Football Stadiums Belong in the Suburbs
There is absolutely no good reason I can think of to try to tempt the Washington Redskins to move to some kind of new stadium located inside the District of Columbia. I love football, I love DC, and I love urbanism. But the NFL season only has 16 games. Eight of those games are on the road. That means you’re talking about a facility that’s going to be without an audience on over 95 percent of possible days. That means the facility can’t possibly be anchoring a neighborhood. On the overwhelming majority of occasions you’re talking about a giant empty space.
A baseball stadium or a basketball/hockey arena are used frequently enough to be perfectly viable elements of an urban neighborhood. Nevertheless, the tendency is for governments to subsidize their construction to a degree that goes far beyond what can be justified. But a football stadium just doesn’t work, it’s a hugely inefficient use of land, and thus ought to be exactly where FedEx Field currently is—a pretty peripheral area in the suburbs. Urban land should be used intensively, and the only way for a football stadium to be an intensive land use is to be one of those combo football/baseball stadiums that have fallen out of fashion and nobody wants to use.
The ideal thing for DC to do with the space currently occupied by RFK Stadium and RFK-affiliated parking lots is to put up lots of buildings where people can live and shop and some kind of park for them to enjoy. It’s land near a metro station and would make a nice fairly dense mixed use community that brought some extra amenities to the surrounding neighborhood.
48 Responses to “Football Stadiums Belong in the Suburbs”
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August 14th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Someone obviously doesn’t give a f**k about soccer…
August 14th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Why would DC, always out of money, subsidize a stadium for billionaire owners so that the upper crust season ticket holders can watch millionaire players run around a field 8 times a year, while the schools crumble around the student’s ears? Because they can and no one calls them on it.
Pathetic…
August 14th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Philly Eagles just signed Michael Vick, naturally.
For the same reason that Michael had pit bulls –we want someone who will jump into a scrimmage, kick the other dawgs’ ass, and come up grinning with blood on his face and the ear of the opposing quarterback in his teeth.
Plus that time in the pen learning how to conceal a shank just added a little polish to this debutante.
Be afraid, Redskins. Be very afraid.
August 14th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Someone obviously doesn’t give a f**k about soccer…
No red-blooded American cares about soccer. I’m all for HSR, social democracy, universal health care, Italian shoes and French cuisine. Soccer fandom is best left to the Europeans.
August 14th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Indianapolis made a big point about having a football stadium and basketball arena downtown as part of its revival, and it turned out pretty well…although the “Hoosier Dome,” as it was originally called, was indeed a dome and had other uses.
But I would agree that there’s a big difference between a Midwest city looking for new energy to revive its downtown and our nation’s capital.
August 14th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
This is the problem right here. Seattle got plenty of use out of the Kingdome– football games, baseball games, concerts, conventions, monster truck shows, all that good shit. Plus the city and county got a healthy cut of the revenue, had lucrative leases with the Seahawks and Mariners, etc. Plus there was tax revenue from fans getting drunk in bars nearby after the game/monster truck show/whatever. Maybe cities should never get in the stadium-constructing business in the first place, but if they do, this is how it should be done.
The Seahawks and Mariners decided they (each) wanted a stadium that made them more money and where they had to pay less in leases and taxes. Fair enough, but unfortunately the city, county, and state governments, rather than give the teams the finger, decided to throw $500 million in tax dollars into new stadii (two, replacing one) where the taxes and leases and such wouldn’t make as much money for the government as they did in the Kingdome. Of course this sorry performance has been repeated by cities all over the place, and if a city doesn’t pony up some other one will, and swipes the team. (Thanks a lot, Oklahoma City! Jackasses!)
Any city of any size in going to build a stadium at some point, if for nothing else than high school football games. Might as well go for the multi-use jobs that come bloser to paying for themselves (or even turning a profit) and telling teams who want to ride the public tit to go to hell. My guess is this proposal to bring the Redskins to DC will be one of those classic corporate-welfare scams we’ve seen with so many other teams moving from one stadium to the next.
August 14th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Should read “closer” not “bloser.” Should save the mis-spellings for after happy hour.
August 14th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Also, the Redskins should be forced to play ball in an empty parking lot behind a mini-mall until they pick a name that isn’t a racial slur.
August 14th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
You are absolutely right. However, I would add that a large part of the problem is that teams tend to surround their stadiums with an extravagant amount parking.
A good option for football stadiums could be to make them easily adaptable into convention venues. Especially for a city like DC which probably hosts a good amount of conventions, this would help make the stadium more vital to the community.
