Category: San Francisco 49ers

I thought about writing some kind of year-end list for this site, but got stuck on whether the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel or the Buffalo News should win Best Performance As A Team PR Department By An Allegedly Major Newspaper, and never got around to writing the rest. Newballpark.org had no such problems, though, and devotes an entire post today to all the ways in which the San Francisco 49ers‘ new stadium was a disappointment: the sod had to be replaced five separate times, it was crazy hot in the sun during the early season, and attendance for college games was pretty lousy. The 49ers kinda sucked. And, though the site doesn’t mention this bit, the traffic was terrible, at least in the early going.

All this is fun to point and laugh at, but I’m not sure that Newballpark’s proposed solution (the 49ers should have built a roof on the stadium) makes all that much sense: Yeah, it would have kept fans from collapsing from the heat, but you can put in a fake turf field if you want for a hell of a lot less than the couple hundred million dollars it would have taken to add a roof, retractable or not. And as for the 49ers’ on-field fortunes taking a nosedive, you could make the case that this actually happened at the perfect time for the 49ers: All their crazy-high-priced PSLs have already sold, so the team owners have guaranteed that they can pay off their building, regardless of whether those PSLs are worth much going forward. Yes, it would be nice to keep people actually going to games and buying $6 bags of M&Ms, but if the choice is between people being disappointed in the product after they’ve paid for it or beforehand, I’d guess that the Yorks will take the former any day.

So, does that make the new 49ers stadium a success, or not? It depends on what you mean by success: Despite a $1.2 billion price tag, it was paid for without bankrupting either the team or the city of Santa Clara, which is a rarity these days. On the other hand, all 49ers fans get for their years of waiting (and their hard-earned PSL cash) is to have escaped a stadium where they were in danger of frostbite for one where they’re in danger of heatstroke. And sports teams, it turns out, don’t magically turn into winners, or even remain winners, just because they’re in a schmancier building. Maybe everyone’s New Year’s resolution — for ticket-buying fans, for cities seeking stadium deals, and even for teams looking to cash in on the former two parties — should be “be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.”

The San Francisco 49ers finally had their real, honest-to-god, official regular season home opener at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara yesterday, and according to the San Jose Mercury News, the traffic still royally sucks:

While post-game transit rides appeared smooth, some fans who drove reported huge waits to get out of the parking spaces, saying it took two hours or more just to leave their lot.
Some fans resorted to driving over curbs to get out and others said travelers looked so angry they were ready to fight the parking attendants. Others, in a fit of rage, claimed they wouldn’t return until the situation was fixed.

At least traffic getting to the game was a “non-issue,” according to NBC Bay Area, with — sorry, you weren’t finished, Merc News?

Fans going to the blue lots off Lawrence Expressway reported pregame waits of up to two hours.

“I have to say, it’s beyond frustrating,” San Jose resident Joey Windham, 35, said from his car before the game, where he had barely budged for two hours. “It pretty much has zapped the life out of everybody.”

 

Now, the 49ers’ old place had some traffic problems, too, so take all this with a grain of salt. (Especially the bit about fans refusing to come back.) But if nothing else, this is a sign that the preseason traffic woes can’t be cured by the Great America amusement park being closed on game days (as it was last night), or running a few extra commuter trains.

One improvement: No one died from the heat this time!

Oh hey, did I neglect to mention that the San Francisco 49ers‘ new stadium has a field that’s falling apart? Apparently the 49ers (or maybe the field itself) is trying to get my attention, because the team has now replaced the grass twice in the last week:

The thicker-cut field installed two days before Sunday’s preseason game against the San Diego Chargers was meant as a temporary solution because the sod cannot generate the deep roots needed for long-term use.

Now, team officials are also removing and making undisclosed “tweaks” to part of the sand base below the turf, and are ripping out the entire 2.5-acre playing surface, including the sidelines and the area behind the endzones, which had not previously been replaced.

Deadspin posted this photo from Instagram (the link appears to have gone dead), which, um, yikes:

The 49ers are footing the bill for all this, so the only harm done here is to the high school games that have had to be canceled rescheduled (they’ve been moved to Columbus Day weekend, with additional games added then as well), and maybe to any players who end up getting injured playing on turf that isn’t actually rooted to the ground. (The 49ers’ home opener is on Sept. 14.) Still, it’s a reminder that “new” doesn’t necessarily mean “better,” or even “done well.” Just think: If this happened at the Oakland Coliseum, people would be calling for the wrecking balls to start swinging before halftime.

