Weekly news roundup, special abbreviated travel edition:
- The Philadelphia city council, as expected, approved the 76ers arena that includes between $96 million and $273 million in tax breaks by a 12-5 margin yesterday, after protestors opposed to its possible detrimental effects on neighboring Chinatown were removed from the council chambers and arrested. As I’ve written previously, this is hardly the worst deal in history, but it is rolling the dice on tax breaks for an unpopular project just so one local billionaire can get a leg up on another local billionaire to have the shiniest arena. My somewhat educated guess, in part from watching the Barclays Center project in Brooklyn, is that the impacts won’t be quite as bad as some fear but also won’t be anywhere near as positive as boosters promise, and a lot will depend on things like what the bigger gentrification environment will look like over the next decade or two.
- A provision to transfer the RFK Stadium site to the District of Columbia, possibly for a new Washington Commanders stadium, is on hold after the spending bill it was attached to failed to pass thanks to a showdown between Donald Trump and House speaker Mike Johnson that somehow involved Elon Musk tweeting more than 100 times in one day. This may also lead to a government shutdown, but apparently one of Musk’s tweets included opposition to spending $3 billion in tax dollars on a Commanders stadium, which the bill wasn’t going to do, this is the world we live in now.
- The owners of the Oakland Roots USL team say they would like to build a 25,000-seat soccer stadium at the Howard Terminal site proposed and then abandoned by A’s owner John Fisher for a baseball stadium … maybe, possibly in 15 years, after playing in a temporary stadium on the site until then. “Stadium-wise, the Roots are tap-dancing and juggling furiously,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle, which is only likely to get them brained with a golf club.
- “Could a third Major League Baseball franchise come to the Lone Star State later this decade?” What say you, Ian Betteridge?
Ew, the CHRON.
The difference between the Houston Chronicle and the Chron is that the Chronicle goes “here’s our award winning journalism… Now pay us up front to read any of it”, while it’s sister site the Chron runs like any content mill; searching for anything some bonehead posts on social media and pops out a thousand words essay so the writer can get $15 and the website makes a killing on ad revenue.
At least I spared you all a “Forbes contributor” post this week.
I did not know that. Thanks for that clarification!!
The Oakland Roots averaged an announced 4,018 fans per game in 2024 at Pioneer Stadium, a 5,000-ish seat stadium at Cal State Hayward.
But, yeah, build something six times that size. Okay.
It would still give them a better capacity usage than the Tarpons have… but yeah, I agree. It seems like maybe a midrange 10-12k stadium might be the logical next step, since they are planning to play in a temp stadium for a while anyway (if this goes through).
I’m not sure what the Tampa Tarpons have to do with this. The Oakland Roots soccer team’s proposal to build a 25k stadium seems high to me, given they averaged 4,000 a night.
They average (over the last three seasons) less than 1,000 fans per game playing in an 11,000 seat stadium, that is what.
If I understand their proposal properly, they (Oakland) plan to build a temp stadium to use while “waiting” for their 25,000 seater… which would be big even by MLS standards.
You think the 11,000-seat baseball stadium was built specifically to house a low-A ballclub?
25,000-capacity soccer stadium on a coveted waterfront property for a community team playing in a league with an enforced growth cap is a much worse allocation of resources no matter how you slice it.
I suspect they hope that somehow the situation in San Jose continues to erode and Fisher sells or moves the Quakes. In that case, MLS in Oakland would make a lot of sense.
To be fair, the 11,000 capacity is for the Yankees, not the Tarpons.
And yet the Tarpons play there… and their parent organization had to be paid $15m to agree to share the facility for one year.
The Yankees fill up the ballpark for a few weeks in Spring Training, and use the facilities all year long (and not just for the Tarpons). There’s no way a minor league soccer team in Oakland is going to fill up a 25,000 seat stadium every week for most of the year (even accounting for both the men’s and women’s teams)
The last article also stated that the Rays were based in North Florida… St Pete is about 200 miles south of both Jacksonville and Tallahassee, and even further south in the state than Orlando.
It’s actually kinda disturbing that a daily from a major city like Houston apaprently doesn’t have editors and fact-checkers doing simple searches on Google on this stuff.
The appeal of the Howard Terminal site for baseball was the view of the bay. A traditional soccer stadium wouldn’t offer that at all. And, there’s still the infrastructure issue.
Agreed, it seems quite an odd proposal. More Ham ‘n Eggs… like they can somehow “help” Oakland ‘salvage’ the failed HT stadium deal. It’s an answer without a question in my view.
The primary appeal was that the city was offering an outrageous sum of money to make it happen.
There’s a rendering of the Oaks’ plan. Indeed, there is no opening on the water side.
Periodic reminder that the bright idea for getting people to Howard Terminal from BART was a gondola over the railroad tracks.
The dream never dies…
We are going to get four years of government by false tweet, aren’t we. Sigh.
Well…. this happened….
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/12/21/rfk-stadium-deal-dc-bowser-congress/