February 28, 2009
Sacramento proposes Atlantic Yards West for Kings
The NBA and city of Sacramento officially issued their plans for a new Sacramento Kings arena on the site of Cal Expo yesterday, and you sure can't accuse them of thinking small: It includes a 350-acre "living village" with a new indoor fair space, and retail, office, and residential buildings, and a whopping price tag of $1.9 billion. If this sounds familiar, it's because it's a dead ringer for the similar office/residential/arena plan that is currently in the process of collapsing in Brooklyn, thanks to plunging demand for office or residential space.
All parties seem to be aware that this is not the best time to be looking for billions for a development project, with NBA arena consultant John Moag (formerly of the Maryland Stadium Authority, where he helped get stadiums built for the Baltimore Orioles and Ravens) calling it "not a shovel-in-the-ground project," and saying the arena wouldn't open until 2013, with the rest of the project following over the next 25 years. That will give them time to finalize such niggling details as finding an interested developer, and figuring out how to pay for it all — there's talk of tax-increment financing, but no real details.
Economist Claude Gruen, a specialist in these kind of giant development deals, called the plan's economic projections "too rosy," and said it wasn't reasonable to expect it could pay for itself. But at least it's created some much-needed jobs for architectural sketch artists.
