January 30, 2011
Businesses on Super Bowl week: Nobody goes there, it's too crowded
The other day i mentioned a St. Louis restaurateur located near the Rams stadium who says he closes on Sundays rather than have his customers fight their way through game-day traffic. Today's Fort Worth Star-Telegram gives a more detailed look at the mixed feelings local businesses have over the flood of humanity that accompanies football games, then disappears the rest of the year. Key paragraphs:
Just south of Cowboys Stadium, Bill Testa, managing partner of the 54-year-old Candlelite Inn restaurant along Division Street, has pre-sold his lot to a parking vendor. It is already sold out, according to Parkwhiz.com.
Testa has catered some Cowboys games and believes that his restaurant could actually see an uptick in customers because of the lane closures. Yet there's a small "For Sale by Owner" sign outside the restaurant entrance, an indication that Testa would like to move the Arlington institution to a new location.
"It's hard for my longtime customers to get here when a game is going on," Testa said. "And many of my customers that used to live around here have moved away. They live in Southlake or south Arlington or Mansfield.
"If I could sell the place tomorrow, I would. But I would move somewhere else in Arlington. I've had tire-kickers, but nobody can get financing in this economy."
Which is pretty much what Phil Porter found, only at the macro level.
November 26, 2010
Dallas Morning News on lockout impact: Whatever you say, NFLPA
This week's award for the worst stenography journalism goes to the Dallas Morning News, for its report on how an NFL lockout would affect the local economy:
The NFL Players Association contends that its members and team owners shouldn't be the only ones worried about a possible lockout next year if they can't settle on a labor contract.
The NFLPA sent letters to Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert reminding them that cancellation of the 2011 football season could cost $160 million in "lost jobs and revenue" for the region.
In addition, a group called Don't Mess With Success — described as a "diverse coalition of football fans, small businesses, community leaders and other associations" — sent a letter to Arlington City Manager Jim Holgersson warning about a $140 million economic hit to the region from canceling the season.
Number of economists consulted for comment for the story: zero. Accordingly, the article never discusses the possibility that in the case of an NFL lockout, sports fans in Dallas might, you know, find something else in Dallas to spend their money on. This is the well-known "substitution effect" — possibly best exemplified by the fact that when baseball went on strike in 1994, movie rentals and comedy clubs saw their business skyrocket. But finding that out would require a five-minute Google search, which is a lot to ask of newspaper writers.
April 27, 2010
Who's to blame (or credit) for Cowboys' Arlington move?
The Dallas Morning News has a long editorial (or maybe a column? hard to say, as online it's unsigned) today asking why the Cowboys built their stadium in Arlington instead of Dallas. (This prompted by Cowboys owner Jerry Jones recounting how he spurned Dallas after Mayor Laura Miller patted him on the knee.) Among the questions posed:
Was the loss of Cowboys Stadium a failure of leadership or was a Fair Park location a fantasy that had no chance of becoming reality, particularly with Jones shopping for the best deal available? ...
Where was the council? Where were the opposition leaders who gleefully blocked Miller on other issues?
Of course, who really knows if a stadium could have been built in Dallas? Fair Park was too small for what towers over Arlington.
All fine questions, but missing is one big one: Would Dallas have been better off if it had built a stadium instead of Arlington? After all, Arlington had to kick in $325 million and displace local businesses to make way for the Cowboys' new digs; Dallas residents, meanwhile, still get to go to the games, but are spared the expense. Arlington presumably gets some added tax revenues as a result of the stadium, but it's still a worthwhile question: Did Dallas win by losing? If so, maybe that knee-pat, if it really happened, wasn't so inexplicable after all.
April 02, 2010
Can Santa Clara stadium opponents avoid Arlington activists' fate?
The San Jose Mercury News has a nice profile today of the opposition to the San Francisco 49ers stadium plan in Santa Clara (including a photo of frequent FoS reader and commenter Chris Koltermann). The article compares the Santa Clara battle to the similarly funding-deprived opposition to the Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington, but notes that opposition to public subsidies is much stronger in California, adding:
Arlington's [stadium activist Wayne] Norred says the "No" side has an advantage in Santa Clara that wasn't a factor in the Cowboys' campaign: Two City Council members, William Kennedy and Jamie McLeod, oppose the project. Arlington's City Council was 9-0 in favor of the Cowboys deal.
"That shows a crack in the city's political structure on the thing," he said. "If they are moonbats, you have a problem. But if they are reasonable people, that helps."
