Root District - Farmers Market / Royalston Station

[Tyler]

It would be hilarious (and dumb as shit) if we end up with basketball in the burbs and freaking USbank stadium downtown. An all-time bungle.

[twincitizen]

FWIW I don’t think an arena in Bloomington next to MOA is a total pie in the sky fantasy either. While the team ownership likely prefers this Farmers Market site, keep in mind that Bloomington missed out on the World Expo planned for this vacant land next to MOA and still would like to see it developed sooner rather than later. There are also TIF funds pooling up that can only be spent in this “South Loop” area, though a good chunk of it is currently dedicated to the public subsidy for the water park project. When the Expo was being pushed, there was a group angling to build a smaller arena & convention space and possibly bring in the Iowa Wolves and/or Iowa Wild minor league teams as the anchor tenants. Not that hard to imagine that there could be people expanding that dream now to attract the actual NBA team instead.

One key difference between the sites is I don’t think there’s a lot of opportunity to build much around a new arena in Bloomington. An attached hotel or two, sure, but you’re not going to see anyone propose an entertainment district literally right next to the mall. The mall is the entertainment district. So it comes down to what the team owners value more in their overall plans to develop around a mostly-private funded arena. Also the question for either site is would they be able to get a property tax exemption similar to Allianz Field - privately funded building but tax exempt because the ongoing property tax liability would be untenable. Unless an arena is going to generate a lot of tax paying development around it, it’s an unworkable proposition to exempt the arena from paying taxes. While Bloomington could in theory offer a subsidy due to those pooled TIF funds, that site is not owned by the city and would not come cheaply. MOA owns the site and MOA’s owners (Triple 5) would absolutely want an arena next door, as fans would flood the mall on game/event days. But would they basically give the land away for free to someone building an arena? Would the city spend that TIF money to buy down the cost of the land and make infrastructure upgrades? That’s probably what it would take to get it done.

[BigIdeasGuy]

I see how building next to MOA makes sense from a fans perspective but it doesn't from the owners view. ARod/Lore are going to want as much of the pre/post game revenue that comes from an events as possible something being next/attached to MOA makes basically impossible.

If Wovles/Lynx do leave downtown, the Target Center would instantly become the worst out of 3 major arenas in a metro area that could probably get by with 1 and the only without any major tenants. The absolute best case is that multiple super niche leagues like Arena Football, Indoor Soccer & Lacrosse, all great in their own way, move it but none of those are going to get close to selling 20k tickets regularly along with a few concert they only get by massively undercutting other venues on price. That would leave the city owning a money pit of a building and 20k less people downtown 100+ dates a year. Which is the worst case from all sides for taxpayers

[MNdible]

Remember that there's also a new 19,000 seat amphitheater in Shakopee that will be open next summer to further dilute things.

[Zkools20]

I don’t get the argument about the city owning the arena makes a big difference. If the wolves and lynx move there’s no major tenant paying rent to help upkeep the arena to modern standards. The city isn’t gonna spend 100s of millions of dollars to keep an arena that barely gets used. A downtown arena is the best option connected to multiple transit lines, has an ample section ready to be redeveloped that would turn millions of dollars to the owners and the city, and open space for a large scale building or multiple buildings and reimagining the target center site once demolished. Being out in the suburbs would kill this part of downtown and loose a major anchor for redevelopment on that section of downtown

[thespeedmccool]

I don’t get the argument about the city owning the arena makes a big difference. If the wolves and lynx move there’s no major tenant paying rent to help upkeep the arena to modern standards. The city isn’t gonna spend 100s of millions of dollars to keep an arena that barely gets used. A downtown arena is the best option connected to multiple transit lines, has an ample section ready to be redeveloped that would turn millions of dollars to the owners and the city, and open space for a large scale building or multiple buildings and reimagining the target center site once demolished. Being out in the suburbs would kill this part of downtown and loose a major anchor for redevelopment on that section of downtown

Agreed.

All this talk about building a new NBA stadium in the South Loop strikes me as a little too clever. Like sure, it could spur development on a big lot, and sure it's connect to transit, but this is all justifying a bad idea IMO.

Sometimes the obvious answer really is the best one, and "putting things downtown is good, actually" is really all I need to sign off on a new downtown stadium vis-a-vis a suburban brownfield. We want activity downtown, not in the suburbs; that's the whole point of cities!

As for whether Minneapolis should assist, I think that comes down to a simple economic calculation. I don't think it's unreasonable to think the city would get $200 million in benefit from a stadium over its 30-50 year life. I think that contribution would be reasonable. Harder to justify municipal investments beyond, say $350 million though.

