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Shockoe
Jocks
Baseball
players in Richmond's Shockoe Bottom? A proposed
downtown stadium is the right project in the right place
-- if developers can pull it off without putting
taxpayers at risk.
Several
days ago, I met Tim Davey for a cup of java and a chat
about a proposed AAA baseball stadium in
Richmond's
Shockoe Bottom entertainment district. Davey, an urban
planner with the Timmons Group, is a leading proponent
of the downtown ballpark concept. To say I was skeptical
is like saying that Starbucks overcharges for coffee –
an understatement.
Strike
one, I thought, was that shoe-horning a large, ungainly
baseball stadium into historical Shockoe Bottom would
disrupt the urban fabric – the human scale of the
buildings, the historic architecture, the pedestrian-
friendly sidewalks -- that makes
Richmond’s
entertainment district so special. Strike two was that
building a downtown stadium would cost up to $34
million, nearly double the cost of renovating the
existing Diamond in mid-town Richmond
–
with the balance to come, undoubtedly, from taxpayers.
Strike three was the difficulty of convincing
suburbanites to come downtown to watch a ballgame. The
phrase “white elephant” kept popping into my head.
But
I didn’t know enough about the Richmond Ballpark
Initiative (RBI) to dispatch its proposal with any
authority, so I’d agreed to sit down with Davey to cover my bases, so to speak. Good thing I did.
It turns out that most of my preconceptions were wrong.
Indeed, my conversion is so complete that you now can
count me an outright fan of the ballpark idea. By
stimulating the development of apartments, condos, shops,
restaurants and even hotels, a ballpark would enrich the
texture of urban life and bring hundreds of people back
downtown to live, work and play.
Downtown
ballparks may be one of the closest things to a slam
dunk (oops, wrong sport)
in urban redevelopment today. Pocket-sized baseball
stadiums in other midsized cities have ignited hundreds
of millions of dollars in nearby investment. If they
work elsewhere, they'll work in Richmond, Davey insists.
“Small, cozy ball fields are a trigger to making
development happen. ... On a one to ten scale, this
project is a ten. This is better than Memphis,
better than Toledo,
better than
Rochester!”
Richmond’s
current ball field, on the edge of an industrial park,
rates a two or three -- on a good day. Visitors to the
Diamond have nowhere else in the neighborhood to go. They park, watch the Braves lose,
and drive home. The mid-town location has stimulated
absolutely no complementary investment -- zippo, nada --
in the neighborhood. Attendance has been sliding for
years.
And
now the stadium needs repairs. Plans call for conducting
$18 million in renovations that would leave the Diamond
a second-class facility. That's less than the $42
million the Braves think are needed, and the team
has refused to sign a long-term lease. Although Braves
management claims not to be considering any plans to
skip town, Davey asserts that other cities are angling
to lure the team away. “You could renovate the
Diamond," he warns, "and the Braves could
leave in five to seven years anyway.”
No
one seriously thought about building a downtown stadium,
however, until Dave Lucado, president of the Timmons
Group, and Dave Anderson, another Timmons executive,
were visiting Memphis.
There, they saw
AutoZone
Park,
home of the Redbirds, and marveled at its impact on the
surrounding downtown area. An $8 million city investment
in the stadium catalyzed $2 billion in
development. And, for what it's worth, the new stadium
also boosted the ailing Redbirds into the premier AAA
franchise in the country.
Timmons
executives Davey and Anderson rounded up a number of
their peers, mostly young professionals and businessmen,
and formed the Richmond
Ballpark Initiative with the goal of bringing a downtown
stadium to Richmond
-- a
stadium that, hopefully, would encourage the Braves to
sign a long-term lease. They had no preconceived ideas
of where in downtown the facility should be located.
Indeed, says Davey, “When we started, Shockoe Bottom
was not on the radar screen.”
As
the initiative progressed, RBI brought in Frank Ricks, a
Memphis
architect who had designed AutoZone
Park
and
gone on to develop a national reputation as an expert in
downtown ballparks. After touring 12 different downtown
sites with Ricks, the Richmond hosts capped off the
day with a dinner at the Hard Shell Restaurant in
Shockoe Bottom.