Speaking of the Cowboys stadium, its price tag has now officially hit $1.2 billion. This isn't a problem for Arlington, since the team covers cost overruns, and shouldn't be in Santa Clara, since the 49ers have promised the same (though there's still the nagging question about revenue shortfalls). But it is an indication of how stadiums on paper never quite match up to actually existing ones.
January 04, 2010
Cowboys Stadium good for some businesses, bad for others
You can't be much more wishy-washy than calling a new stadium "a godsend for some and a nightmare for others," but the Dallas Morning News has tried, evenly balancing positive and negative quotes from store owners in the vicinity of the Cowboys' new stadium. Sample couplet:
[Olenjack's Grille] general manager Adam Jones said his restaurant has "embraced the stadium since Day One." He said Sundays and Mondays were traditionally slow, but now he sometimes doubles his business. The stadium is about three-quarters of a mile away. ... "It's been fantastic for us," Jones said.
The stadium's impact has been particularly surprising to [Mi Tierra Latin Fusion] restaurateur Damaris Torres. At a mile and a half from the stadium, she thought she might get a few extra customers to drop in for Cuban sandwiches and guava turnovers. Instead, diners have stayed away, many of them worried about potential traffic jams, she said. That has driven down business an average of 40 percent when the Cowboys play at home.
It'd be nice to see the News make some attempt at coming up with conclusions from its survey: Is the stadium helping more businesses than it's hurting? Are there particular geographic areas, or types of businesses, that benefit more than others? But that's probably too much to expect from today's time-pressed journalists.
September 29, 2009
Cowboys' record-breaking stadium to spark new building war?
The Dallas Cowboys officially have the world's largest video board, as certified by the Guinness Book of World Records. The question now is, as I've noted before, whether this ups the ante for other NFL teams' stadium demands. Peter Callaghan of the Tacoma News Tribune wonders today whether Cowboys Stadium could be "the first stadium of the next round" of stadium extortion in the NFL.
"Every time a new stadium or arena opens it has something new that everyone else wants," notes some guy with a website to Callaghan. Sports economist Rod Fort counters that not every market could really support a 100,000-person capacity stadium or the world's largest video board; but then, keep in mind that Fort is also the one who once quipped to me: "I don't see anything wrong, from an owner's perspective, with the idea of a new stadium every year."
September 25, 2009
Stadium death watch: One leaves, one enters
From the Shoot First, Ask Questions Later Dept.:
With Tiger Stadium now history, the Detroit Economic Growth Corp. may soon solicit ideas to redevelop the site.
Meanwhile, the Irving, Texas city council has authorized the demolition of Texas Stadium, the former home of the Dallas Cowboys. According to the Associated Press, the council is hoping to set up an "implosion auction," with tickets marketed "possibly [to fans] from cities with ardent rivals of the Cowboys." Bring your own dust masks!
September 17, 2009
Keeping up with the (Jerry) Joneses
ESPN.com's Matt Mosley raves about the new Dallas Cowboys stadium, or at least its grandiosity, citing in particular its humongous scoreboard, the fact that players enter the field by running through a sports bar, and the glass-enclosed exterior. "It was [Cowboys owner Jerry Jones'] vision to build the greatest stadium in the world," writes Mosley, "and he just might have pulled it off."
We can argue whether being bigger necessarily equates with better — it's especially noteworthy that Jones apparently decided to build the stadium's signature oversized scoreboard after going to a Celine Dion show at Caesars Palace and being so distracted by the giant video screen that he couldn't keep his eyes on the actual performance — but for NFL fans the key phrase here is in the photo caption, which describes Cowboys Stadium as "the new standard by which other stadiums are judged." "State-of-the-art" clauses are already popular among NFL teams, and Cowboys Stadium only ups the ante for what other franchise owners can demand as standard. (And even for teams without lease clauses, you know their owners are salivating over Cowboys Stadium's new goodies.) At least Jones skimped on the holographic replay system.
This, in part, is the answer to the often-asked question (often-asked to me, anyway): "Won't the new-stadium craze die off once every team has one?" The problem with "new" is that it's a moving target — this decade's state-of-the-art is next decade's outmoded, as new stadiums keep (sorry) moving the goalposts. Twenty-one NFL stadiums have opened in the past 20 years, but eight of those are already more than a decade old. If Cowboys Stadium leads to a new round of NFL stadium demands — or stadium upgrade demands — it will end up costing taxpayers and football fans far more than the $350 million in public funds that went into the stadium proper.
September 10, 2009
Forget the obstructed seats and the punt-hazard scoreboard, the Dallas Cowboys' new stadium has another cross to bear: It's apparently running Windows.
