Chapin's Dissertation Proposal

Sports Stadia as (Possible) Urban Revitalization Tools:
An Assessment of Impacts at the Microarea Level

A DRAFT Dissertation Proposal for the
Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Urban Design and Planning,
University of Washington
Winter, 1997
Timothy S. Chapin, Ph.C.

PAPER OUTLINE
Introduction | The Proposal
Problems and Hypotheses | Key Questions
Dissertation Data | Devil's Advocate

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INTRODUCTION

In city after city throughout North America a common "sports" scenario has been playing out. A professional franchise owner recognizes the millions to be made from a new stadium or arena that includes the full array of "modern" conveniences like luxury boxes, club seating, or ample advertising space. In response the team owner makes known his intention to generate a new stadium, almost certainly with substantial public investment, to make his team more "economically viable". The owner calls upon local politicians, business interests, and the local newspaper to publicize how important the team is to the local economy and to city identity.

After lengthy public debate and political wrangling a new stadium is financed and built, offering a sweetheart lease to the team and guaranteeing substantial increases in profits to the team owner. Some district in the city is forever altered by the construction of a large stadium that brings crowds in the tens of thousands to the district. These crowds are identified as untapped profits by several local entrepreneurs, while other local business owners are forced to relocate because of the incompatibility with this new facility.

This scenario has been acted out in over forty metropolitan areas across North America in the past ten years. From dilapidated central cities like Detroit and Cleveland, to the prosperous and ever expanding new urban metropolises like Atlanta and Phoenix, from smaller cities like Erie (PA) and Durham (NC), to some of the largest metropolitan areas in the country like Los Angeles and Chicago, cities have been grappling with this sports development monster.

The tremendous increase in the number of sports stadia being built in recent years has not gone unnoticed by the commercial press. A recent UAS Today Special Report on sports facilities estimated that by the end of the 1990’s over $9 billion will have been spent on the construction of sports stadia and arenas across North America. The report concluded that the 1990’s will likely see the opening of forty-five new sports facilities, many of which have been financed largely by or exclusively by public sources.

It must be noted that this $9 billion figure simply totals up the total construction costs for recently built or planned sports stadia. Therefore, in certain cases public investment was minimal and team owners or other financing sources were tapped to build these facilities. However, these figures do not include ancillary construction costs like new sewer hook-ups or highway interchanges that are often built, at public expense, in conjunction with a new facility.

The sports stadium boom has not gone unnoticed by academia either. A "cottage industry" of academics who have established their professional identities as sports development experts has developed in the past ten years. These experts have weighed in on the debate and concluded quite simply that: sports facilities do not represent good investments for cities based upon identified and measured economic impacts. These studies have concluded that sports facilities have no measurable positive impacts upon a metropolitan economy. However, these same experts also come to two other important conclusions: 1 ) there are substantial noneconomic benefits and costs associated with sports stadia that are difficult to quantify when assessing these facilities and 2) impacts at the district level, or microarea, have yet to be assessed because of the limitations of data in metropolitan areas.

The Proposal

This dissertation proposes to investigate the "microarea" gap in this literature. In short, this proposal outlines a project that would attempt to identify, quantify, and assess the parcel level impacts of sports stadia in four cities across North America. The microareas surrounding the sports stadium (a radius of one-half a mile or up to man-made or natural "barriers" like highways or bodies of water) would be measured for land use designations (zoning), land use changes (if any), and land value changes (if any) for a period several years in advance of the opening of the sports stadium and several years after the opening of the sports stadium.

An attempt will be made to account for and minimize the effects of metropolitan and "other" district variables, like strong metro growth during the same period or the opening of a new shopping center in the same district. In short, other causes for microarea change will (hopefully) be addressed through data collection that addresses the metropolitan economy and targeted interviews of local planners and government officials that assesses the impact of the sports stadium versus other neighborhood projects.

The purposes of the dissertation would be:

• The identification and quantification of microarea, parcel level impacts of large scale urban developments.

• Addressing a substantial gap in the existing sports stadia literature by answering the basic question of the actual local impacts of large scale sports developments.