Ricks
promptly fell in love with the Bottom. As Davey recalls,
“He said, ‘Why not here?’” After dinner, the
group wandered around the gritty but historic entertainment district, hemmed in by Interstate 95,
railroad tracks and the James
River
floodwall. The ideal situation for attracting private
capital, Ricks explained, was to find a place where
things were already beginning to happen. Shockoe Bottom
fit the bill. The district has attracted piecemeal
investment in the past 15 years or so as property owners
have converted old warehouses and industrial facilities
into offices and apartment buildings. But the pace has
been ragged and uneven, especially near the I-95 exit
onto Broad Street, which serves as the gateway to the
historic Church Hill neighborhood.
Ricks
persuaded RBI that a Shockoe location was a winner. The
group identified a 12-acre area backing up to Main
Street train station where a stadium would fit. The ball field
itself, absorbing four blocks, would take out only three old industrial buildings.
Having
identified the scope of the project and selling it to
the community -- "taking the arrows in the
ass," as Davey put it -- RBI now is shopping the
project to nationally known urban developers. There is
tremendous interest, Davey says. He expects
a developer to come on board before the end of the year.
The developer will assemble a formal proposal, and then
submit it to Richmond city council sometime in 2005.
Like
any ambitious redevelopment scheme, the Shockoe ball
park has inspired resistance. Many on the east side of
town are concerned that a baseball stadium -- a
structure of significant size -- would constitute an
invasive species in the
historic district, where most of the neighboring buildings
are only two or three stories tall. That certainly was
my concern. I envisioned facilities the size of the
Diamond or the Norfolk baseball stadium plopping down
just down the street from Havana 59, one of my favorites
restaurants, filling the night sky with floodlights and
loudspeakers.
But,
as designed, the ballpark will leave a footprint one
third the size of the Diamond complex and reach only
three-and-a-half stories at its highest point. That's lower than nearby facilities like the Main
Street train station. The elevated Interstate and office
towers beyond will dwarf the structure.
Image courtesy of the RBI
website.
Parking
is another hot topic. The Diamond
is surrounded by 2,000 parking spaces, but the RBI
proposal doesn't include a single new parking lot.
Sounds bad. But more no more spaces are needed, Davey says.
There are more than 5,000 parking spaces within a
five-minute walk of the 7,000-seat stadium and they're
mostly empty on the evenings -- Sunday through Thursday
-- when the Braves play ball.
Traffic
is another perennial worry. Congestion is certainly a
problem around the Diamond before and after game time -- wouldn't it be even worse
downtown? Not so, says Davey. The crush at the Diamond
occurs because everyone is arriving and leaving at the
same time. But traffic would be buffered downtown by
people arriving early or leaving late to eat, drink or
partake of the other amenities in the area. Given the
office and residential development in the immediate
vicinity, some visitors might even walk to the stadium!
Noise
won't be a bother. Instead of five or 10 giant
loudspeakers that blast sound waves indiscriminately, the
stadium will be wired with hundreds of smaller speakers.
Light pollution shouldn't be an issue either. Deflectors on
the lamps will direct the light to where it's needed on
the playing ground.
Davey
is so bold as to suggest that the project will bring net
benefits to the district. There will be micro-parks
and benches where people can sit, even when the ballpark
is not in use. Rest rooms will be open to the public, a
major bonus when street festivals like Que Passa draw as
many as 30,000 visitors. Perhaps
most significant will be the estimated $5 million to $6
million in streetscape improvements slated for the
entertainment district. A developer, working through a
community development association, can raise funds to install
attractive streetlights, sidewalks, trees and other
streetscaping that benefit everyone-- something
individual property owners could never afford to do on
their own.
The
Richmond Ballpark Initiative has devised a financing
plan that, in theory, doesn't shake down the taxpayers.