Make your own joke, really.
UPDATE: Sorry, link was wrong. You can see the photo now here.
August 30, 2009
Cowboys low-hanging video board to stay put for 2009
Looks like Puntgate will linger on for at least another few months: The NFL has ruled that the Dallas Cowboys don't need to raise the video screens at their new stadium, regardless of the fact that punters have hit the boards during exhibition games. Instead, the league implemented emergency ground rules for the coming season only (permanent rules changes require a vote at the annual rules meeting) that essentially make any punts hitting the board a do-over, with replay used to check if balls hit the board in case officials miss it.
Last night's game was free of punt-board collisions, so the ground rules won't come into play for another week at least. Until then, the only problem with the video screens will be the one that former Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson identified recently: "If there's anything wrong, it's that people are going to watch the video board and not the game." I haven't been there myself, but still I know what he means.
August 24, 2009
Cowboys Stadium just gets worse and worse
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has outdone the Steinbrenners in one way, anyway: He's built seats with views even more obstructed than those in the new Yankee Stadium bleachers. Deadspin has the link the the GeekBrief.tv video segment, and the color commentary:
One is literally behind a cement column. The other sits up against a cement wall that obstructs all of the stadium except for one red zone. I'm not sure which exact seat this is, but there doesn't seem to be any indication on Ticketmaster that obstructed view seats are available or that they are any cheaper than the lowest listed price of $75. ($59 as part of a season ticket package.) The standing-room only morons get a better deal than that, but at least you get a chair.
How bad are these seats? You are in the same room with the world's largest video screen, a massive 160-by-90-foot egoriffic TV built specifically to give fans in the cheap seats a visual reminder that they are actually attending a football game ... and you can't even see that.
Maybe they can at least put a painting of a football game on the wall.
August 23, 2009
Cowboys' scoreboard is a punt hazard
There have been plenty of articles about the first Dallas Cowboys preseason game at Cowboys Stadium, but what do I want to talk about? The fact that the new $25 million video screen was hung so low it's getting hit by punts. The NFL is apparently going to have to make new rules to account for this, and Cowboys tour guides were telling visitors on Saturday that the board was being raised, though team officials denied this.
What was behind this screwup? No one's saying, but it couldn't have hurt that the video board appears to be the main attraction both for those in the luxury suites and those in the standing-room-only sections on the same level. One fan told the Dallas Morning News on Friday night: "I catch myself watching that screen instead of watching the field. They zoom in on the bench and you can see sweat running down the back of the players' necks and you can see the expression on their faces. It just draws you in." Maybe the Cowboys could just skip the game itself and have computer players play the game on the big screen — that way they'd both save on player salaries and could just avoid scoreboard-colliding punts by adding a few lines of code.
August 09, 2009
Cowboys Stadium brings flood of ... something
A month away from opening day of football, the Dallas Morning News is already ready to declare the new Cowboys stadium in Arlington a smashing success for the economy:
The Dallas Cowboys have yet to play a down in Arlington, but the impact of the team's new stadium is already being felt in the local economy.
At least 80 percent of Arlington's hotel rooms were filled for the Cowboys Stadium debut concert with George Strait in June, and the municipal airport was packed with private planes. Tourism officials said the 4,000-room nights booked for that weekend were comparable to Arlington's largest conventions.
"It would have been hard to find a hotel room the night of the George Strait concert," said Jay Burress, president and CEO of the Arlington Convention & Visitors Bureau.
Items not covered in the article:
- How many hotel rooms are filled on a typical weekend in June.
- How it could be "hard to find a hotel room" when there was a 20% vacancy rate.
- What the economic activity (and hotel vacancies) were like in nearby Irving, where the Cowboys played until this year, and where any local stadium concerts would have gone had it not been for the new stadium.
The Morning News did mention that the manager of a nearby shopping center reported that "people were so fearful of traffic jams that north Arlington became a ghost town during the Strait concert" — though traffic jams didn't materialize, so she hoped shopping would pick up during future events.
August 05, 2009
Cowboys charge $29 to put your fanny nowhere a seat
As part of their bid to make their new taxpayer-supported stadium even more of a monument to excess than the Yankees' new stadium, the Dallas Cowboys have announced that they'll be selling "Party Pass" tickets for $29 a pop that don't even get you a seat. The Cowboys plan to sell between 15,000 and 35,000 of the standing-room seats per game, which is an unprecedented number — little wonder that one Dallas local who attended a soccer game in the standing section reported that most people couldn't get close enough to the front to see the game.
