A New Era of Professional
Sports in the Northwest: Facility Location as an Economic
Development Strategy in Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver
The United States and Canada have
experienced an incredible surge in the number of new sports and
entertainment facilities that have been built in recent years.
New arenas are completed each year as cities have attempted to
lure and retain sports franchises as a means to economic
development and revitalization. The Northwest has not escaped
this trend. Within the past fifteen months Seattle and Portland
in the United States and Vancouver in Canada have each witnessed
the completion of a new sports arena to house professional
basketball and hockey franchises. Each arena purports to serve
both their principal tenants (the sports franchises) and their
respective metropolitan area as a "world class"
facility and an important entertainment center and economic
development tool. This paper offers a comparative assessment of
these new facilities: Key Arena in Seattle, The Rose Garden in
Portland, and GM Place in Vancouver. Specific attention is paid
to the different metropolitan locations of each facility. It is
argued that the location of each arena represents a different
development strategy available to cities that are constructing or
will be constructing these entertainment facilities. Seattle has
chosen to revitalize an aging, but culturally significant civic
center, The Seattle Center, with the reconstruction of the former
arena, an integral part of the Seattle Center entertainment
district. Portland has chosen to locate their new facility in the
same area as their former sports arena and current convention
center, thereby strengthening their maturing convention and
sports district. Lastly, Vancouver has chosen to enhance their
metropolitan core through the construction of a downtown arena.
These options, summarized as reinvestment into existing
entertainment centers, the development of new entertainment
districts, and investment in inner city
revitalization/redevelopment, represent three of the fundamental
economic development strategies metropolitan areas undertake when
locating sports and entertainment facilities.
The literature on sports and entertainment
facilities has focused primarily upon the financing, the economic
impacts, and the intangible benefits of constructing a new
facility in a city. The ubiquitous and controversial
"economic multiplier", as well as the intangible
economic and cultural benefits of these facilities, have remained
at the core of the sports facility literature throughout its
development in the past twenty years. However, an essential
element of an assessment of these benefits has received little
mention or research attention: that of facility location.
Certainly, some authors have derived general conclusions and
guidelines concerning facility location. In addition, recently
there has arisen a pervasive belief in the United States that a
"downtown" facility can help revitalize a city and is
therefore always preferable. However, on the whole the literature
has focused very little upon the question of facility location.
Further, the location of a facility within a metropolitan area is
only one part of the location question. In this paper, the author
outlines a theoretical model for addressing and researching the
question of facility location. It is argued that facility
location should be studied from two perspectives: a metropolitan
perspective and a local\land use perspective. The first
investigates facility location at a metropolitan level,
identifying the relative location of facilities, especially as
they relate to the central city and surrounding communities. The
second perspective qualifies the local impacts and location of
facilities with particular attention paid to existing land uses
in the area. Through this theoretical approach researchers can
better identify optimum locations through an analysis of
metropolitan trends and local land use opportunities and
conflicts. Similarly, facility developers can first answer the
question of metropolitan location before turning their efforts
towards the identification of optimum sites within the chosen
area of a metropolis.
The city of Seattle will soon begin
construction on a new stadium to house their Major League
Baseball franchise. This construction will begin despite the
failure of a county referendum that would have financed the
stadium via a combination of taxes levied on citizens of and
visitors to King County. State and County officials devised
alternative funding mechanisms that did not require a voter
referendum. The stadium is to be located in close proximity to
the downtown business and convention core, in part to serve as an
economic development generator for this district. In 1975
construction on the Kingdome, Seattle's existing multi-purpose
sports and entertainment stadium, was completed. In the previous
fifteen years, King County voters had rejected several
referendums to finance a multi-purpose stadium. State and county
officials identified and secured alternative financing that
ultimately achieved the goal of a new stadium. The facility was
built immediately south of the downtown business core and was
expected to serve as an economic development generator for this
area. The "deja vu" experience of Seattle is not
unique. Numerous cities have completed or will soon begin the
process of securing financing and constructing new sports
facilities to replace economically obsolete ones. This case study
of Seattle highlights the striking similarities between the
stadium provision process that resulted in the Kingdome and the
ongoing process that will one day reveal the "New Century
Ballpark". This paper will provide a critical assessment of
the political processes, financing decisions, and locational
decisions behind the Kingdome and the new ballpark. Consistent
with much of the literature on urban politics, it is argued that
cultural and economic elites have controlled and continue to
control important decision making processes in Seattle.
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