 

I’m on wonky internet in an undisclosed location, but here are the top headlines from Sunday’s first-ever San Francisco 49ers game at their new stadium in Santa Clara:

• “Levi’s Stadium review: Food runs out, 49ers struggle, fun had by all” (CBS Sports). Highlights: There were no lines for the bathrooms, and 49ers fans really like $12 meat sandwiches.
• “The race to Levi’s Stadium: By car, Caltrain, Amtrak, BART, and VTA” (San Francisco Chronicle). Highlights: All four Chronicle reporters got to the game by kickoff, though it took the BART rider two hours and 16 minutes. (The reporter who drove made it from Mill Valley in an hour and 18 minutes, which isn’t terrible coming from Marin County.)
• “49ers fans complain of ‘unbearable’ heat at Levi’s Stadium amid fan’s death” (San Jose Mercury News). Highlights: The sun, an infrequently appearing feature in San Francisco, was “unbearable” and “miserable,” and most fans fled the seats before the end of the game, some to wait on long lines for ice cream. And a man sitting in direct sun and “just pouring sweat” died of a heart attack in the third quarter.

So, new 49ers stadium overall report: Great place to eat and go to the bathroom, not impossible to get to if you leave enough time, don’t stay in your seats to watch the game on a sunny day or you’ll maybe die. I think in headlinese that qualifies as “mixed reviews.”

 

The San Francisco 49ers‘ new stadium in Santa Clara had its soft opening on Saturday with a San Jose Earthquakes–Seattle Sounders soccer match, and things went anywhere from pretty okay to terrible, depending on who you ask:

“I never had a feeling of pride in my stadium, but I went to Candlestick because that’s how I was raised,” said Alexis Marina Kershner, 34, of San Francisco. “I learned how to tailgate by the time I was 6, out in the parking lot, where it was cold and it was windy and my hot dogs blew away.

“But coming here? This is like a whole new level. This makes me proud.”

That’s good!

The VTA’s 5:54 p.m. train headed north from San Jose’s Tamien station was 10 minutes late. And then the power went off near the stadium stop — killing the air-conditioning. With panic levels rising, the cry went up to open emergency windows. A police officer on the platform raced up and slammed one window in a woman’s face; he later apologized. One pregnant woman nearly passed out.

That’s a lot less good! But hopefully the trains won’t break down every time.

With a goal of arriving 90 to 120 minutes before the 7:30 game (actual kickoff was at 7:53 p.m.), I followed the instructions on my parking pass, optimistically turning onto Tasman, the road that leads to the stadium, a little before 6 p.m. and hit gridlock. Complete and total, Candlestick-esque stopped traffic. It took a full hour to go one mile. But at least I was able to get one of the last parking spots when I finally got to my lot – which those behind me in the jam weren’t able to do. They were turned away and sought street parking in neighborhoods miles from the stadium, exactly the scenario many Santa Clara residents were concerned about…

The wireless crashed in the press box, just as it used to regularly do at Candlestick, and the TVs went out for a long stretch. Some ticket buyers who had tried to use the Levi’s Stadium phone app to buy parking passes before the game were unsuccessful. The sound system was muddied and roundly panned.

The will-call windows and security lines were jammed before game time. Many unhappy women didn’t realize they couldn’t bring their purses in – an NFL rule but not an MLS rule – and had to turn around and go back to their cars. Some security screening was lax and some elevators weren’t working. The women’s bathrooms, in at least one location, ran out of toilet paper.

That’s actually pretty awful!

Now, the whole point of a soft opening is to discover and fix problems like these, and some (“Buy more toilet paper!”) are easily enough fixed. A muddy sound system at what’s supposed to be a state-of-the-art stadium isn’t good, though, and traffic gridlock and insufficient parking — this at a game that only had about two-thirds as many fans as will be present for a 49ers game — isn’t promising at all. At worst, it sounds like 49ers fans will have traded a painful drive to a 50-year-old stadium for a painful drive to a brand-new one, and even if the concessions are now crazy expensive (“Are they paying for this place with beer?” one fan asked aloud on Saturday), at least they won’t be paying for it with tax dollars, only with PSLs. Which might be something they can look at as an investment, partly, maybe.

