Every once in a while, someone who doesn’t really follow sports or news or how the world works in general will suggest that, what with all the new stadiums being built these days, we’re set for a lull once every team owner who wanted one has already gotten one. This ignores the fact that some team always by definition has the oldest stadium, and history shows that it’s only a matter of time before that team’s owner gets back on line for a new one.
And with that, I give you the Houston Texans:
When Texans owner Cal McNair named a new team president last month, the first thing he touted about Mike Tomon’s résumé was his “extensive history in stadium development.”…
The Texans, meanwhile, have started negotiating a new lease agreement at NRG Stadium, their publicly-financed home since 2002. A recent facility assessment found the stadium was in average or below average condition compared to its peers, with a laundry list of needs from deferred maintenance over the years. But McNair’s quote and Tomon’s history suggest stronger ambitions: The team may want a new stadium entirely.
That’s some tea-leaf reading, there, but the Houston Chronicle has a bit more to go on than just Tomon’s history working for Legends Entertainment (co-owned by the Dallas Cowboys and New York Yankees) and work on the Buffalo Bills stadium campaign: The paper also reports that “two sources familiar with the Texans’ thinking” (so, likely someone in the team front office) say that team officials have “explored” a possible new stadium though they haven’t “committed” to one.
If your first thought is “Wait, don’t the Texans already play in a new stadium?” I have some bad news for you about time. NRG Stadium was opened all the way back in 2002, making it more than 22 years old, which is increasingly when sports team execs start thinking wistfully about that new-car smell, especially since 30-year leases are getting close to expiring then, making for a good opportunity for leverage for demanding new buildings. Besides, though the old stadium was built for just $352 million, because that’s how things rolled back in the first George W. Bush administration, it now somehow needs four times as much in renovations:
A recent study estimated long-term maintenance costs will reach $1.4 billion over the next 30 years, with Harris County on the hook for those payments.
None of the reporting has actually linked to that study, that I can find, at least. (Another Chronicle article puts the figure for required work at $2 billion, again without citing specifics.) And while yes, the Texans’ lease puts Harris County taxpayers on the hook for repairs — the county just spent $35 million on fixes to the roof and ginormous video screens, thanks to one of those dreaded state-of-the-art clauses that local governments way too often agree to — that’s the lease that expires in 2031, so the county would no longer be bound by it then.
In any event, Texans owner Cal McNair appears to be floating a trial balloon of “if it’s going to cost the county $2 billion to repair the old stadium, may as well help me build a new one,” and hoping no one looks too closely at whether that makes any sense for a building that is one month older than Jenna Ortega. If tt worked for the Tennessee Titans owners, it should be good enough for Houston, right? Wait, you say the Titans owners may have lied about the prospective renovation costs in order to get a new stadium? Well, can’t blame a guy for trying.
Do you think a decent first step would be municipalities just refusing to commit to ongoing maintenance and putting that on the teams during lease negotiations?
Or would teams just not do it?
I mean, if municipalities all refused to agree to it, teams would have no choice, right? Same way teams don’t currently demand space elevators as part of every stadium deal.
Hurricane Harvey (2017) $125 billion of damage. Hurricane Ike (2008) $30 billion. Tropical Storm Erin (2007) $248 million. It seems like saving money for the next natural disaster might be a good idea.
What would the Texans do if Houston didn’t even offer a lease extension? Move to St Louis (a market with 4.7 million fewer people)? Then the city could sell the land for development that generates property tax revenue.
In most cases, I believe that cities would be better off financially if their sports teams moved somewhere else. The costs related to their presence almost always outweigh the financial benefits (many of which are dubious, most of which are never supported by actual data).
Eventually if your city “lost” all it’s sports teams and the theatres and parks and concert halls also closed down, you might find you have a city that no-one wants to live in. But the net effect of losing one professional sports team will approach zero. If you take into account the boost “other” sports teams get when one leaves (which is a measurable statistic), you might find that that “loss” is actually a gain in net revenues.
Houston should have some leverage being a huge market that the NFL does not want to lose. Yes, the Oilers left for a smaller market, but that was a different era. I can see Cincy and Jacksonville and even Cleveland bending over backward to keep an owner happy. Houston can play hard ball.
Where can the Texans move? Well there is one place they could go and keep the name, San Antonio. I imagine Jerry Jones would love the Texans to go out of the state though.
Who has the money to lure a team? Even the smaller teams don’t have the options like the ’90s.
“If you take into account the boost “other” sports teams get when one leaves (which is a measurable statistic), you might find that that…”
Where is the documentation showing this? Don’t economists claim this isn’t a factor due to the “substitution effect”?
I think you may have misunderstood my point Warren. It’s not that there is a noticeable uptick in spending when a team leaves, it’s that sports fans are, to a certain extent/percentage, ‘fungible’.