Here's what's needed, according to Davey. The city of Richmond
and the counties of Henrico and Chesterfield have
committed already to pay $500,000 a year for 20 years to
support the debt service on a Diamond renovation. If
they transfer that commitment to a downtown
stadium instead, and if the Braves are willing to match
with $500,000 of their own -- which they might do, given
the prospect of higher ticket sales and skybox revenues
-- that should more than suffice to borrow $30 million
to construct the ballpark.
The
key to making the ball park work, however, is to redevelop
the area all around. RBI envisions buying several blocks
of surrounding property, renovating the buildings of
historic significance and filling in with new buildings.
The city owns 70 percent of the land in the proposed
district. The plan hinges upon the willingness of the
city to sell that land for below-market rates. The land
is earning no revenue right now, Davey contends; indeed,
the old train shed building represents a maintenance
liability of $300,000 to $400,000 per year.
Secondly,
the
city must approve the creation of a Community
Development Authority (CDA) that will buy out private
property owners and pay for streetscape and
other infrastructure improvements, totaling another $28
million or so. The bonds to fund these improvements
would be paid from the higher property values created by
new development. The only taxpayers on the hook would be
those property owners who voluntarily participated in
the CDA.
Davey
sees significant mixed-use development rising all
around the stadium. Development would
hew to the tenets of the New Urbanism movement, creating
a hospitable environment for pedestrians: lots of
storefronts, attractive streetscaping, micro-parks and
places for people to mingle. There would be a finely
grained mix of uses, including retail, office
space, a hotel or two and multi-family housing -- in
other cities people have been willing to pay a premium
to overlook an urban ball park. Davey emphasizes the idea
of "connectivity". A top design goal would be
integrate the new development seamlessly with the rest
of Shockoe Bottom, and perhaps even with the Virginia
Commonwealth University medical campus on the other side
of the
Interstate.
It
would be unrealistic to expect the stadium to spark a $2
billion wave of investment as in Memphis, but it's not
unreasonable to expect it to add hundreds of millions of
dollars to the tax base. For the city of Richmond, the
project could be a huge winner.
The
last concern I had was whether suburbanites would defy
precedent and come downtown in large enough numbers to
prop up Braves revenues. All Davey can do is point to the
example other cities. When set amidst the right
surroundings, he says, small stadiums work. Attendance
invariably increases, and support from business --
usually in the form of skybox rentals -- surges.
In
a sense, such concerns are academic. If the Braves have
enough confidence in the project to sign a 20-year
lease, who am I to argue? If investors have enough
confidence to purchase millions of dollars worth of
bonds predicated on an increase in property values, who
am I to second guess them? If a big-name developer from
out of town has the confidence to invest multi-millions of his
or her own capital, am I going to look a gift horse in
the mouth?
The
only unresolved issues that I can foresee revolve around the
distribution of risk. What happens if forecasts don't
pan out -- as happened, for instance, when the Sixth
Street Marketplace opened in the 1980s? The city cannot
allow itself to get stuck, again, with the liabilities
from a failed project. If the stadium is the no-brainer
that Davey insists it is, then the private sector should
be willing to shoulder the risk. Before I can pass final
judgment on a downtown stadium, I'll have
to see what the developer's proposal looks like and
scrutinize the potential downside for city taxpayers.
But
there are many things to love about the project, even
for someone like me who has watched maybe five ballgames
in the 18 years I've lived in Richmond. The concept
fleshed out by RBI will work on a micro scale: It's not,
as I originally feared, a suburban-style development
dumped inappropriately in the city. It mixes land uses,
maintains a sense of human scale, integrates smoothly
with surrounding buildings, and fosters a
pedestrian-friendly environment.
The
ball park also works on a macro, or regional, scale. It
puts development in the right place: in the urban core,
utilizing an Interstate 95 exit and other existing
infrastructure, rather than pushing farther into
Richmond's rural periphery, scattering growth and
creating the demand for new roads and utilities. The
project even may be big enough and bold enough to
capture peoples' imaginations and spawn more interest in
urban redevelopment.
I'm
getting fired up just thinking about it. Go Braves! How
does that Tomahawk chop thing go? Dunh-dunh, dunh-dunh...
Dunh-dunh, dunh-dunh..
--
August
23,
2004
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