• Weigh in on the debate concerning the economic development rationale behind sports stadia. Are there microarea development justifications for public investment into sports stadia?

• Determining the microarea impacts of large scale, crowd generating, development projects. Do these developments offer opportunities as revitalization "poles", or anchors upon which to redevelop or remake an area?

• Placing the impacts of sports stadia in perspective with other urban development projects like aquariums or downtown shopping projects.

PROBLEM AND HYPOTHESES

The general problem to be addressed by this project is to:

Assess the parcel level impacts in the "microarea" surrounding a sports development.

These impacts should be understood as one of four kinds:

• Physical Development Impacts: It has been argued by some that sports stadia have discernible physical development impacts on their surrounding areas. Land use records will be utilized to identify the transition of vacant parcels to developed parcels and/or developed parcels into vacant land. For example, does the construction of a sports stadium lead to the greater utilization of land (new local physical development) or does the stadium cause some parcels to become vacant (for use as surface parking)?

• Land Use Designation/Land Use Changes: How does the construction of a sports stadium affect land use designations, at the parcel level, in the microarea surrounding these projects? This variable is measured by land use designations as assessed by local government agencies. For example, do parcels in the microarea surrounding a sports stadium change from industrial to commercial after the opening of a stadium? Also, how does the construction of a sports stadium affect land use changes within a given classification? For example, a building in a district that is now home to a sports stadium may change owners and evolve from a light manufacturing auto parts plant to a T-shirt factory. This situation may not require a change in land use designation, but it would be a measurable land use change.

• Land Value Changes: How does the construction of a sports stadium affect land value in the identified microarea? Tax assessor’s data will be utilized to identify value changes that could be related to sports stadium construction and completion. For example, the area surrounding a sports stadium may actually reveal land value decreases because of increased congestion during events and little traffic during times when the facility is empty.

Hypotheses Construction

With the delineation of a set of possible and measurable changes, a number of hypotheses can be constructed to assess the microarea impacts (if any) of sports facilities on a district. In this case, hypotheses will be constructed on two levels. These hypotheses would be as follows:

Hypothesis #1: The Measurable Impacts Hypothesis: This hypothesis states simply that there will be measurable differences at the microarea level between the pre-construction period and the post-construction period. In short, after the completion of the stadium, it is hypothesized that there will be changes in land development, land uses, and land values.

Given that hypothesis #1 is found to be supported, then:

Hypothesis #2: The Land Development Hypothesis: Land surrounding a sports stadia will become more intensively developed after the opening of the facility. Vacant parcels will be utilized for higher uses. New development will occur in the microarea after the completion of the stadium.

Hypothesis #3: The Land Use Transition Hypothesis: Land uses surrounding the stadium will transition from "incompatible uses" (like light manufacturing or low density residential) to "compatible" uses (like commercial or industrial). Facility crowds and traffic lend themselves better to certain uses than others, therefore the new facility will affect local land uses designations and actual uses.

Hypothesis #4: The Land Value Increase Hypothesis: The value of parcels surrounding a new stadium should reveal changes after the opening of the facility. In this case it is hypothesized that land values will show increases due to more intense development, investment of millions of dollars in the district, and because of opportunities that arise related to the stadium.

A Hypothesis Caveat: The "Real" Problem

Given that the above hypotheses can be tested, one final piece of the puzzle remains; identifying a relationship between any measurable changes (be they positive or negative) and the construction and opening of the sports facility itself. In other words, given that land values change, land use changes occur, and new development can be identified, there is still the matter of linking these changes to the sports stadium. In short, I expect to find that some measurable changes occurred at the microarea level. I am still trying to come to terms with ways to attribute any changes to the new sports facility and not other causes. Suggestions or thoughts on this would be welcome.

Questions to Be Addressed by the Proposed Study

The above hypotheses can be seen as addressing a number of key question surrounding sports stadia and other similar large scale, publicly financed development projects. These questions include:

• The single most important question to be addressed by this proposed study would be: Do sports stadia have measurable microarea impacts and, if so, what is the nature of these impacts?

