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If approved by voters in November, San Antonio’s proposed Project Marvel would join a growing list of the latest sports and entertainment districts across the country.
Texas Public Radio looked into the economic outcome following the opening of the Deer District in Milwaukee, a sports and entertainment district built around their pro NBA team—the Bucks— to see if it could be a glimpse into San Antonio’s future.
Tom Bond is the president of San Antonio-based PC Sports and has been involved in the development of major sports venues and sports entertainment districts for three decades.
Bond said professional sports are competitive between not only teams but also between cities and the state-of-the art sports venues they can offer.
"Keeping up with the Joneses is definitely a smart thing to do with these buildings or they will fall behind," he said.
Bond is currently working on a new home for the Calgary Flames of the NHL. Other recent projects by Bond include the Deer District for the Milwaukee Bucks, a sports and entertainment district like Project Marvel proposed here in San Antonio for the Spurs.
Bond said all ages of visitors to developments like Project Marvel could make an entire day of it and not only see a game, but also dine out, mosey up to a bar, do some shopping, and take in a concert.
“Families will stick around and do something, and your group of post collegiate, collegiate-age kids will stay around and enjoy some of the entertainment available," he said.
The Spurs have not publicly threatened to leave San Antonio if voters don't back a new arena and Project Marvel. But the Spurs are a business, and money talks in pro sports.
And there were those home games played on the road at the Moody Center in Austin the last couple of seasons. Those games were just called market expansion by local elected officials and the Spurs front office.
Then there’s Austin’s tech billionaire Michael Dell, sitting among the Spurs investors. And a number of big corporations based in the Texas Capitol who might want to sponsor an NBA team.
All that's enough to give nervous jitters to Spurs fans worried about the team moving out of town.
Could voters imagine a San Antonio without the Spurs?
Longtime San Antonio Mayor and Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said the series of NBA Championships won by the Spurs put the city on a global stage.
“We won five national NBA championships in a small market. Unheard of. They did it with integrity," he said.
To the rest of the world, San Antonio looked like a city for winners.
And when global company Toyota opened a plant here during those championship winning years, it felt like the city was on a championship run itself. Wolff said those Spurs championships helped indirectly win Toyota over too.
Sports venues can also be a source of civic pride, Bond said.
"I think everybody who has a home team, whether it be an NBA team, and NHL team, they do have pride in their teams and want to root them on."
Now that the city, county, and Spurs have agreed to terms on how each will finance the arena and Project Marvel, voters will be asked on November 4th to approve a venue tax on tourists to help pay for the proposed arena, at the heart of the planned Project Marvel.
The city's own third-party economic analysis claims Project Marvel, which includes makeovers for the Alamodome, expansion of the convention center, a new convention center hotel, and conversion of the old federal courthouse into a music venue, would pump more than $31million each year into the San Antonio economy.
But sports economists are quick to blow a whistle on such lofty projections.
Michael Leeds is a professor of economics at Temple University, and he's written the book, "The Economics of Sports."
He’s also a Phillies fan and visitor to the South Philadelphia Sports Complex, home of all the city’s professional sports teams and an entertainment district called Stateside Live, which opened in 2012.
Leeds is impressed by the attractions at his hometown sports complex, but unimpressed by the economic performance of sports and entertainment districts in general.
"In terms of its economic impact, these things are uniformly coming in below predictions," he said.
He said the huge scale of sports and entertainment districts does not boost revenue all that much either.
"It's effectively saying let's build all this stuff and stick a giant spaceship in the middle of it that's unoccupied most of the year," he said.
Project Marvel backers have said there will be year-round programming at the arena and other venues within it.
Leeds also has a different take on the dynamics of downtown crowds. He said for everyone in a downtown crowd, there is someone who probably stayed away because of that crowd—cutting its impact in half.
So, what can San Antonians expect for how this will play out in the Alamo City?
It could be instructive to take a look at what has happened with the Deer District in Milwaukee, built around a new arena for the Bucks, a team and city in a similar-sized NBA market as San Antonio.
The public-private venture came with a lot of economic promises when it opened in 2018. Now seven years later, Dale Kooyenga, the president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, believes those promises have been delivered. And the Deer District has attracted other indirect business to the city, such as the Republican National Convention (RNC) in 2024.
“And if we had not had the Deer District, there is no way that Milwaukee would have hosted the RNC. So, it’s not only about the basketball. It’s about the concerts we got. A lot of comedians there. … Marquette plays there. And we’ve had marquee events that really highlighted how great our city is, like the Republican National Convention."
He also says having a professional sports team helps a lot when cities are trying to recruit a big company to come to town.
There’s been an economic domino effect of development around the Deer District too. Kooyenga says it has attracted a 100-million-dollar mixed use project, including 269 apartments, just across the street.
And to make it all sweeter, the Bucks won the NBA championship in 2021 in their new Deer District home—the Fiserv Forum.
Kooyenga said cities like Milwaukee and San Antonio have to compete against bigger cities to keep their teams and compete against similar-sized cities that show promise for a team owner.
“If you want to be in professional sports, then the model is that governments have to put up some creative ways to retain these teams. If you don’t, you may lose your team to Nashville or another city that is growing and looking for an additional sports venue.”
When it comes to the game of basketball, the Spurs are rebuilding just as the city of San Antonio is re-imagining its downtown space.
Heading into November, San Antonio voters are seeing a mix of perspectives on Project Marvel —are the economic projections too optimistic? Is the City getting enough in return for what it will eventually need to spend? Does the public have enough information?
But when it comes to the game of economic development, Kooyenga says the first step is not to open the door to another city to step in and offer the Spurs something better.
