Also - I don’t believe that all public investment requires a financial return. Civic pride is important and should be taken into account. Maybe build a fountain or two with that money, I’d be all for that but its not going to generate income for the city.
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I’m not aware of any high-quality studies that have looked into this issue. (If anyone knows of any, please let me know!) The American Association of Museums put out a study suggesting they’re a big economic driver, but that’s not exactly an unbiased source, so I wouldn’t really put any stock in that.
I think one complication to studying this issue is that it would really depend on the museum. It’s very easy to define what does or doesn’t count as an NHL arena. But how do you define the relevant population of children’s museums? If I had to wager money, I’d bet that, say, the Boston Children’s Museum really has provided Boston with a strong ROI. But that experience wouldn’t extrapolate to all children’s museums.
I agree that deciding what to fund, or not to fund, with public money involves many considerations beyond just what’s going to generate the most income. But those non-monetary factors would generally provide more support for funding an educational institution like a children’s museum than funding a for-profit entertainment business like a soccer team.
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That moment you realize some people find the glass have empty when a developer is willing to take a dead section of town, dump in 1.5 Billion investment dollars and ask the city for measly 11Million (which was already slated for visitor activity). Oh, which will certainly generate a net positive in tax revenue on an annualized bases. Come on Raleigh… you’re killing me
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The ROI question is not an easy one to answer.
You can dissect the ROI on occupancy/beverage tax just on the stadium, the surrounding hotels and retail, subsequent property taxes etc or non of that until you arrive at the conclusion to feed ones selection bias 
My take on it as a pro development guy is this – give the bold developer their tax breaks to set them up with the biggest chance to succeed for the MLS bid and for the development around it. Raleigh needs it.
Such a big development would come in phases and who knows what “develop it in another fashion” means. Would NH be the same if the first phases would have been less successful?
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I drive through this section of town twice a going to and from work. It is a dead zone, it is unattractive, and it is screaming for development. Let’s see how our Council can slow this down or screw it up!
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And don’t forget that Kane doesn’t seem to stop or slow down his projects during a recession!
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I agree completely. Just building a new stadium to replace a perfectly fine one that would be nowhere near MLS requirements is dumb.
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*extremely dumb. Especially if NCFC is granted a MLS spot.
Technically the $11M/year has nothing to do with the $1.9B investment. $11M from the county is a drop in the bucket for a development of this size. I don’t have an issue with using the hotel funds for the stadium, and I think it’s entirely appropriate.
My issue is that there are at least 3 options that could happen with a stadium proposal.
- They get an MLS team, they build a $200M, 20K seat stadium, yay! everyone’s happy. Show them the money.
- They don’t get MLS team and NCFC moves the minor league team there. They build a $40M, 10K seat stadium, Malik pockets the extra $290M over the next 30 years. Yay for Malik, Sad for Wake County.
- The economy crashes as they start groundbreaking. MLS suffers a severe attendance drop, expansions come to a halt. Malik renews his lease with Cary to keep NCFC there to save costs, uses the money from Wake to pay that lease, and walks away from Penmarc, leaving Wake County to either finish the stadium or find another buyer.
What’s so bad about having contingencies based on performance? Why wouldn’t you have a condition that states they have to build a specific thing in order to get a specific amount of funding?
Are we so desperate for the development that we’d give away money that does have a specific list of uses, without any type of guarantee of stewardship? It should be an incentive, not a gift. Giving tax money to millionaires with no strings attached is just bad policy.
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THANK YOU. When people say “Raleigh-Durham” it kills me. 
I agree with the rest of your post, but take huge exception to these two comments.
First of all, Durham has never proven to be interested in looking at itself as a distinct neighborhood of one city, and neither should Raleigh. Raleigh should stay hungry and assertive of its own identity and not tether itself to RTP or Durham in a way that makes its identity dependent. It’s perfectly fine to say that Raleigh is the largest city within the Research Triangle area, and that Durham is a neighbor/sister city, but it needs to exert its rightful position at the top of the food chain. It is the top dog.
As for not having an Interstate running through the city, that is perhaps the single best decision that was made for the city’s planning post WW2. A freeway would have devastated and decimated the already constrained DT boundary and associated neighborhoods. I-40 being a little more than a mile south of DT proper is perfectly fine by me.
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Just the ones run for profit and owned by millionaires. How’s that for a distinction ?
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The city and or county should have thought about adding that little nugget before they started offering the incentive… 
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Contingencies, yes of course - Tie them to tangible goals same as for economic development projects. Makes absolute sense.
I love the rest of your post but respectfully disagree with this sentence. The project would be in phases and the $11m/year you mentioned would be that extra encouragement that the city of Raleigh is behind the stadium and the MLS bid. A successful first phase and positive feedback is vital for later phases and the overall return of the project.
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I don’t disagree about Raleigh being better off without a freeway through the center of downtown. I still think it has hampered, and continues to hamper, Raleigh’s downtown economic development, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay to not have a freeway through the heart of our city. By extending Southward towards the freeway, we may be able to get the best of both worlds.
We’ll just have to agree to disagree that Durham is a threat to Raleigh. That implies that it’s a zero sum game which it isn’t. Everything good that happens in Durham, increases the draw to Raleigh, and vice versa.
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I think people are talking about building 12k capacity with the option to add seating up to 20k if we got the bid. A 20k capacity stadium with no pro team is ridiculous
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Wake County Commissioner Sig Hutchinson just posted a link to the TBJ’s story about this project on his Facebook page, saying that he [hearts] the idea, with like an actual heart emoji, just in case anybody else is trying to count noses on this thing.
FWIW, when I was writing my story on Opportunity Zones a few months ago, I spoke to some folks on the condition of anonymity so that they could speak candidly about the topic. My sources were pretty consistent in telling me that 1. There’s definitely some appetite on the respective boards for contributing hotel tax funds towards this project. 2. No one in government knows whether or not the $330 million ask that was attached to the original version for a stadium is going to be similar to the ask for this project. 3. If the ask really is $330 million, it’s going to be extremely difficult for the government to shoulder all of that, even if they’d like to. PNC Arena is asking for $200 million, and there’s very strong support for the Marbles project, and everyone knows that the convention center is going to be looking for more money soon. If Malik really is seeking $330 million, he’s likely going to run into the problem of that kind of money just not existing.
That said, $330 million was always a surprisingly high number for an MLS stadium. Most stadiums have been built for $200 million or even less, so this implies that Malik was expecting taxpayers to put up 100 percent of the cost and he would just be in charge of collecting the profits. So it’ll be interesting to see how the haggling goes, how much the stadium is expected to cost, how much of that, if any, Malik is willing to stump up out of his own pocket, and how the city-county reconcile the desire to fund this request with the requests from PNC and others that they would also like to fund given the finite amount of tax money in the kitty.
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Looks amazing! The stadium design hasn’t changed much, but that’s totally okay as long as all of this gets built.
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Woah. Even if 1/4 of this is built that would be completely awesome!
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