• Do these facilities alter the built environment in their microarea’s? Can new development be traced to the opening of a large, crowd generating facility?

• Do these facilities lead to land use changes that alter the mix of businesses in the area surrounding the facility? Do stadiums create an "entertainment district" with restaurants, bars, and other compatible development? Does a district like this have identifiable boundaries?

• Do these facilities lead to land valuation changes? Are these changes positive (more property tax revenue) or negative (less property tax revenue)? Can some justification be made that stadiums alter microarea land values that can provide some measurable (albeit very small) economic benefits to the local government?

From a policy perspective, the outlined proposal also offers weighs in on several important public policy questions:

• Do large scale, crowd generating developments offer opportunities for "revitalization" as has been suggested by facility proponents? Can a city utilize a sports stadium or aquarium or theater complex to anchor redevelopment on? Do these facilities actually have any measurable effects upon the microarea?

• Is there an identifiable "local environment" that is best suited as a site for a new stadium? In other words, if a stadium does act like an entertainment district "anchor", should stadia be located in an already developed commercial area, a developing commercial area, a transitional district, etc.?

• It has already been concluded that sports stadia do not alter the metropolitan or even the city economy. This proposed study would attempt to focus the analysis on a smaller geographic unit than has been previously studied. From this, then, is there any evidence, from the microlevel, for an economic justification for publicly investing into a new sports facility?

THE DATA SECTION

Sports Facility Choices

There are a wealth of new sports facilities to study, so some very tough choices must be made. These choices are related in part to the likely availability of data, the pertinence to the sports stadia debate, and opportunities for comparisons between cases. I would propose to investigate the parcel level impact of a new stadium for four cases. These cases are culled from a longer list of possibilities after discussions with the Committee Chair, a review of the sports facility literature, and discussions with some of the leading experts on sports stadia in the country. Other recently built stadia were excluded for several reasons, including: they are primarily football facilities (Atlanta, Charlotte, St. Louis), they were deemed too old (Miami, Minneapolis), because of documented design difficulties that would likely affect any microarea impacts (Chicago), and because of a different development environment (Toronto). The four cities and stadia that were identified for study are: Baltimore’s Camden Yards, Cleveland’s Jacobs Field, Arlington’s The Ballpark at Arlington, and Denver’s Coors Field (see Table 1)

Table 1: City and Stadium Choices

These stadia each represent a baseball only facility that was built in the past few years with substantial public investment. Each stadium has been very well received in the baseball and sports communities and each has been held up as an excellent example for what a stadium can do for a city in terms of development and image building. An in-depth look at the literature and consultations with experts in the field suggested that these stadia were most comparable because of the recent construction of each facility, their similar design and "old-time" baseball feel, and the individual locality’s desired microarea effects that went into the planning, locating, and design of each facility.

Data to be Gathered

Ideally, the data to be gathered from each jurisdiction will be parcel level land use and tax assessor’s data for a period of three to five years prior to the opening of the facility and all years after the opening of the facility. These data will be the focus of the analysis as they should yield insights into the microarea impacts (if any) of the new facility.

The parcel level data will be augmented with a development history of the district being studied. These histories will be generated through interviews, library research, and government documents research. These development histories will provide insight into the past fortunes of the area, past and recent development projects, and a sense of the history and "intangibles" that are part of the development process.

Metropolitan and local economic and demographic data will be gathered to assess the metropolitan "circumstances" and the development "environment" into which these projects were situated upon their opening. This data will attempt to rule out other possible metro-wide forces that might be identified as the cause of any changes that are found to occur at the microarea. For example, perhaps an area was already showing signs of revitalization prior to any talk of a new stadium.

Local government reports and impact assessments will also be utilized to assess projected and measured changes in the microarea surrounding each stadium. Targeted interviews with planning staff, stadium oversight groups (stadium authorities), and other local experts should help to flesh out the development impacts (both positive and negative) of the new stadium.

THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE SECTION

Clearly the proposed research will not go nearly as smoothly as planned and significant problems and questions will arise. This section will identify some of the key problems and questions that can be identified at this early stage in the process, hence the "devil’s advocate" title.

Question #1: What of the data? Is parcel level data available?

This is the question that most worries me at this time. In discussions with a wide variety of people both locally and nationally, it seems that the data is available for each case. As for what form the data will be in and as for the accessibility of the data, that has yet to be determined. Inquiries with the city of Seattle about their data and its availability have yielded very optimistic signs. This (hopefully) suggests that data collection from the case cities will go smoothly.

Question #2: How can you determine if the "cause" of any measured microarea changes is indeed the stadium? What of metropolitan-wide effects? What of serendipity; the redevelopment of the district coincidentally with, but not because of the stadium?

The gathering of both demographic and economic data at the metropolitan level and the use of interviews and public reports will hopefully address this problem. It is hoped that any changes that are measured can be traced to the opening of the facility or the planning of the facility. Linking any measured changes to the stadium represents the heart of the dissertation and is therefore a very important problem. Comments are then especially encouraged on this problem/question.

Question #3: What of the small sample size? How useful will this study be for other cities/cases? How generalizable will be the results?

The use of a small number of cases is done in an effort to finish the dissertation within a "reasonable" amount of time. The cases utilized are very similar to each other, therefore any general trends that are identified can be compared across cases. Further, these stadia have all been identified as excellent examples of the positive effects of sports facilities on a city. Evidence supporting this would lend weight to the economic rationale for public investment into sports stadia. A lack of evidence of microarea effects would add to the growing amount of evidence against that same economic rationale for public investment into a stadium. Further, the comparison of the "downtown" models (Baltimore, Cleveland, and Denver) with the "suburban" model (Arlington) might be useful in addressing the question of metropolitan wide locational decisions.

Question #4: What is deemed "evidence" of microarea effects? Where can the line be drawn between the usual land use/value changes within a city and changes related to a sports stadium?

Without having seen the data, I have yet to devise any clear decision points for the identification of changes at the microarea level. For example, I have yet to state that "If one-half of all microarea parcels show an increase in land value greater than 10%, then a ‘measurable change’ has been found." Nobody has attempted to do this analysis before, so no clear-cut rules yet exist. I hope to arrive at definable and defensible standards during the course of the analysis.

Question #5: What constitutes the microarea? Will the microarea be the same for each case?

The microarea represents a contiguous district that represents the focus of the possible benefits and costs of a new stadium. This district will be no larger than a half mile radius surrounding the facility, with natural and man-made barriers being figured into the definition of the area. For example, Baltimore’s stadium is located near their harbor. Any land use/value changes would not likely be found in the middle of the harbor. Therefore, each city will likely have a unique microarea that will be determined after consultation with local experts and a full investigation of the area to be studied.

Question #6: What of the short time period after the opening of these facilities? Will the microareas not reveal any changes because the local area has yet to develop in response to the new stadium? Or, conversely, what of a "honeymoon" period in which development changes are great because of the excitement surrounding a new facility, but in the long run many of these changes are revealed to be short term?

The question of the time period to be studied could also be problematic because of the two scenarios outlined above. In response, the four cases were chosen because they each represent an important new trend in stadia design; that of a "neighborhood friendly" facility. Baltimore, Cleveland, Arlington, and Denver have each built a new stadium that is located within an existing district and not on top of an existing district. This important trend in stadia development has been cited by proponents as a new era in which the microarea impacts will be greater because the facility respects existing development patterns. Further, the recent time period has been focused upon to eliminate any period effects that might occur if we compared stadia built in the 1970’s with stadia built in the 1980’s. In short, the development environment in metropolitan areas was vastly different in the 1970’s (flight from the central city) versus the early 1980’s (the office boom) versus the 1990’s (some return to central cities, but not at the rate of the 1980’s). Lastly, in an interest of limiting the "expandability" of the dissertation, the time period chosen keeps the analysis of the microarea to a period of a few years prior to facility opening and a few years after facility opening.

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