Not to throw in a little hometown booster-ism but…
Chicago is an interesting case study in stadiums and urbanism. Soldier Field is right downtown but, since it’s surrounded by the museum campus and lakefront trails, it remains remarkably vibrant, even on non-game days. Wrigley Field has virtually no parking and is integrated tightly with the neighborhood, which during game days, is an attraction in itself. And then the United Center and Comiskey Park, which are typical of modern stadium construction in that they are surrounded by depressed, but recovering neighborhoods. It is going to be interesting to see what happens to their gigantic parking lots when the land around those stadia becomes more valuable. However, those two stadiums are generally irrelevant to the growth in the area. Stadiums don’t necessarily make great urban rejuvenators unless people want to live around them.
August 14th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
I notice you don’t address the transit issue this stadium’s current location poses, which just happens to be a God-awful mess.
The only realistic way to get to the stadium for the 80,000 some-odd people who attend the games is to drive, since it is located an unwalkable distance (not to mention the pedestrian-unfriendly terrain) from just about the furthest suburban spur of the Metro. And since many of the drivers are coming a long way around the beltway from northern Virginia (and not, say, from the areas to the stadium’s immediate northeast – Ravens country), the traffic snarls are huge.
NOT TO MENTION…the intelligence-free placement of feeder roads and the clumsy use of existing regional roads…come on, Matt, wouldn’t putting the stadium at the center of a well-established transit hub at the very least reduce the disgusting, unnecessary and attendant woes of the traffic tie-ups the current location creates?
August 14th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
“Indianapolis made a big point about having a football stadium and basketball arena downtown as part of its revival, and it turned out pretty well…although the ‘Hoosier Dome,’ as it was originally called, was indeed a dome and had other uses.”
It DID work out pretty well, and indeed the dome was used far more than 8 times per year for hosting basketball, concerts, monster truck rallies, and god knows what else.
However, even if you hold Indy out as a positive example of stadium-driven urban redevelopment, which I would, they eventually screwed the pooch by letting the Colts blackmail them into tearing down a perfectly good dome and building an all-new retractable-roof dome that cost much, much more and bankrupted the city’s stadium authority due to large-scale bipartisan idiocy and corruption at several different levels of government.
So despite a few notable exceptions, Matt’s rule of thumb is probably a wise one.
August 14th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
FedEx Field is the biggest horror show transit-wise in the NFL. My sister-in-law left her job in Northern Va. to attend McCartney concert there, and never got in because she and many others could not find parking spaces in the lot at 9:30, two hours after the warm-up act kicked off the concert. It is a disgraceful tribute to the lack of regional planning in Matt’s home town and the fact Daniel Snyder is an idiot.
In theory, Matt is right. The Patriots and Bob Kraft are doing fine developing the land around Gillette Stadium, which is 30 miles drive from downtown Boston.
Execution is key in urban planning as well as football.
August 14th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Wake up you silly liberals! Its not a football stadium, its a FEMA concentration camp!!
August 14th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
I’ve got a question for everyone. I’m actually pretty interested in these types of urban development questions, and it’s pretty obvious that Matt just kinda spits out ideas off the top of his head without any study or research at all (which doesn’t make them wrong, just obviously un-researched).
But there has to be some pretty good blogs out there from people who really do study this stuff, right? There’s lots of smart people who do this kind of stuff for a living. Does anyone have any suggestions on who’s good to read regarding modern urban development issues from a left-leaning perspective?
August 14th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Oh, so now suddenly people enjoy parks?
August 14th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
A better example in Chicago area is a few miles north, in Evanston. There Northwestern has a football stadium and a basketball arena right next to a vibrant upper-middle-class, mixed-use neighborhood.
The small businesses in the area cater to the neighborhood and by and large do not cater to the sports crowd. This kind of makes sense, because the organizers of sports events work hard to make sure the fans spend their money inside the stadium – buying hot dogs, drinks and souvenirs.
The neighborhood business actually consider the sporting events to be a drag on their business, as fans park in spaces that customers would like to use. This is especially true in football season, when you can’t – literally (I measured it) – can’t park within a mile and a half of the stadium. The neighborhood businesses consider those days lost.
August 14th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
In urban real estate, the only thing worse than a football stadium is a graveyard. Stadium subsidies are a terrible waste of money; there’s just no evidence that stadiums of any kind help spur neighborhood revitalization or employment.
