Quote:
Originally Posted by Nerv
Just an open question not intended to piss on anyone’s favorite sport but the NFL, MLB and the NBA have all had issues of declining interest in the last few years. None of the three is currently looking like they will have a big upswing in interest. There’s a variety of reasons for this but the reason I bring it up is it seems that building anything for a sports franchise is only going to get more difficult if the “value” of having a sports team is really kind of dropping. Not a sky is falling comment that all 3 will disappear but if you follow sports you know all 3 are having variable interest issues which is a new wrinkle in our heavy social media based society. Things are changing...
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These days a lot of cities are reexamining the value of having a professional sports team. When you do the math they oftentimes end up costing more money to their host cities than they earn.
From the downtown San Diego perspective especially, it's not very clear what building another stadium in the East Village would bring that Petco Park hasn't already given us or San Diego already innately has. We're already one of the top tourist destinations in the nation, our hospitality industry is booming, and there are a variety of preexisting event venues large and small in downtown. Petco Park host events over 300 days a year, has a ton of features for non-fans like restaurants and a (regular) park, and since it was built the East Village has absolutely no issues finding development dollars. Is it worth it to replace 2-4 of our limited number of potential skyscrapers with a gigantic, walled off, midrise superblock (as every stadium design I've seen proposed seems to consist of). And add on the fact that it will have to start cannibalizing from other potential event venues if it's going to be used more than a 1/3rd of the year, when we're still paying off the loans for Petco.