Meanwhile, no word that I’ve seen on how the app to tell you the shortest bathroom lines is working out. I am honestly stunned that, in Silicon Valley, this wasn’t the headline, but maybe all the tech reporters are still stuck in traffic…

 

And let’s see what’s in the papers today … hello, Oakland Tribune:

‘Stadium effect’ expected to spur office, retail, hotel development

That’s today’s headline about the new San Francisco 49ers stadium in Santa Clara, and is surprising, to say the least, given that pretty much any economist could tell you that an NFL stadium that’s dark 355 [EDIT: or 345 or 350 or whatever; see comments below] days a year is not going to encourage anyone to build much of anything nearby. (Or as the University of Chicago’s Allen Sanderson memorably put it, “There are only two things you do not want on a valuable piece of real estate. One is a cemetery, and the other is a football stadium.”) But the Tribune reports that “roughly $3 billion worth of office buildings, retail centers, hotels and residences are under construction or on the drawing boards in the vicinity of the stadium,” and that can only be because—

To be sure, some of that development would have occurred anyway because of the technology boom that has been underway for the past three years.

Okay, but really it’s because of the stadium, according to—

developers, realty executives and analysts say a considerable amount of the new activity is due to what they call the “stadium effect.”

“Developers and realty executives,” huh? What do economists, planning officials, or really anyone without a vested interest have to say about the cause of the planned developments? Reading the article all the way through … nothing. Oakland Tribune? Are you there? Are your emailing fingers broken? Hello?

The San Francisco 49ers‘ under-construction stadium in Santa Clara has been a reasonable deal for the public in some ways, but the whole bit about football fans needing a place to park their cars hasn’t worked out quite as smoothly. And now it may be setting some kind of record for roughness, as the Niners’ parking needs are threatening to put the kibosh on a hotel/retail/office complex being developed by, seriously, Joe Montana:

Under terms of the 2012 stadium deal, the 49ers are entitled to 789 parking spots on land where Montana’s company intends to build a hotel, stores and office space. The site is just across the street from the stadium.

“Their position has been that unless we find other parking acceptable to them, they may not allow the project to go forward,” said City Manager Julio Fuentes.

Just sharing parking spaces with the development won’t do, the team says. Niners President Larry MacNeil told city officials in a letter Feb. 10 that if Montana’s $400 million project goes ahead, Santa Clara needs to come up with 8.5 acres of replacement parking free of charge.

So far, the team has rejected most of 4,000 spaces that the city has proposed as too distant, too waterlogged or beset by other problems.

This is all part of the game of chicken the 49ers are playing with Santa Clara over parking, and will probably get worked out in the end. Still, even the prospect of a 49ers stadium not only not spurring local development, but actually preventing development being pursued by the team’s greatest player ever, stretches irony to the breaking point.

The Santa Clara stadium for the San Francisco 49ers may be going well in most respects, but at least there’s something for residents to be legitimately upset about:

After the San Francisco 49ers rallied support for their new stadium by promising to pay for new youth soccer fields, the NFL team isn’t following through with its part of the deal — and taxpayers will be left footing the multimillion dollar bill…

Jed York, owner of the 49ers, told the soccer league in a letter two years ago that the team would fund replacement fields. But the team’s front office shocked the soccer league last week by telling them the Niners had abandoned those plans.

“You feel betrayed or lied to,” said Matt Heintz, president of the 1,500-member Santa Clara Youth Soccer League, which had supported the new stadium that voters approved public financing for in 2010. “It sounds like they got what they wanted, they got the stadium built — and pushed us aside, brushed us under the rug.”

The current youth soccer fields won’t be usable during football season because of 49ers fan traffic, and the cost of just studying how to build new fields is estimated to be about $2 million. (The cost of actually acquiring and building the fields is unknown.) Mayor Jamie Matthews claims that the project won’t use general fund money, but it’s tough to say how he knows this, since he doesn’t even know how much it will cost, let alone how it will be paid for.
I was puzzling over why the 49ers are suddenly drawing a line in a sand over this issue — even if the cost turns out to be several million dollars, that’s a rounding error on a billion-dollar-plus project — until I got to the last paragraph of the Mercury News article:

But last week one of York’s vice presidents in the front office said in a letter to the soccer league that the local school fields they had looked into upgrading are “no longer available.” It said now the 49ers would only fund replacement fields if the soccer league was willing to give up its prized soccer park to the Niners to use for VIP stadium parking.

So from the sound of it, this is less the 49ers owners inexplicably backing away from a commitment, and more them suddenly demanding a land swap in exchange because as we know, they’re desperate for parking. Which is still backing out of a promise, but at least it’s explicable.