August 14th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
NOT TO MENTION…the intelligence-free placement of feeder roads and the clumsy use of existing regional roads…come on, Matt, wouldn’t putting the stadium at the center of a well-established transit hub at the very least reduce the disgusting, unnecessary and attendant woes of the traffic tie-ups the current location creates?
Before the Indigenous Persons moved to FedEx, there was talk of a location in outer NoVa that was between where I then lived and where I went to church. I was not happy at the prospect of not being able to get home in time for kickoff because I was tied up in stadium traffic for a game I couldn’t get into.
August 14th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Also, the Redskins should be forced to play ball in an empty parking lot behind a mini-mall until they pick a name that isn’t a racial slur.
There’s precedent for that. When the Federal government built the brand spanking new District Stadium (renamed RFK Memorial a few years later), a Massachusetts subcommittee chairman got a provision into the legislation that forbade the Indigenous Persons from moving in until they integrated. In those pre-expansion days when their “home territory” stretched south to Florida and west to Texas (and the official arrangment of “Hail to the R******s” included a “Dixie” countermelody in the second verse), George Preston Marshall was reluctant to offend his radio fanbase and was running the last whites-only NFL team. So a trade for Bobby Mitchell was the price of getting into the new stadium.
August 14th, 2009 at 7:51 pm
I disagree with Matt on this. I think, generally speaking, all major sports complexes belong in the suburbs. Chicago does thing right, but that’s just about the only example I can think of.
Speaking as someone who used to live less than a mile from Turner Field in Atlanta, I can tell you that stadiums do not make good neighbors. That stadium is surrounded by the largest sea of parking imaginable. There is no near by business supported by that horror, even though it is located in what is essentially downtown Atlanta.
Parking, however is only one of the problems created by urban sports complexes–and the most easily solved with garages. The bigger problem is that you have to have a huge road capacity for events that occur only occassionally. Downtown Atlanta is filled with massive one-way roads and viaducts that exist primarily to sweep surburban families past any possible contact with urban Atlanta at maximum speed and straight into the secured parking around the stadium. There’s also the huge expense in police work during events that must be covered by the city.
As far as I am concerned, Cobb County can have the Brave, the Falcons, and the Hawks.
August 14th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Re: Indianapolis made a big point about having a football stadium and basketball arena downtown as part of its revival
Baltimore has Camden Yards and its named-after-a dumb-bank football stadium right next to each other, and in the middle of an old brown-field that wasn’t going to be used for residential construction anyway. Added bonus: the two stadiums (stadia?) can use the same parking lots. And while the football stadium does get less use, there’s other stuff that goes on there, including non-sport things. And oh yes– it’s right next to the light rail stop.
August 14th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Re Mike at 17: “In urban real estate, the only thing worse than a football stadium is a graveyard. Stadium subsidies are a terrible waste of money; there’s just no evidence that stadiums of any kind help spur neighborhood revitalization or employment.”
—————–
So why did the Emperor Vespasian put one in downtown Rome?
Bread and circuses, my boys. Got to keep the rabble diverted with cheap entertainment while you turn them into slaves and steal them blind.
A Society is revealed by its architecture — and huge mass stadiums are signs of a corrupt Republic on its last legs. One which has degenerated into oligarchic Empire, on the Rubes have to be left with their delusions.
August 14th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
I dunno: you were just in Pittsburgh, where the football stadium and baseball stadium are close enough to share parking and (soon) public transit, along with some hotels and restaurants and such, and the new casino is supposedly going to generate higher revenues because of the proximity to the football stadium, and so on. So I guess my point is that if land really isn’t that scarce and the football stadium is just one part of greater complex of reasonably related things, it might not be a terrible idea to have a dedicated football stadium near your CBD.
August 14th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
Regarding comment 14 by WOOF
Woof
If you are looking for other blogs on urban planning i only know a couple. I personally like the blog called ” The Urbanophile”. It looks at urban development issues.
It’s fairly non partisan. I don’t even know if the author is a Democrat or a Republican [ which i like]. But it does tend to focus entirely on the midwest region.
He does post regularly.And there tend to be interesting posts.
There also is “New Geography”. But that looks at urban planning from a libertarian point of view.You may not agree with much of what is written.But it is always good to look at both sides of things.And New Geography is defintly not “right wing” as far as im concerned.It also has a lot of links to other urban planning blogs.But i have only checked out a few.
Good luck on your search for urban planning blogs WOOF .I hope you find what you want.It is a shame that MR Yglesias does not have any links to these types of blogs.