If you have an NBA and an MLB team and one leaves, the percentage of sports fans that used to attend both on occasion will now spend their discretionary ‘sports’ spending at the remaining franchise’s home games. There will, of course, be some fans who do not like the “other” sport and will spend their money on non sports related entertainment instead. Or spend it on a streaming/direct TV package etc.
This is also true of sports related sponsorships too. Any ‘local’ company wanting to advertise in the sports industry does not benefit from having fewer options… the price for in stadium sponsorships the remaining franchises tends to go up.
Sadly this uptick in fortune for the non-departing franchise never translates into reduced demand for public subsidy… in fact, it is usually a signal to that owner that s/he has an opportunity to strike now because no council wants to “be the group that ‘lost’ multiple franchises”… which the city itself never actually owned.
We actually have some data on this. Among other things, the NHL canceled an entire season. Neil can correct me if I’m mistaken, but I am unaware of any study that showed an overall negative economic impact. People found other things to do with the money.
Sixty seconds of Googling turned up this:
“Using the impact found in a county with an NHL team, relative to trends in the surrounding counties, we find no general impact on employment”
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2232234
I’ll ask around about whether there’s anything more robust.
The other tenant of the stadium is the Houston Rodeo and Livestock show, which is a far bigger thing than you might imagine if you’re not from around there or have never been to it. Unless they plan on resurrecting the Astrodome, that land will be not for sale with or without football?.
Greensboro is still waiting, better yet, beat da Bears back to Decatur.
Yes, but footbawwwww is important, y’all.
Granted, the former Reliant field has a retractable roof, but it still cost double what Tampa’s then new stadium cost just four years earlier… (wiki source alert:)
“Immediately upon purchasing the Buccaneers in 1995, new owner Malcolm Glazer declared that twenty-eight year old Tampa Stadium was inadequate to justify the record $192 million he paid for the NFL franchise and began lobbying local government for a replacement. A few months later, the city of Tampa and Hillsborough County unveiled plans for a $168 million stadium that was to be paid for with a rental car surtax along with fees on items relating to stadium events, such as ticket surcharges and parking fees. However, the Glazer family rejected the plan within hours because it would reduce their revenue, and when local and state government officials did not agree on an alternative taxpayer-financed plan quickly enough for their liking, they threatened to move the Buccaneers elsewhere and were soon meeting with officials from several other cities to explore possible relocation sites”.
Eventually, the Bucs got Hillsborough to pay for 100% of the stadium when their own season ticket drive failed to reach it’s goal of 50,000 sold.
Honourable mention here to former Tampa mayor Bill Poe who actually fought the good fight against this scandalous deal, taking it all the way to Florida State Supreme Court where the court ruled this fine example of welfare for scumbag billionaires was not unconstitutional because “the people” of Florida somehow benefitted from paying for the entirety of the construction cost as well as the vast majority of the operating and maintenance expenses while the Glazers kept practically all revenue – even from non-NFL events.
So while I agree that the cost for “maintenance” or “replacement” of this stadium that is barely old enough to drink in some states is ridiculous, doubling costs every few years is not uncommon… there are many examples (Edmonton’s Arena (2016) vs Pittsburgh’s (2010) being just one obvious comparable).
And yet somehow “stadiums are getting insanely expensive to build” becomes an argument for replacing them every two decades and change…
I particularly like the suggestion/implication that “if it is going to cost you a billion or two to maintain the stadium that I haven’t bothered to, maybe it would be better for you to just build me a new one”.
Some serious hubris there.
And even after the county built and entirely paid for the stadium, the Glazers were still unhappy that they didn’t own it, but they also didn’t want to have to pay taxes on it. So they turned the stadium into a condominium with the county basically owning part of the property and taking all the tax liability and the Bucs owning the rest and paying nothing. The whole thing was just giveaway after giveaway.
Maybe it’s just the cynic in me, but could “deferred maintenance” also be interpreted as “letting the facility degrade to the point where asking for repairs or construction of a new stadium on the public dime becomes ‘justifiable?\'”
I think so.
It would also be of interest to know exactly whom is making the decision to ‘defer’ this work? Is it work that the team has asked the city to do and the city has refused? Or is it work that the team has identified as being needed but which it does not want to pay for and thus has pushed over to a ‘capital’ requirement rather than an O&M item?
Or perhaps there is no legitimate work that needs to be done which hasn’t been and the team are just looking to make the repair cost artificially high to justify… something else.
In the town I live in, the council – then looking to obtain county money to cover their own deficits – put together an infrastructure deficit document to prove their “need”. I asked how they came up with their (shocking) number. They said they included the cost of replacing every pipe, every sidewalk, curb, hydrant, repaving every road etc.
