Within the ecosystem of sports, the trend is about using them to build a community. Initially, you couldn’t have expected that just by putting an arena and a team in a city it would change the community and economic landscape. It just didn’t seem likely.
In the 1980s and early ’90s, the city of Arlington, Texas, the city of Baltimore, Maryland, and the city of Cleveland, Ohio, put arenas and stadiums into their communities. They did this with the idea that their communities would be improved by having sports facilities. And in some cases, this does work. But in some cases, it just doesn’t, and it takes cataclysmic emphasis to get development to occur.
The way this is happening in the current environment is that developers are not only building sports facilities and arenas in the communities, but they’re also building all of the other components that go along with them. They’re building housing, restaurants, theaters, shopping, parking, and mixed-use commercial developments. They’re doing this to catalyze the communities, and to do it in a way where sports are part of it, and maybe even at the center of it, but aren’t necessarily the only part of it that’s generating community emphasis and changing the community landscape.
Barclay’s Center in New York is a great example of this. Before that building was constructed, Atlantic Yards was part of Downtown Brooklyn. But now, there’s shopping there, and multi-modal transportation elements. Then there’s the arena, which holds hundreds of events each year. This brings people to a community gathering place. If it weren’t for the transportation and the shopping that was also included, and it was only the arena, it might not have the same impact.
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