August 14th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
I see JonF made much the same points about Baltimore’s setup as I did about Pittsburgh’s.
August 14th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Regarding comment 21 by JonF
I would defintly agree with JonF that the 2 Baltimore stadiums are convenient to light rail.
My main concern about stadiums is how they are financed.Baltimore struck one of the worst deals possible with Art Modell just to lure the [ then] Cleveland Browns to Baltimore.
Im not liberal.But i would rather have socialised medicine than socialised sports any day. If the owners pay for their own stadiums i really don’t care too much where they put them.
BTW MR JonF. Don’t complain too much about M&T bank stadium’s name.It’s a lot better than when it was called PSINET Stadium. Which was always pronounced “pissinit” by half of Baltimore.
Best regards to you MR JonF
August 14th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
I’m surprised at the amount of agreement here. The only city I’ve lived in for any extended period of time with a pro football team is Charlotte, NC, home to Bank of America Stadium and the Carolina Panthers (GO PANTHERS!!!), so my experience is limited here, but I will say that the Panthers’ stadium is a pretty great anchor within Charlotte’s center city, which was pretty free of major attractions until the Panthers moved in. Since then, downtown has seen huge growth in its pedestrian-friendly urban environment, fed largely (initially) by the close proximity to the field, which is in walking distance. The Bobcats Arena was recently built on the other side of downtown, and the light rail line that was built to serve the center city serves thousands every gameday–these are people who park *outside* the city and ride downtown.
The big problem that many people have correctly cited as a huge turn-off for these mega-buildings is the amount of (usually surface) parking that has to be devoted to the venue–this is perhaps the only area where FedEx “Shining City on a Hill” Field excels. In Charlotte, there are a fair number of surface lots near the stadium and scattered around downtown, but they are also used (usually to capacity) by commuters during the work week.
MY’s point about the use of the area on non-gamedays is well put, but that will be the case no matter where the venue is sited. You will have some extra infrastructure built to accommodate the max load of the building either way, but I’ll take a little extra parking and cheering for the hometown team while you go from your favorite pre-game bar to the field any day. Have you ever been out to the FedEx Field area on a non-event-day? You’ll be the only one on that 8 lane divided highway and it will take you longer to drive through the Target parking lot than it will to walk from your car sitting in the empty lot, to the door. I’ll pass.
August 14th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
The Romans put their sports complexes in the middle of the urban zone and still somehow managed to maintain walkable cities!
August 14th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
Actually, I don’t care where they put the stadiums, just as long as my tax dollars don’t have to pay for them.
August 15th, 2009 at 12:25 am
JMG–Gillette Stadium is great–until you try to get out of it. Went to a half-full event there once and spent two hours getting out of the parking lot and a couple miles down the road to the highway. There’s exactly one way in and one way out, and there’s no mass transit link of any kind. The same is true of just about every suburban stadium I know of. I’d argue that the best place to put a stadium is in between the city center and the suburbs, in a place with highway and mass transit links in multiple directions–good examples of this are the Baltimore Stadiums and Shea Stadium in New York.
August 15th, 2009 at 1:15 am
@pete, thanks for the links.
@Sam S., I honestly don’t see how the pedestrian-friendly environment could have been “largely fed” by just 8 games a year at a football stadium.
In general, I think the football stadium/convention center/other stuff complex with shared parking and public transit works pretty well near a downtown. Situating the stadium against a natural break helps a lot (like Pittsburgh’s rivers or Chicago’s lake), since things don’t have to try to build around it. The big problem comes when you try to build a suburban-style stadium with a huge dedicated parking lot and no public transit in a downtown area. Then you just have a big ugly eyesore that stops growth and development.
August 15th, 2009 at 1:43 am
@31 Woof: “In general, I think the football stadium/convention center/other stuff complex with shared parking and public transit works pretty well near a downtown.”
Agree Woof. It really all depends. Every situation is different. A downtown combo facility might be pretty cool.
But for sure, a dedicated football only stadium with massive parking lots in the middle of your downtown is pretty goddamn goofy.
August 15th, 2009 at 3:34 am
In Charlotte, there are a fair number of surface lots near the stadium and scattered around downtown, but they are also used (usually to capacity) by commuters during the work week.
This really is the key point. Urban stadia should reuse the same infrastructure on evenings and weekends that the city uses for commuters 9-5. That’s why they’re best built close to downtown.
