In California, Development Bills Are The 'New Sexy.' Here's Why Housing Doesn't Get Built

If the city long in San Francisco's shadow ever breaks out of it, Oakland's baseball franchise will likely have had a lot to do with it. 

The Bay Area's two professional baseball teams are making similar attempts to write the latest chapter in huge sports-backed developments, which are rising in popularity.

A visit to the site for the Giants' development in San Francisco and the land for the Athletics' in Oakland — apart from the scant 8 miles separating the two cities — would reveal the clearest difference between the two attempts.

Within a few months, the Giants and co-developer Tishman Speyer will have broken ground at the 28-acre Mission Rock; site preparation is already visibly underway, according to San Francisco Giants Senior Vice President of Strategy and Development >

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The promise of new revenue, visibility and business activity has lured officials in cities large and small into believing new sports stadiums will revive and transform their towns, a siren song leading many to fund and build such projects.

Reality hits when the bills come due, especially when cities realize the sports teams that bring so much notice can simply depart for other locations, frequently lured by a different set of officials also offering sweet deals. Residents of Baltimore, Los Angeles, Oakland, Cleveland and others watched beloved National Football League teams depart, and sometimes later return, while professional baseball fans in Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Boston saw their teams leave for the Sun Belt.  

Whatever heartbreak those departures cause fans, taxpayers sometimes end up paying the real price.

Unlike old warehouses or loft buildings, stadiums and ballparks have a limited set of uses, and repositioning these structures for other uses is almost impossible. That leaves cities dependent on the local sports team filling the stadium year after year, a precarious strategy for catalyzing new development. That is particularly true for…

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In Case You Missed It...

Foreign capital flowing into the U.S. fell 54% last year as entity-level sales plummeted, particularly in the retail asset class, CBRE reported Friday. 

Were it not for this steep drop in entity sales, foreign investments in U.S. retail assets would have increased by 8% last year, according to CBRE. An entity-level sale is a transaction where a buyer purchases all assets and liabilities tied to a business entity as opposed to the straight…

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