerned the deal will be modified in a way that denies the team the revenue it needs to renovate Wrigley without a public subsidy…

“If this deal looks like it’s going down in flames or not getting done in a reasonable time, Tom will invest in ‘Plan B’ locations. He’d still work with the mayor on a city site. But, maybe not in Wrigleyville. I know people don’t believe it. But, it’s true,” the Cubs source said…

Aides to Mayor Rahm Emanuel privately dismissed this week’s public solicitation from DuPage County Board Chairman Dan Cronin as a Cubs-orchestrated negotiating ploy.

“This is all manufactured to gain leverage,” said a top mayoral aide, who asked to remain anonymous.

Last month, Ricketts threatened to move his team out of Wrigley and Chicago if he doesn’t get the outfield signs he needs to bankroll a $300 million stadium renovation without a public subsidy.

This comes after the announcement this week that DuPage County has two potential sites for the Cubs. But, little extra information about these plans were provided.

But, I think a more interesting take is the regional nature of sports teams and stadiums. Sports teams these days are really regional entities, particularly considering that more people live in the suburbs than central cities. It is unusual to have a team like the Cubs so closely tied to a specific neighborhood. Additionally, cities often see sports stadiums as economic engines, even though research suggests spending lots of taxpayer dollars on stadiums doesn’t pay off for communities. On one hand, it is not all that different than fighting over big box stores or corporate headquarters because of the supposed economic benefits. Yet, on the other hand it is a constant status symbol. Could the city of Chicago really afford in terms of prestige to lose the Cubs? I don’t think so. Would a suburb get a big status boost from hosting the Cubs? Possibly. If a suburb was able to woo the Cubs, I imagine they would trumpet this fact and try to build around it for decades.

This has happened before in Chicago. When the Chicago Bears were looking for a new stadium from the 1970s to the early 1990s, several suburbs were involved. The Bears ended up getting a decent enough deal from the city to stay. (Maybe they should have pushed harder. They have the smallest NFL stadium in terms of seats and with it also being an open-air facility, this limits its Super Bowl possibilities in the future. Also, the facility is still owned by the Chicago Park District and this has led to issues over the years.) Again, it is hard to imagine the Chicago Bears, a historic NFL franchise, playing out in the suburbs next to a major highway. What would have been a boon for a suburb would have been a big perceived loss for Chicago.

In the end, these sorts of negotiations can pit cities against suburbs in similar ways to fighting over business opportunities. But, rather than arguing about just money, sports teams are viewed as public goods that belong to a region. Perhaps the worst possible outcome is for the region to lose a team to another region altogether. The second worst outcome might be for the big city to lose the stadium to an upstart suburb.