DColeKC wrote: ↑Thu Jun 23, 2022 2:09 pm
The stadium is a mix of public assets and privately owned entity. There was no talk of a downtown stadium until developers and the city invested in downtown thus making it possible. I'm not advocating for one location over the other and I'm definitely not saying it should go where it only benefits certain developers. Yet it's hard to argue it shouldn't go near PNL based on the fact that cordish are the experts at this baseball entertainment deal with proven examples in STL, Texas, Atlanta, Philly etc. So you have this major asset already built, operated by a company who specializes in baseball stadium entertainment complexes around the country. Why wouldn't you do everything possible to put it close and create that fan experience?
You say a smaller entertainment complex in east village really won't hurt other's that much. That's completely false. That's hundreds of thousands of dollars a week if there's a home stint.
I too care about the overall impact on downtown and want whats' best for all of downtown. I happen to think a certain location or two works the best for everyone, including ALL the developers and city folks who laid the ground work to even make it a possibility. On top of that, these locations will offer the best fan experience possible. Hopefully making a weekend Royals game more palatable when they're not winning.
As far as stadiums being gigantic holes when not in use. It doesn't have to be. STL isn't that way as it's vibrant and the baseball stadium just adds to the fabric of downtown even where there's no home game. Wonder why that is? Could it be the entertainment complex, office buildings, gyms, hotels and residential towers operated by Cordish and the Cardinals? Probably.
This conversation isn't really going anywhere, which I guess is not surprising since on both sides these are just vaguely defined ideas and not real plans with concrete details from which it could be reasonable to draw conclusions like "Cordish will lose hundreds of thousands of dollars a week" (or, to follow on from that, why it is or isn't acceptable for Cordish to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars a week in light of what we are getting in return). I'm not saying that a smaller complex wouldn't hurt P&L -- I think it's impossible to know what affect any other complex would really have on P&L until there is a specific proposal for such a complex and we can look at what it will actually entail. But what I'm saying is that I don't think there will
be a complex to hurt P&L, which, admittedly, is also just idle speculation at this point. To return to the initial point, I believe that, all else being equal, the city's priority should be to develop currently under-utilized land instead of demolishing existing occupied buildings. If we end up with dueling proposals for the site you are advocating vs. EV (or any other site), we can discuss their respective merits and drawbacks at that time. In the meantime, I don't see any real value in debating how much revenue Cordish stands to gain or lose depending on where the stadium is built, and as far as I'm concerned, Cordish's business shouldn't be a key consideration in picking a site.
I haven't been to STL in about ten years, so I will have to take your word for it that Ballpark Village is "vibrant" (though my impression from this thread has been that this is not the prevailing opinion), but that vibrancy is in spite of, not thanks to, the presence of the stadium. Cordish and the Cardinals willed a working neighborhood into existence next to the stadium. In KC, the Cordish entertainment complex and the neighborhood are already there, no stadium needed to incentivize anyone to force them into existence. If placing the stadium closer to P&L results in a greater benefit to
the city (not to Cordish, or to Cordish's tenants, or to the "fan experience" at the game, or anyone else), then sure, put it there. But I'm not convinced that bulldozing existing buildings that are used every day to build a superblock that will sit empty for nearly 80% of the year is better for the city than building that superblock on parking lots a few blocks away, where it is simultaneously still easily accessible from the downtown core but also far enough removed from it not to seriously damage the urban environment. There has to be an argument about how you're actually improving the neighborhood -- for ordinary people who are not necessarily attending a baseball game -- by putting the stadium there, not just appeals to the "fan experience" (not a valid use of taxpayer money, in my view) or to reward investors for things they've already built on the strength of the neighborhood's stadium-less fundamentals.