"For your die-hard Joe Sixpack Cowboys fan, $29 is a fantastic price point," one Texas ticket broker told Bloomberg News. Of course, given that the cheapest actual seats cost $75, and that the pizzas in the luxury suites go for $90 (or maybe $60 — either way), maybe he has a point.
July 06, 2009
Headline of the week on vacation
I admit I've been giving a bit of short shrift to the Dallas Cowboys' new gajillion-dollar stadium that opened amid much hoopla last month, but Saturday's Dallas Morning News had a report that I couldn't overlook:
Cowboys Stadium site in Arlington isn't expected to be used for gas drilling
Just in case you were wondering.
June 02, 2009
Sports bubble watch: Giants waiting list has evaporated
In a Newsday column mostly about the lagging naming-rights market — both the Dallas Cowboys stadium opening this year and the New York Giants and Jets stadium opening in 2010 still haven't found buyers for their stadium names — sports business writer Neil Best reveals this tidbit as well:
The Giants are further along in their sales process but still have personal-seat licenses available at club levels for $20,000, $12,500 and $7,500 &mdash ones that come with game tickets at $700, $500 and $400.
Johnson and Mara expressed confidence that they will be sold out before the 2010 openers. But Mara confirmed that the Giants have moved through their notoriously long waiting list and that tickets now are available to the public.
What this means is that at least 60,000 Giants fans have been offered the chance to buy season tickets at the new place, and replied, "Not at those prices." See why I'm concerned for Santa Clara?
May 29, 2009
"It's bigger and more beautiful than I ever imagined!" —Arlington Mayor Robert Cluck on the new Dallas Cowboys stadium, which opened its doors to 1500 VIPs this week
"The first word that comes to mind is: impressive!" — New York Red Bulls captain Juan Pablo Angel on the team's new stadium, which players got a first sneak peek at yesterday
"The action is quite intense and the effects are completely of-the-moment and dazzling!" — Director Brad Silberling on "Land of the Lost," which opens at theaters near you next Friday
May 03, 2009
Cowboys practice facility collapses
In what was either "thunderstorm-spawned winds" or a near-tornado, depending on which description you prefer (AccuWeather calls it a "microburst"), the Dallas Cowboys' six-year-old practice facility was flattened yesterday, its aluminum-frame roof collapsing on dozens of team employees and reporters there to cover practice. Latest word is that there were no life-threatening injuries, though one Cowboys coach did suffer broken vertebrae (he's not paralyzed, and is expected to make a full recovery). [UPDATE: Another Cowboys staffer wasn't as lucky.]
Dramatic video here and here. (Obligatory stadium controversy comment: The practice dome angered local residents when it opened in 2003, as it towered 80 feet over the surrounding neighborhood.)
March 06, 2009
Long piece in today's Wall Street Journal on the bad timing by the New York Yankees, New York Mets, and Dallas Cowboys in opening stadiums geared to high-end consumers at a time when there ain't none to be found. (Best headline, though, goes not to the WSJ but to the New York Times' blog item on the story: "Luxury Stadiums Seemed a Good Idea at the Time.") Highlights:
With just weeks before their new $1.1 billion stadium opens, the Cowboys still have 2,000 premium seats and about 50 of their 300 luxury suites left to sell. The Yankees have hired [luxury real estate agent Neal] Sroka to drum up buyers for the hundreds of premium seats still in their inventory. The Mets, who once had deals for all 49 of their luxury suites, say they've had to go back to the market after one customer, whom they declined to name, backed out....
Between corporate sponsorships, naming-rights deals and luxury suites, two-thirds or more of teams' revenue comes from corporations rather than ordinary fans, estimates David Carter, executive director of the University of Southern California's Sports Business Institute. Over the years, luxury boxes, once just a few glass-enclosed rooms high above the regular seats, have become as integral to a new stadium as concession stands -- more so, because companies pay for them up front, guaranteeing profits regardless of the team's success on the field. As team owners crammed in ever-more premium seats, corporations, eager for new ways to entertain clients, happily bid up the prices.
All that corporate money, Mr. Carter says, has created what he calls the "sports ticket price bubble." Now that bubble is in danger of bursting.
If so, the question is whether sports will get that "soft landing" that everyone was talking about for the real estate market a couple of years ago, or the spectacular nosedive that we saw instead. Opinions?
February 09, 2009
For the fan who has everything, including some things that don't belong to him
Headline of the weekend:
New Cowboys Stadium in Arlington to feature Upgraded Jail
Great, now everybody will want one.