The Harris County Houston Sports Authority’s building committee has estimated how much the Astros and Rockets venues will need in maintenance costs in coming years, and it’s a bundle: $836.5 million over the next 20 years for the Astros, and $635.81 million for the Rockets. The numbers, according to the Houston Business Journal, come from a study by Tennessee-based public facility consultant firm Venue Solutions Group, which previously estimated that the Texans‘ stadium needs $1.4 billion in renovations.
When price tags like these get floated, there are always two questions: 1) Is this for renovations the buildings need or just that the team owners want? and 2) Whose responsibility is it to pay for them? Buildings do need maintenance, but they also become what’s been called “economically obsolete,” which means they could make more money if they were schmancier — the second should reasonably be considered less a problem for the public landlord that owns the buildings and more a problem for the billionaire owners who’d like to be even more billionairey.
Let’s start with the need vs. want question: More than half of both the Astros ($448.27 million) and Rockets ($339.24 million) money is slated for “architectural renovations,” which means things like moving walls and rearranging layouts. It’s not something you do to keep a building from falling down, in other words, so much as to rejigger how you organize your building’s interior. Among other things, Chron.com reports that the Rockets’ “premium and legacy level need an upgrade to be more enticing,” which certainly seems to be edging more into “want” territory than “need.”
As for whose job it is to pay for snazzing up the venues, HBJ has this to say:
The Houston Astros and Houston Rockets are responsible for maintenance costs at their respective facilities.
However, leases for the Astros and Rockets require the sports authority to renovate Daikin Park and Toyota Center to keep them in first-class condition. In particular, the Astros’ 2018 lease extension requires HCHSA to obtain additional funding for renovations by Dec. 31, 2030. If the organization does not do so, the Astros have the option to terminate their lease effective March 31, 2035.
When the Astros moved into their stadium in 2000, they agreed to a 30-year lease, but that was extended to 50 years in 2018, with an additional $2 million a year in rent money to be used for maintenance and capital repairs. But somewhere along the way Harris County agreed to a state-of-the-art clause, meaning the lease binds the county to keep renovating the stadium along the way. That’s the same kind of subsidy-that-keeps-on-subsidizing that Hamilton County in Ohio is trying to get out of regarding the Bengals, so if Astros owner Jim Crane terminated his lease early, he’d arguably be doing Harris County a favor. (The Rockets’ lease already expires in 2034, so it’s not as clear what Harris County would be risking there by not giving their arena a $635 million facelift.)
What would really be nice here is a look at the VSG report itself, but if it exists anywhere online, it’s well-hidden. (VSG hasn’t even added the Houston venues to its online portfolio yet.) Until then, everyone please agree to report that the Astros and Rockets owners want almost $1.5 billion in upgrades, not that that’s what the buildings need — and that while denying it could mean having to renegotiate the team’s leases, it’s not like there are any other sixth-largest media markets in the U.S. out there that they could move to instead.
I am a lifelong sports fan. But even I am reading this and finding my takeaway is “Houston taxpayers could be free of subsidizing MLB and NBA teams by 2035”. I can’t imagine that is the way the authors of this article (much less the carpetbaggers feeding them the information…) would like their message heard.
As the nation (in fact, most western nations…) experiences a general decline in disposable income for broad swaths of its population, you do have to wonder for whom these subsidies will be seen as ‘benefits’ as the years go by.
Are there 1m committed sports fans (IE: those who can and will pay to go to multiple games per year in each of the major sports) in Houston?
I have my doubts there are that many, but I don’t live there so I can’t say. Even if there are, however, this means that more than 5 out of 6 people paying this welfare to billionaires don’t have any interest in the product they are subsidizing.
The Houston Chronicle author of the article sure does make it sound as if the Astros and Rockets owners are beneficent in the $ they’ve “contributed” and/or “given” in the maintenance of the buildings, when this is simply their contractual responsibility.
A nice blend and mish mash of “repairs needed”, “architectural renovations”, “needed…updates”, “need of the most attention”, “require a refresh”, “required” repairs, etc.
I think the title of the Chronicle article should be corrected from “$1.4 billion bill: Houston’s top sports venues face massive overhaul costs” to….”Houstonians face massive $1.4 billion bill for overhauling Houston’s Billionaires’ profitability”.