I touched on this in earlier posts, and it is a valid question. At what point do we make decisions not based on an ROI but some other experience metric to meet expectations of a growing city, corporate relocations, etc? Can this be considered an infrastructure investment in the same way that we presume other community resources are? For example, do we analyze new community parks throughout the county for specific districts/neighborhoods by ROI?
If Raleigh is to compete, we have to build for what we want the city to become, not what it was or what is is now. To go to the next level, there are certain experiences that must be provided or we will grow to be the inland empire east of LA proper instead of a city with an identity of its own.
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I’d be willing to bet a corporate relo, or decision to establish a new large office/presence in a city includes things like amenities. Lots of factors but you can’t put those soft considerations into an ROI. At some point it needs to be considered a sunk cost of being a desirable city.
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That was the point of my questioning - Quality of life/leisure should not be a sole ROI decision!
In the past it was enough to lure jobs and then people would follow. Now you have to follow talent and (young) talents wants to live in a cool place with things to do!
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Full disclosure, I don’t have kids yet and am biased in that regard, but isn’t our metro family friendly enough? We’re constantly being voted a top place to raise a family, but we weren’t cool enough to land Apple. Maybe marbles is serving its purpose perfectly well, and we should invest in other areas that cities are graded by. Just my perspective.
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I’m 12 and I have sim city build it on my iPad, I like it but have nothing to compare it to other than cities skylines which is kinda different
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I have a 3 year old in Soccer Shots. There’s a potential scenario where when hes 7-8 years old we could ride our bikes along the greenway to go see an MLS soccer game. That could be “priceless” if he ends up being a soccer fan.
Raleigh has options for art, music, history, science, play, open space, drama, etc. For sports we’re really looking at going to one of the universities, out to the PNC, WakeMed Soccer, or DBAP. I think it would add to the city culture to have a sports venue located towards the city center, rather than away from it.
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It strains belief that upgrading from a USL team in Cary to an MLS team downtown is going to have absolutely any effect on whether companies relocate here or people move here, though. (In fairness, nobody is going to move here or not based on whether Marbles gets an expansion, either.) We already have a pro sports team in a league that is substantially more popular than MLS, and it is perfectly nice that they are here, but is there any evidence that we are attracting people or companies that we wouldn’t have if not for the Hurricanes? How would bumping our existing soccer team up one classification alter that equation?
In some ways, I actually kind of agree with @niko. The idea of letting the government operate a VC fund for tourism startups is a terrible idea, and we really should just focus on funding projects that make Raleigh a nicer place to live and improve the quality of life for local residents. And if people from other places want to come to Raleigh and enjoy all of our cool stuff, that’s swell.
Whether it’s Marbles or NCFC or what have you, these are all nice amenities to have–some people will use them, many others won’t, but the people who use them will get some enjoyment out of it, and there’s a value to that, even if it’s hard to quantify. But, and I know I keep coming back to this, NCFC is asking 8 to 10 times what most of these other projects are asking for. Is moving NCFC a few miles closer into town really going to generate 10 times the ROI of those other projects? At some point, the cost of stuff matters. There has to be a point at which we’re willing to say, “It’d be nice to have that amenity, but the cost is too high.” (And handing over taxpayer money to subsidize a for-profit company really is a bad idea as well.)
@OberlinSouth I actually have a daughter who turned 2-1/2 today and is in Soccer Shots as well, and I was talking with the NCFC communications director yesterday about how I am looking forward to taking her to see the Carolina Courage in a few years. But I can already do that now! Sure, moving the team to Downtown South would make the trip mildly more convenient for us, but it’s not like moving the team a few miles would bring some new amenity to the county that doesn’t already exist. The team is already here.
@evan.j.bost I’m not sure I understand what it means for an area to be “family-friendly enough” already, as if we don’t really want it to be any more family friendly than that. Most working age people either have kids or plan to have them in the future. It’s usually the number one thing people with kids care about when deciding whether to move to a new location: “Is this going to be a good place to raise my kids?” It is a much, much, much more important factor for the vast majority of families than whether the city has enough pro sports teams. If the goal is to attract more companies, building a community that is a great place to raise kids is the best possible strategy for doing so.
There’s absolutely no evidence that we lost out on Apple or Amazon or whoever because we were insufficiently “cool,” or that having more sports teams would have helped us land those companies. In fact, Apple decided to build its new campus in Austin … which doesn’t have a single major pro sports team.
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More Charlotte competition news: Panthers execs to tell MLS they have 60 suite commitments for expansion franchise.
