Why a new arena when there are no professional sports teams to justify it?

I question whether we have the audience levels for another large capacity venue as well as enough convention business to warrant building either project.  Ask the Hippodrome how they currently feel about if-you-build-it-they-will-come.  It doesn’t seem possible that we will will not get stuck with a pair of projects resembling the hotel.  

I do not want more professional sports teams that are subsidized by the city.  I have other priorities – clean water, sewers that don’t leak, crime reduction, education and child care.     Building more facilities for entertaining rich people or for county people isn’t one of them.  Let Baltimore County house them, fund them, and  handle the traffic!

Until this billion dollar convention center plan came along, the question of when, where and how big to go with a replacement arena was being debated at its own pace. But in terms of a mega-convention center, trying to attract the NBA or NHL is small-potatoes compared to attracting major-league conventions.

Willard Hackerman has raised the stakes. He’s not just interested in attracting sports. But he also isn’t willing to put up the money for the convention center half of the project. What’s his motivation? Is he just looking for a reason to knock down and rebuild his adjacent Sheraton Hotel on Conway Street? Does he just want to put his name on something – The HackerDome?

Glad you raised New York’s Javits Center, James. It’s instructive that the modest High Line has been more instrumental in attracting interest in Manhattan’s previously forlorn Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea neighborhoods than the convention center ever has. People are more interested in a quality urban environment than “gi-normous” convention facilities.

Everywhere I go, people tell me that the biggest problem with Baltimore is our medium-sized convention center.  If memory serves, it was the focus of season 3 of The Wire.  If the city is having a hard time finding the money to pay for this project, we can always raise taxes or cut school budgets.  I think stifled economic growth is a small price to pay for the possibility of getting an occasional NCAA basketball tournament game.

It is interesting the way people talk about this money as if it could be easily used for whatever the cause might be. Spend it on schools. Spend it on rec centers. Whatever. This is not a pot of money. Revenue bonds get paid by revenue. Federal road dollars are spent on roads. Etc. If you don’t want to give tax breaks for development. Fine, don’t do it. Give the development opportunities to the projects that aren’t asking for tax breaks. Oh wait. There aren’t any. Businesses are not breaking down the doors of the city to set up shop, hire workers, and pay taxes. If you don’t want to do anything, that’s okay. You can choose to be like Cleveland and Detroit where they continue to contract and decline. Read the online and newspaper letters from citizens in those cities, and you will frequently see citizen requests for their cities to invest the way Baltimore has done with the inner harbor and downtown stadiums. Are our problems solved? No. But they would have been a lot worse off without the steps we have taken to spur interest, growth and jobs in the city. The success of Canton, Inner Harbor East, Federal Hill and similar areas were spurred by city development efforts downtown. Could we get similar or even better results investing in neighborhoods and schools. Good question. We might. But it will take many decades. The city doesn’t have that long. The state and city have been investing huge sums in education for over a decade. How much better are we off?