[Emerson Uptowner]

I see how building next to MOA makes sense from a fans perspective but it doesn't from the owners view. ARod/Lore are going to want as much of the pre/post game revenue that comes from an events as possible something being next/attached to MOA makes basically impossible.

If Wovles/Lynx do leave downtown, the Target Center would instantly become the worst out of 3 major arenas in a metro area that could probably get by with 1 and the only without any major tenants. The absolute best case is that multiple super niche leagues like Arena Football, Indoor Soccer & Lacrosse, all great in their own way, move it but none of those are going to get close to selling 20k tickets regularly along with a few concert they only get by massively undercutting other venues on price. That would leave the city owning a money pit of a building and 20k less people downtown 100+ dates a year. Which is the worst case from all sides for taxpayers

I am a fan and it doesn't make any sense to me why it should be near MOA. It also doesn't make sense for the northern suburbs and north metro. It should be centrally located.

[HKM]

There are concerts happening at Target Center, Xcel Energy Center, and US Bank Stadium, despite the acoustics being atrocious at the latter. The even worse Roy Wilkins Auditorium also still gets events from time to time, and that's certainly a venue we could demolish safely at this point.

If the consideration for where to host an event was simply "the newest venue gets every event," we would have stumbled into this problem years ago. A new NBA stadium will not become the city's only event center if built.

All of those venues have a primary tenant (even Roy Wilkins is managed by Wild ownership), the concerts/non-primary tenant events are just gravy but the venues would be hard pressed to survive on them.

It's probably more likely the new Wolves ownership buy/take a significant stake in the Wild (worth less than the amount of the new ownership's $1.5B-$2B unrealized gain on the Wolves/Lynx) and have 82 NBA/NHL dates in a Minneapolis arena they control opening by 2035 (when both Wolves/Lynx and Wild leases are up) than an NBA arena being built in not Minneapolis.

[BikesOnFilm]

I guess it all keeps circling back to "If this is such a perfect arrangement for the team, the owners, the fans, etc., why do billionaires need public handouts?"

The answer is they don't, but we are forced to do it anyway because someone else more desperate than we are will be more than happy to shower them with public money. It's a frustrating position to repeatedly be put into.

[MNdible]

I'll just toss in again that many other cities are able to get some extra benefit from their arenas by locating them close to their convention centers -- allowing them to host very large events supported by the exhibition space, etc. There isn't an obvious site near the convention to make this happen, but a Root District site is going to be even further removed from that the convention center and hotels. At least now, there's a real (if circuitous) skyway connection available.

[BigIdeasGuy]

You could piece together the land needed for an arena attached to the convention center at the corner of Grant & Nicollet but it would involve demo-ing everything east of Nicollet between 15th & Grant/2nd and the western edge of the convention center. That's probably a political nonstarter for multiple reasons including multiple churches, historic buildings & a good amount of affordable housing would all have to go along with 1st Ave & 14th St ROW being vacated.

The other idea I just had was the Hyatt Regency block but that's also a nonstarter because it would involve buying out 2 condo buildings which would be somewhere between a nightmare & impossible without eminent domain or some other legal option to force owners to sell

[Didier]

It’s worth nothing that there’s no indication anyone is actually looking into the South Loop for a new NBA arena. It’s almost impossible to imagine that happening without Bloomington offering what would surely be a massive (and massively unpopular) subsidy.

[mister.shoes]

Football works in the suburbs because ~12 times per year 60k people show up, many of whom spend 8 hours on-site tailgating. Fans are focused on the venue, not the area around it. With so few dates and the need to accommodate so many people at once, there’s a natural incentive to do so on the cheapest land possible. US Bank is an extreme outlier in the NFL stadium realm.

Basketball arenas don’t work in the suburbs because no one tailgates for hours before and/or after a game. Fans making a day of it want and need more interesting things to do around the venue. Fewer fans + more dates incentivizes locating in an active area.

Beyond pure economic arguments, there’s a sociological/demographic angle to consider. Basketball is traditionally an urban sport; football rural. The energy in the building feeds off the energy of the city and vice versa. Anywhere in the suburbs, even somewhere as “lively” as MoA, is going to pale in comparison to downtown.

[twincitizen]

It’s worth nothing that there’s no indication anyone is actually looking into the South Loop for a new NBA arena. It’s almost impossible to imagine that happening without Bloomington offering what would surely be a massive (and massively unpopular) subsidy.