Article is behind a paywall so here’s a couple snippets:
If a Major League Soccer team comes to Charlotte, there are at least 60 companies willing to spend $100,000 annually to buy luxury suites, Carolina Panthers executives told the Charlotte Business Journal this week. The pledges for suites would dwarf many existing teams in the league, whose soccer-specific stadiums typically have a total of 30 luxury boxes.
“We have 60 letters of intent for annual commitments for suites just for soccer. And I think what’s important about that is we haven’t gone to the market yet. We’ve really just been speaking to the folks who are already here.”
There are 151 luxury suites at Bank of America Stadium.
In addition to corporate interest, Glick predicted season ticket sales in the range of 30,000 for a Charlotte MLS team.
[Don Garber] said publicly last year that he found interest in MLS from Tepper, whose net worth is $12 billion, and the Panthers intriguing.
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Raleigh can handle an MLS franchise. Raleigh would struggle with an MLB franchise. Use the tax dollars toward the soccer stadium and infrastructure for the Kane Development.
The whole Marbles discussion is ridiculous. Build the soccer stadium already. SoDo!!
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Correct, no one knows why we missed apple, and Austin doesn’t have pro sports, but they are the music capital outside Nashville. South by Southwest, home of Stevie Ray Vaughan, etc.
The point being, we’re already crushing it as a family friendly city. If we neglect the other sides of a well balanced city (entertainment being one) we’ll lose certain types of people and get pigeonholed. Durham is already known as a more “fun, hip” city. I can attest that we’ve lost marvelously talented people to cities that better embrace the other aspects of a local culture, other than family friendliness. Much of the most inventive art, music, and scientific explorations have been done by people who don’t form families, because they sacrifice a “normal life” for the passion of their fields. This is way off topic sorry lol.
Getting back to @John’s point - we have to loosen up a little bit and weigh the cultural, experiential benefits of game-changer developments. It’s a shame Dix park has so many “keep it natural” activists out there that would die chained to a tree before allowing commercial development along lake wheeler Rd. If that park is ever going to be built to the grandeur of the master plan, we need the funding!
Anyways, all this discussion and speculation hinges on the council of no, so we’ll see what happens. Kane might start peeping at Durham 
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Austin has an MLS franchise. And we do know why we lost Apple…the N.C. legislature. I know this for a fact.
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They piss me off. It’s sad how we didn’t get Apple 
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And it was stated it was imminent. We were all waiting for the news it was coming and then we all found out it went to Austin.
Thank you so much for your thoughtful responses. A+
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An article in the TBJ just popped up about this project. I have a subscription, but don’t know the rules around posting that.
Edit…Basically says, they won’t go through with the project without the funding and time is running out. They were classified a “medium project” and that’s not what this is.
Also, the city would own the stadium and help fuel IMMEDIATE development of hotels and office.
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Malik says the current plan is to have its public partners – potentially the city of Raleigh and Wake County – actually own the soccer stadium. North Carolina Football Club could rent the stadium to the tune of $1 million per year. And he says it’s a fact lost in the public’s eye as the debate over public dollars continues.
I thought the $13 million per year was for stadium upkeep.
Can someone explain to me the advantages of the city owning the stadium? Wouldn’t this reduce the property tax generated on it?
You can quote a paragraph or two but certainly not the entire article.
I think some of the money was for upkeep, but also for project infrastructure…but now I’m not really sure. I think they’ve provided the City Council and Board of Commissioners this information (or at least I hope they have).
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This just honestly confirms what some of us had believed all along and weren’t exactly happy with. They want the city/county to take full-risk on a 20k seat stadium with no high-volume tenant. The $1.9B in development is proposed, but no way to hold Kane to that if the economy tanks or the stadium isn’t able to be activated.
I hate to say this, but the messaging and the positioning for this project was a big miss IMO. The lack of data, the lack of transparency, the vibe that this was almost a $1.9B ransom of sorts (by saying they weren’t doing it if they don’t get ALL the money). It just seems very disorganized and never answered the tough questions that people needed to know when you’re asking for $300 million.
If you want an MLS stadium built on speculation, then say it and make a real case for it. Otherwise, there is no reason to build a 20k seat stadium in DT Raleigh right now for NCFC and The Courage (and then put it on the city to try to fill it the rest of the time).
If I was a big MLS supporter I’d honestly be very disappointed in how this played out. I know a lot of soccer fans are going to blame those who questioned this proposal from day 1, but there was a way to do this, to position this, and to sell this. They missed.
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you just nullified your point with your last paragraph