In case you’re wondering why sports team owners keep on releasing incredibly amateurish vaportecture stadium renderings that are just going to subject them to ridicule, check out these headlines from just the last two days: “Browns players share thoughts on Brook Park stadium renderings,” “Cleveland Browns stadium saga: Fans react to renderings of Brook Park proposal,” “Cavaliers Star Donovan Mitchell Chimes In On Browns New Stadium Proposal.” Pretty pictures, or even doofy-looking ones, are red meat to click-starved news outlets, and so long as they keep getting coverage that is more “ooh, shiny” than “who’s going to pay for this exactly?” the CAD mills are going to be kept busy.
And speaking of busy, let’s see what else happened this week:
- Oakland A’s owner John Fisher has agreed to sell his half of the Oakland Coliseum property to developers African American Sports & Entertainment Group for $125 million, which is $20 million more than the city of Oakland got for its half. Now AASEG will convert it into a “$5 billion megaproject that could include a new convention center, restaurant, hotel, youth amphitheater and restaurants,” and maybe a soccer stadium — or could, you know, not, depending on how the economic winds blow. That the group’s private equity partner says the money will come from “investors” isn’t exactly reassuring, but at least a Coliseum development might pencil out as a better investment than the plan that Fisher is trying to sell.
- One thing to breathe easy about with Inter Miami‘s much-delayed new stadium is that at least it’s not getting any public money, and … wait, why is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holding a giant $8 million check made out to the stadium? He can just do that? (Answer: Yes, it’s from an infrastructure slush fund he controls.) Technically the money is going toward traffic improvements around the stadium, but still, handing over $8 million to support a stadium that’s going to happen whether or not you spend the taxpayer dollars on it and then declaring “we just don’t believe that we give money to build sports stadiums” is a nice trick if you can pull it off.
- And speaking of privately funded soccer stadiums getting public funding, how about Kansas City spending upwards of $30 million in cash and tax breaks for a parking garage for the KC Current‘s newly opened stadium? The deal isn’t final yet, so no publicity photos of oversized checks for now.
- Signal Cleveland speculates that the proposed $2.4 billion Cleveland Browns stadium in Brook Park could use tax increment financing to cover some of its bills, with the $740,000 a year in property taxes the site currently generates continuing to go to local schools while anything above that number would be kicked back to help pay for the stadium. Except if you believe transit blogger and Browns dome enthusiast Ken Prendergast, the newly developed land would “generate millions more in property taxes or payments in lieu of taxes for Brook Park schools than it does now,” and both things can’t be right. We’ll just have to wait and see what’s actually in the financial plan, which the Browns owners seem perfectly content not to reveal anytime soon, not when they can get Donovan Mitchell making headlines by tweeting that a new stadium is “gonna be fire.”
- The new Worcester Red Sox stadium has “put the Canal District’s emergence on overdrive,” according to a Boston Globe article citing … some bars that opened nearby? Not mentioned: What the numbers show about the city’s bang for its 150 million bucks, despite there being local economists who could have easily told the Globe the answer.
- In Anaheim, meanwhile, the presence of the Los Angeles Angels has spawned a group of about 40 hot dog vendors who’ve set up outside the stadium, and Angels execs hate it because that’s money that’s not going into team pockets — no, of course not, they’re just concerned about someone “getting severely sick or even dying due to food poisoning,” because we know how devoted the Angels organization is to ensuring people get quality food.
- Thomas Tresser, not the DC Comics villain but the author of a book on the successful campaign to defeat Chicago’s Olympic bid, has launched a petition to demand that the city of Chicago not provide any public money or land for sports stadiums, feel free to sign if you’re the petition-signing type.
AAESG is going to put up not one, but two museums? Rare is the museum that doesn’t require huge subsidies (either public or private) to break even. And what is a “Youth Amphitheatre”?
Not pictured:
https://www.aasegoakland.com/objectives
$60 for a 246 page paperback?!
Thomas Tresser may not be a DC Comics villain, but that’s DC Comics villain level pricing.
Routledge is infamous for its obscene pricing. It’s why Judith Grant Long’s book costs as much as the stadiums it describes.
“Academic Publishing” makes stadium hustles seem like chump change
What’s not to love about giant checks?
