Way back in 2001, when Orlando Magic owner Rich DeVos was looking for a new arena to replace his then-12-year-old one, I asked sports economist Rod Fort what he thought the expected shelf life was for a new stadium or arena. His tongue-in-cheek answer: “I don’t see anything wrong, from an owner’s perspective, with the idea of a new stadium every year.”
Which brings us to the present-day San Antonio Spurs:
The San Antonio Spurs, their future suddenly brighter after landing No. 1 draft pick Victor Wembanyama, are exploring the idea of developing a downtown arena, sources say.
At the same time, the San Antonio Missions’ new owners are pushing for a new baseball stadium in the inner city…
Co-locating the teams’ facilities, the thinking goes, could bring a year-round stream of fans to the central business district, which is struggling to recover from the COVID pandemic, and touch off a wave of new restaurant and bar openings.
“The thinking” has some ’splaining to do, as even coupling an arena with a minor-league baseball stadium is unlikely to touch off a wave of anything. And given that the Spurs’ arena has only been open since 2002, and received $110 million in renovations in 2016, it seems crazy to spend hundreds of millions of dollars — of team or public money, no one’s saying yet — just to encourage a few restaurants to open. For that price, you could just pay people to open restaurants and cover their losses.
This all remains exploratory by at the moment: Eddie Aldrete, a consultant who worked on the campaign for the current arena, and who got in the San Antonio Express-News article about all this despite saying he knows nothing directly about plans by the Holt family for a new downtown arena, said, “I think they’re doing some preliminary research to see if it would make sense. They wouldn’t want to start the conversation if the math doesn’t add up.” I mean, unless the math only adds up if most of the money is coming from taxpayers, right? Then you can totally start the conversation. The Spurs’ lease isn’t up for another nine years, but the NBA could move to expand into NBA-hungry cities like Seattle as soon as 2025, so no time like the present to create leverage.
I guess we will start seeing newspaper articles about how the Spurs 21 year old arena is starting to “fall apart” because someone saw a broken chair somewhere.
Then que up the whispers of “it would be a shame if we had to move to the brand new Moody arena in Austin on the University of Texas campus” because SA doesn’t want to be major league anymore…..
Why does the San Antonio city council hate freedom?
This is a serious question spurred by the I-know-you’re-not-serious idea that you could just pay people to open restaurants:
Why don’t we actually do this? Just build restaurants instead of stadiums? Restaurants are used every day (depending on their schedule), their impact on the local economy and well-being of the populace is not just an ethereal concept, and it has to be way cheaper than building a stadium.
Is that crazy? The argument “it’s not government’s place to subsidize what is or should be a private business” is out the window already, because we do that as long as the private business is occasionally on ESPN and say it’s an imperative that we do so because reasons.
I wasn’t not serious! If you want more restaurants, you’ll get much better bang for your buck by paying someone to open restaurants than by dropping half a billion dollars on a sports venue and hoping that restaurants will magically sprout up.
There are probably things that would be even better for the economy and the populace at large than restaurants — supermarkets, hospitals, welfare benefits — but restaurants wouldn’t be the worst thing.
Don’t forget *housing.* Before people need restaurants or grocery stores, they need a roof over their head.
Many of these cities that are supposedly “progressive” are actually regressive when it comes to providing people with a place to live.
Why should we expect a sports franchise to play their entire home season in one stadium? That’s like wearing the same underwear for 8 months. I see a time when each team has multiple stadiums. (like Cleveland in the late 1930s.
We’d be drowning in restaurants!
Reminds me of an Onion article:
https://www.theonion.com/yankees-to-build-stadiums-in-every-mlb-city-for-away-ga-1819569700