Agreed, I was just laying out some reasons why that site could enter the conversation, should all efforts to build a new arena in Minneapolis fail.

[twincitizen]

What's interesting is closing and redeveloping HERC could be the shared interest that binds urban environmentalist progressives and rich sports team owners/Chamber of Commerce booster/Rybak-Frey types.

Yeah I agree that tying the arena approval to the closure of HERC might be the only way to make the politics work. And HERC is a better site for an arena than the site they're looking at, by any possible measure.

Circling back to this just to spur conversation, I measured the buildable portion of the HERC site (minus existing TFS Plaza and tail tracks) and found the buildable site to be roughly 8 acres. I've always been one to fall in love with my own ideas too quickly, but I really think HERC is the only truly good and workable site for a new basketball arena. Fans would still park downtown (ABC ramps and more) to pre-game and walk to an arena at the HERC site. An arena on the HERC site requires no new parking to be built.

Despite being "across the street", the 501 Royalston site just can't be stitched into existing pedestrian connections and Target Field plazas the way that HERC could. The Royalston site would be completely detached from downtown, providing zero benefit to existing businesses walkable to Target Center. It's not even very walkable from the A Ramp, and it's not like the city is going to approve massive parking structures surrounding the Royalston LRT Station. In my view, the only way an arena works on the Royalston site is by rebuilding that entire district, and that won't be cheap for the city or the team owners. One way to make it work would be building parking garages along the freeway where the farmers market sits now, and building a new farmers market on the current public works site adjacent to Mary's Place.

P.S. I haven't been a supporter of rushing the closure of HERC (i.e. before we have viable alternatives, so probably not for a decade or longer), but if there's momentum building to make that happen sooner I would really not want to miss the opportunity to replace HERC with the basketball arena vs. having the arena go on a clearly inferior site with worse benefits to downtown, whether that's Royalston or elsewhere.

[BikesOnFilm]

It's certainly a better plan than the "tear down City Center and the Target Center" plan Axios came up with.

[Silophant]

Makes sense to me. My particular hobbyhorse is that the HERC property is the ideal spot for a downtown utility hub as we stare down the barrel of electrification generally *and* the existing district energy system having to decarbonize specifically. There's going to need to be at least one new downtown substation and some kind of geothermal(?) district heat source, and I don't know that there's a better place to do that than an already publically-owned, already probably-polluted parcel that just so happens to have a 50MW power interconnection on-site.

There would, of course, be some pushback to wasting a parcel in the North Loop on boring infrastructure stuff. But if you build an arena on top of it...

[Oreos&Milk]

Makes sense to me. My particular hobbyhorse is that the HERC property is the ideal spot for a downtown utility hub as we stare down the barrel of electrification generally *and* the existing district energy system having to decarbonize specifically. There's going to need to be at least one new downtown substation and some kind of geothermal(?) district heat source, and I don't know that there's a better place to do that than an already publically-owned, already probably-polluted parcel that just so happens to have a 50MW power interconnection on-site.

There would, of course, be some pushback to wasting a parcel in the North Loop on boring infrastructure stuff. But if you build an arena on top of it...

I don't know man... I just feel like we are kinda running out of sports to build arenas for.. I mean.. maybe we can invent something like... fishing boat ice jumping or, influencer viral deathmatch?

That or focusing on bringing some of the bigger landlord who deal with housing units in volume. It's a perfect location to hop the train to work downtown, and then walk on the weekends to the farmers market. They can focus on density vs building ascetics. To be blunt kinda a market rate version of Riverside. Start bringing thousands of new rental units and then lets see rental prices drop making life so much affordable for everyone. Just don't look up. It truly would be okay.

[BikesOnFilm]

I love it, but I think the issue with that plan (and chatter from real estate folks seems to confirm this for me) that said developer would need to be okay with the fact that they're undermining the very market that they'll use to get a return on their investment.

For all the good that the 24,000+ units Minneapolis brought online in the past decade to hold rent growth at a very modest level, that lack of rent growth (plus financing issues) is keeping new projects from being proposed right now.

What you're describing would work in a functional country that has a social housing scheme that is well funded, shame we don't have that here.

[Zkools20]

I rather have a new arena there if they decide not to build at the current site. Then have a mixed used district around the new arena with new residential, hotel, office space, and of course restaurants/bars/shops sprinkled around the new arena. The old arena site then can be used as a watch party site kinda like how Milwaukee does for bucks playoff games or KC live type of area.