And of course desantis loves it because it’s called “freedom park” … just sayin’
http://www.northescambia.com/2024/07/florida-announces-free-state-of-florida-placed-on-all-welcome-signs
“ What’s not to love about giant checks?”
I was quite pleasantly surprised to find out recently that you can order giant checks online and have them delivered to your house.
Even better, you can get dry-erase giant checks, so you can wipe out the payee and amount and re-use your giant check over and over again…
I know what’s going on the top of my wishlist! That’s a great birthday gift!
I would be nice if AASEG built something that California really was short of like, um, I don’t know…..housing?
They seem to have plenty of the other stuff.
Sigh…..
What is the turnaround time on these stadium renders? I’m actually legit curious to know. So far, there are no telltale signs that they’ve given up and moved to AI generation; otherwise you’d see a lot more fans with two heads, or a team trying to play soccer on a baseball diamond or something. But the architecture has less than zero effort put into it; seems to be just enough to say, “yup, that looks like a stadium all right!”
About the only part of the AASEG plan that fills me with confidence is their statement that the arena continues to be a viable venue, and that they can deliver a housing element. I think they surely can get housing going, since every politician in California is campaigning on housing costs, but beyond that, it’s up in the air. I’m unfortunately made jaded by many years of watching master-planned developments go up on the fringes of the Bay Area… Mountain House is perhaps the most successful of these, having finally incorporated as California’s newest city after 20 years, but it ultimately feeds people directly into the hell-commute of the Altamont Pass and I-580, with little in the way of adjacent jobs that will pay for the prices the developers have been charging. I also well remember back in the 90s when this weirdo South African developer began touting River Islands at Lathrop, which is extensively advertised throughout the Bay Area these days, as being practically a new city, with housing, commercial real estate and office parks, and even a freaking theme park. As actually realized, well, there’s a bunch of standard-issue McMansions behind a giant fortress levee on a floodplain, and +15 miles on that nightmare Altamont commute over and above Mountain House. And as for that theme park, uh… the adjacent farm still has a corn maze every October! Plus a pumpkin cannon, a fake bobsled slope, and a few other tchotchkes, but the moral of the story is that great big beautiful master plans too often devolve into the bare minimum.
Rebuilding the Coliseum with much less parking would mean that they have to firmly bet on transit orientation. As much as urbanists and environmentalists want it, and California government is pushing it, the transition away from the automobile will still be a multi-decade affair. It remains a better site for building a regional fanbase than Howard Terminal, but I would say that the smart money still has the A’s sold as-is, where-is in Sacramento. $125 million gets Fisher just over 10% of the way to closing the gap in Vegas; how many times can he lever that up? Shovels in the ground on Tropicana Boulevard by spring, right, John?
Sadly the comments on my original Deadspin vaportecture article have gone down the memory hole, but I did quote a few of them in a post here:
https://www.fieldofschemes.com/2019/03/25/14741/my-deadspin-guide-to-vaportecture-got-even-better-when-some-vaportecture-designers-showed-up/
The most relevant of which here is:
“Another commenter whose father was an architect noted that one design a week used to be standard; now it’s more like four per day, leading to impacts on quality that journalists as well will be familiar with.”
Oh wait! Looks like Wayback has the comments archived:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190823065132/https://deadspin.com/the-7-laws-of-vaportecture-stadium-arts-fever-dream-1833445857
Scroll way down and click on “Community” to show them.
Illegal aliens selling hot dogs in front of the big A and there everywhere people buying them the food inside is deplorable
I don’t think even Angels management is claiming that the hot dog vendors are undocumented immigrants.
“Hotdogueros”, Rick
Isn’t Anaheim the deplorable city where Mayor Sidhu took a million dollar campaign contribution in exchange for giving the Angels owner the land under the stadium and parking lots?
I don’t think he actually got the million dollars, he just approved the stadium deal and planned to ask for the money after. Not sure if that’s better or worse, honestly.
The Athletics never intended to move to Vegas, per RCs personal, they are planning to stay in the Capital City on a permanant basis. Vegas is just a sheme for the Athletics, however Vegas still may land a baseball team, the Chicago White Sox are looking to relocate to several cities.