Sporting Chance
Nov 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Jennifer Popovec
Americans love sports
Professional leagues have become multibillion dollar institutions as ravenous fans pack stadiums and arenas and spend even more time watching events on television at home. Americans also love shopping. According to the latest estimate, Americans spent $2.25 trillion at shopping centers last year. So it's only natural that entrepreneurial developers have found ways to marry two of country's most popular pastimes.
Take Arlington, Texas. There, a sports mecca is taking shape. To the south, construction is well under way on a new $1 billion, 80,000-seat stadium for the National Football League's (NFL) Dallas Cowboys — the largest professional football facility in the country. To the north sits the Ballpark — the 13-year-old home of Major League Baseball's (MLB) Texas Rangers.
But unlike in the past, the stadiums will not sit as idle islands in the middle of seas of parking, left dormant when it's not game day. Instead, the Columbus, Ohio-based developer Steiner + Associates and Hicks Holdings are knitting together a district between the two stadiums designed to host activities all year through the construction of Glorypark, a $600 million mixed-use project that will combine 1.2 million square feet of retail, 300,000 square feet of office, high-rise and mid-rise residential, and two hotels.
“We think sports teams help galvanize a community, but there are a whole host of things that need to be around a sports venue for it to succeed,” says Barry Rosenberg, president of Steiner + Associates. From his perspective, a town center like Glorypark is one of these things.
Arlington isn't the first city to try and create a successful sports and retail mix. The trend got its start in 1992 when the Baltimore Orioles moved from Memorial Stadium on Baltimore's outskirts to Oriole Park at Camden Yards smack dab in its then-moribund downtown. It was a bold move at the time — reversing the decades-long trend of professional teams leaving city-based stadiums for sprawling suburban facilities. It also set a new standard for ballpark design with its retro look incorporating exposed steel and brick and showcasing a view of Baltimore's downtown.
There, the Orioles enjoyed unprecedented success. In the team's first year at Camden Yards the Orioles set a then-franchise home attendance record of 3,567,819, a 1,000,000-fan jump from the previous season. At the same time, Baltimore's Inner Harbor was completely redeveloped and became host to a series of prosperous retail developments. In 1998, the NFL's Baltimore Ravens joined the Orioles downtown.
“Camden Yards was the first try at creating a place where sports fans could find entertainment outside of the ballpark,” says Ron Turner, vice president of RTKL & Associates Inc., a Los Angeles-based firm that designed Glorypark and L.A. Live, a $1 billion mixed-use project near Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. The concept has matured so much that his firm has coined the phrase “extended play” to describe these types of entertainment/destination developments and districts.
What's happened today is that developers have learned from Baltimore — and other cities like Cleveland and Atlanta — and now are taking even bolder steps in the latest generation of stadium projects. Glorypark represents one of the most ambitious sports-centric retail developments proposed to date and is joined by others in progress like Meadowlands Xanadu in northern New Jersey, Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, N.Y., Patriot Place in Foxboro, Mass. and Victory Park in Dallas. All are multibillion-dollar facilities whose developers seek to integrate sports and retail and create districts where the disparate ebbs and flows of those activities can coexist successfully.
But that doesn't make the process of getting these massive stadiums built easy — especially when teams come looking for public financing. Some cities — such as Seattle, Minneapolis and Pasadena, Calif. — have bristled when asked for money. Instead, teams are increasingly turning to private developers who can create a mix of development around stadiums, arenas, ballparks and even NASCAR racetracks to make the projects more palatable to politicians and citizens.
“There's an opportunity to create a greater place than just a stadium or ballpark where people come to see a game and then leave,” says Jim Baeck, vice president of Development Design Group Inc. (DDG), a Columbus, Ohio-based firm that has designed several mixed-use projects around sports venues.
If successful, Glorypark will complete the transformation of Arlington that began a decade ago. What used to be nothing more than a bedroom community sandwiched between Dallas and Fort Worth now will have its own identity. And none of that could have happened without the new Cowboys Stadium. The city of 367,000 was able to beat out its much larger neighbor, Dallas, and won the right to host the stadium by committing $325 million toward its construction — something Dallas officials refused to do. In part, it's hoping to reap the riches that can come to a city from hosting a Super Bowl, (something Arlington will do for the first time in 2011) an event that could create $200 million of new spending across the entire Dallas Metroplex and $30 million within Arlington alone, according to Craig Depken, a sports economist at the University of Texas at Arlington.
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