August 15th, 2009 at 7:25 am
Re: Urban stadia should reuse the same infrastructure on evenings and weekends that the city uses for commuters 9-5.
We have an elevated freeway spur (395) next to our stadiums, and a lot of the parking is underneath it, space which would otherwise be wasted. Also adjacent to the stadiums is the Baltimore Convention Center. I have to say that the setup for our stadiums is quite good. They anchor the west end of the downtown/harbor area, are quite easy to get in and out of (next to I-95 and the Washington-Baltimore Pkwy) and they’ve probably played some role in the revival of the Federal Hill neighborhood to their immediate east.
August 15th, 2009 at 8:54 am
You could make a football stadium work in the middle of the city if you do what has been done with the verizon center and put a bunch of retail on the first floor that can be accessed without going into the stadium.
You could also make the parking situation work by running lots of shuttle buses from metros and outlying parking lots (why by law the redskins can’t use metro buses as shuttles is beyond ridiculous)
Your problem is the teams have no incentive to give up parking. Those huge lots around Fedex that they charge lots of money for, where do you think it goes. Into the owners pocket. This isn’t even taking into account the tailgating culture that has built up around football.
I do think there is a way to build the 25,000 seat soccer stadiums that MLS teams are building into he center of the city. The primary reason is becuase you can use somethign this size for a lot more things then you can a 70,000 seat stadium.
August 15th, 2009 at 10:17 am
I would like the entire world to be one big parking lot.
August 15th, 2009 at 10:19 am
No one has mention that tailgating is an integral part of the football-game-going experience, which sort of requires a parking lot. Which means that you simply can’t put them downtown in the way that you could for a baseball or soccer stadium.
August 15th, 2009 at 10:29 am
I think there is a relative change issue — when Pittsburgh built the stadium areas mentioned above, it also added some museums (Andy Warhol, Children’s) nearby, in an area that had most definitely declined, and had for some time not been much more than a warehouse district. The net net was positive for the city and the neighborhood.
In Washington, there aren’t many places where a football stadium would produce that kind of gain, at least not anymore. The Convention Center encroached on neighborhoods — I can’t even imagine what the reaction to a stadium would be.
The distinguishing factor about RFK is that it’s already there, and not being used. So revamping it for its prior use would not be a net loss, but I agree that other uses would probably provide greater gains. For most of us who don’t have tickets, the games might as well be played on the moon. This is a problem football teams haven’t quite figured out how to address.
August 15th, 2009 at 10:57 am
Uh, RFK is being used…
August 15th, 2009 at 11:14 am
tsg Says:
August 14th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Someone obviously doesn’t give a f**k about soccer…
No red-blooded American cares about soccer. I’m all for HSR, social democracy, universal health care, Italian shoes and French cuisine. Soccer fandom is best left to the Europeans.
———————————————————–
Come on now, it’s tremendously exciting watching all those nil-nil games. You must admit it says something significant culturally about all those millions of people who get enjoyment out of the watching the style of play with so little outcome in the game.
I remember reading during one of the World Cup tournaments in the 90s where an American said to someone from the UK that all those tie games and 1-nil games weren’t very entertaining. The Britisher replied, “Who said they were supposed to be entertaining?”
August 15th, 2009 at 11:33 am
Sorry, yes, of course, RFK is being used to some extent. I don’t know what would happen to soccer — but I would go out on a limb and say that given the average attendance at those games, they could get by with a much smaller venue. Indeed, one thing I haven’t heard is to take the RFK area and incorporate a different kind of sports complex along with residential, etc., that would allow the soccer team to continue playing, but in a smaller facility. I just don’t see the same kind of popularity for soccer in the U.S. as there is in Latin America and Europe. Even in Europe, the stadiums are not built right in the middle of their cities. But I actually don’t think pulling RFK down is imperative by any means. It’s already there. Were the proposal to build it anew, then I would have a stronger opinion.
August 15th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
The MLS would love to move out of RFK — witness the trend to soccer-specific stadia.
The idea of building the Jets a stadium on the west side of manhattan was possibly the worst idea bloomberg ever hatched.
August 15th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
DC United would love a smaller, soccer specific stadium. If one existed, they’d have left RFK for it a long time ago.
The point, however, is that DC United hosts more events a year in RFK than the Redskins ever did.
And if the Redskins do come back to the RFK site, renovating RFK is not an option. It will be torn down and rebuilt. It’s functionally and economically obsolete as a stadium, and it’s nearing the point of physical obsolescence as well. It’s falling apart, would be tremendously expensive to renovate, and a renovation wouldn’t solve the basic issues that the stadium has now.
