Apparently, sports arenas should no longer be considered long-term investments. The current debate is in Seattle, where basketball's (Super)Sonics say that little ol' Key Arena, renovated only 10 years ago, is no longer keeping up with the times.

I first ran across this in a business column in the Post-Intelligencer: Is your house as 'obsolete' as KeyArena?. The writer points out that office buildings and residences have expansion and updating costs, so we should probably expect such expenses from sports arenas, too.

I'll not point out that some baseball stadiums have lasted practically a century, many of the domed and multi-purpose stadiums of the 60s and 70s lasted 30 years before they fell out of favor.

Apparently, it's going to get worse:

"A new arena built in the year 2030 will be obsolete before it opens."
-- Bill Alves, a Seattle city council analyst

(Note to newspapers: when a columnist refers to a story you printed earlier, feel free to link to it -- save the rest of us some time hunting for your material.)

Anyway, just as a city wouldn't build an office building for a company, I still don't get why they put up something for a sports franchise. But, as another P-I story points out, this particular arena could make money without basketball.

Goodness knows we here in the Queen City have an arena with no permanent tenant, no major league team of any kind, that must be making some money, what with all the circuses, concerts and monster truck shows that parade through. In fact, the football stadium has started hosting things besides the NFL's Bengals. High school games, concerts, even the U.S. women's soccer team came for a visit.

Those kind of activities make a sports facility more of an asset to a community than just the goodwill of professional sports fans. Now that the Bengals are winning, everybody feels good that we "kept them here" by building a new stadium. But I'm betting many got an even bigger thrill seeing their high school team play on the same field. If Seattle gets to host high school basketball on the same floor where the kids' heroes play, that makes those efforts even more special.

This entry was posted in the following categories: Economics