So the deficit noted was actually more of a net present value of all infrastructure document.
Hey, if someone else is paying…. right?
Thankfully, the county in question said “no”.
letting the facility degrade, inflating the costs of said repairs to cover the entire stadium, conviently to a number that would buy a whole new stadium, hiding the true substantially smaller number from scrutiny. Standard playbook by now, rinse and repeat.
The deficiencies McNair is probably referring to are the lack of all the bells and whistles at Jerry’s World, which would probably cost about $5,000,000,000 to build today. Harris County can tell the Texans to take a long walk out of the soon to be 2nd largest county in the country.
What’s the deal with the astrodome ?
It’s chillin’.
http://res.dallasnews.com/interactives/2014_March/astrodome/
Its funny that one stadium opened in the 90s already has a replacement under construction. 2 more are in process (Washington and Cleveland) of being replaced and one is having an overhaul on par with being a new stadium (Jacksonville). You also have St Louis which would have been replaced if the Rams had stayed. Then you add Chicago which was essentially a new stadium in 2003.
Conversely the only 90s NBA arena that could be replaced soon is New Orleans. The only 90s NHL arena which is being talked about being replaced is Ottawa but thats more due to location. Yes you have the Delta Center undergoing an overhaul which is on par with building new but that’s because it wasn’t built for hockey.
The only 90s MLB stadiums that are being talked about being replaced are Tampa and the White Sox. Even those 2 you’re talking early 90s (Tampa opened in 1990 and the White Sox in 1991) while the NFL stadiums I mentioned were opened 1995-1999.
So what is it with NFL stadiums that make them outdated so quickly.
JerryWorld happened and reset (or obliterated) the bar. Even though there’s not much there that is for the average non-club fan, and even though there are basic design defects like being oriented so that the sun shines in receivers’ eyes, it made every pre-existing stadium look ancient overnight. Call it the Camden Yards of football.
JerryWorld is great when you are in the middle of the most football crazed state in the world and the middle of thousands of corporate headquarters, and still have a national following despite no Superbowls for 30 years. Cities like Jacksonville and Buffalo have no need for 30,000 luxury club seats. As for Chicago and Houston, let da Bears and the Texans fight over the Greensboro market.
Don’t forget about the Wells Fargo Center in Philly….opened in 1996, renovated over the last few years by Comcast for about $400 million, may be taken down by 2031 for a new arena since the Sixers “agreed” to stay put.
I assume the one under construction is the new Nashville stadium? The existing one just had it’s 25th birthday and I, for one, am shocked that it hasn’t fallen down already.
The Georgia Dome didn’t even make it’s 25th birthday as I recall. And just ten years before demolition, it ‘needed’ a $300m refurbishment (original construction cost about $200m IIRC, which would be in the $450m range today).
You can add most of the new/heavily renovated in the early 2000s NFL facilities to the list too. Denver, Cleveland, Cincinnati etc. With the Eagles having won a championship, you can bet publicly funded renovations to the (ancient!) Linc won’t be too far in the offing. Pittsburgh had major additions recently, but that is no reason not to demand a new facility… especially if all their neighbours have one (Cle, Cinc, Buf) !
The stadium in Glendale is about to turn 20 as well… and we just can’t have that now can we?
The Ravens stadium could well be 30 (30!!!) by the time additional public funds are made available to replace it (the $600m upgrade fund won’t buy more than ten years, maybe five…). How do NFL owners survive in such a hostile climate I ask you?
Houstonian here. Also of note. Both sports agencies involved here, NRG Park and HCHSA, have de facto bans on out Gay male players participating in high profile events at taxpayer owned facilities.
NRG Park’s Tenants
Houston Texans – Owner donated to a campaign to make it legal to fire Gays. Fired its PR head for congratulating Harris on becoming VP on her personal website. Grooming an overt promoter (Case Keenum) of an anti-LGBT advocacy group to be the next leader of the team. No Gay players – ever.
Rodeo Houston – Has an EXPLICIT ban on recognition of LGBT fans while extravagantly promoting Christian night and Trump supporting guests. No out Gay athletes have ever performed there.
Texas Bowl – Has a board member from the viciously anti-LGBT advocacy group, Turning Point USA. No out Gay player has ever participated in the Texas bowl as a football player. Teams routinely bring anti-LGBT team pastors to curate anti-LGBT sentiment.
NCAA Final Four – This event was “hosted” by the school formerly known as Houston Baptist University. They ban Jews and out LGBTs from sports employment.
Copa America final – This event invited Saudi Arabia to participate even though any out Gay player would be executed.
NRG Park – a billion taxpayer dollars used to discriminate.
Wow. So if they started discriminating against white christians as well, they would have covered everyone and thus wouldn’t be discriminating at all???
Isn’t that how it works?