August 15th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Alex B., that sounds about right. One thing that I would definitely oppose is government subsidy of a new stadium. Especially for a football stadium, that makes no sense. The fact that (I am assuming) no government would ever propose subsidizing a soccer venue even though it almost certainly gets more use just highlights the unfairness of such subsidies. Verizon Center was built without D.C. funding and arguably has done more to increase its tax base than any other civic undertaking in the past 25 years, especially including the convention centers, new or old.
August 15th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
Shortly after Bob Kraft bought the Patriots, he floated a proposal for a new stadium on the then-blighted South Boston waterfront. Eventually (I think) he thought he might buy the Red Sox as well and build a baseball park, too. The city, to their eternal credit, turned him down and eventually built the new convention center there. It is now (allowing for the recession slowdown) the fastest-growing area of Boston.
Kraft then threatened to move, first to Providence and then to Hartford, if either would build him a stadium. It never came out publicly, but my guess is that the NFL looked at the demographics of both places vs. Boston and said, essentially, “are you f***ing crazy??!?”
Soon Kraft bought all the land (an old racetrack and some other parcels) around the Pats existing supercrappy facility in Foxboro, and built the state-of-the-art Gillette Stadium with his own (mostly borrowed) money. There was some state ca$h involved for “infrastructure improvements” (widening roads, building some ramps and dedicated turning lanes). There were rumors that lots of NFL owners were angry because, as outlined above, they always want the taxpayers to take the weight. And there was some grumbling that the financial nut was so onerous, the Pats would get into serious financial trouble.
What happened, of course, is that the stadium and the team are hugely profitable. Kraft paid the loans well ahead of schedule. And the Patriots, of course, have become one of the flagship franchises in the league. Now Kraft has built a huge shopping complex (Patriot Place) near the stadium, and it too has been hugely successful.
Any government, including DC, that builds or subsidizes a stadium ought to be turned out of office, period. There are only so many markets that are big enough to support NFL franchises. The teams can’t all move to Ok City. I don’t notice that LA has been hurt by all these years without a franchise. Where would the Colts have gone if Indy didn’t build? San Antonio? Where would the Bills go? The Bengals? To smaller cities? Canada? Honolulu? Montpelier? I love NFL football, the game, but screw them.
August 16th, 2009 at 3:04 am
I’m kinda surprised nobody’s mentioned L.A. yet. Ed Roski, the same guy who built Staples Center in downtown L.A., has proposed (he has an approved EIR) building a new NFL stadium out in the City of Industry, near the 57/60 interchange. I think that, barring a return to the Coliseum, this is exactly the right place to put it. It’s accessible by freeway, Sunday games won’t interfere with commuter traffic, and it’s even within walking distance of a Metrolink station if they just build some walkways.
The nearby City of Walnut, a bedroom community, is up in arms over it and are trying to fight it in court, but I think there’s a growing contingent of people there who realize that they’re not going to be able to stop it.
I think the fact that the same guy built Staples shows that he knows the difference between a football stadium and a basketball/hockey arena. He’s also bringing in a big retail element to it, so it’s not going to be totally empty the 357 days of the year it’s not hosting a game, but it’s still very different from Staples Center, which is anchoring a downtown revival.
Furthermore, it brings a major league-level sports team out close to the Inland Empire for the first time. USC and UCLA already have big followings in L.A., but despite being almost 30 miles east of downtown, this will be within easy driving distance of about 7 million people in the San Gabriel Valley, the Inland Empire, and Orange County.
August 16th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
efgoldman,
When Kraft made his threat to move to Hartford, they called his bluff beautifully. A large chunk of the legislature went on TV to say “That is great! Connecticut will pay for it, and it is a shorter drive than Foxboro!” Kraft broke his proposed deal with Connecticut within days.
August 18th, 2009 at 11:14 am
I agree that RFK Stadium is way past it’s “sell-by” date and should be razed. At that time, alternative uses for the RFK site can be considered. But first, as a D.C. United season ticket holder, I do believe that United should have the opportunity build a 24,000 to 27,000 seat soccer stadium in the District along the lines that the team has proposed in the past. United has proposed, as I am sure you know, terms that are considerably more favorable to the District and D.C. taxpayers than the terms MLB and the Nationals demanded for the Nationals’ new stadium. As it turns out, the District has an excellent site for a new soccer stadium almost directly across the Anacostia River from the site of the new Nationals stadium.