Plan for Houston theme park still inworks
HOUSTON — For more than four years, Mayor Sylvester Turner has trumpeted Houston’s need for a destination theme park that would boost the region’s tourism industry and provide an outlet for families.
In the final weeks of his reelection campaign last year, he even said an amusement company was interested and that an announcement could come within weeks.
“I’ve had investors come and sit around my table to talk about it,” he said that October.
That teaser came months after the mayor appeared at rapper Travis Scott’s concert — part of the Grammy-nominated Houston native’s “Astroworld” tour, named for a theme park that sat across the South Loop from the Astrodome for 37 years before closing in 2005. Standing on the Toyota Center stage, Turner gave a beaming Scott a key to the city and drew thunderous applause when he said, “Because of him, wewant to bring another amusement theme park back to the city!”
The announcement hinted at last fall never came, however. After he won re-election last December, Turner said investors
had surveyed land on the north side but determined the site was not a good fit.
Still, Turner said several large parcels within the city limits could host a marquee park, and said he planned to form a task force in January of this year to focus on the idea, with the goal of having a park open by the time term limits force him from office at the end of 2023.
Turner spokeswoman Mary Benton said this month that the mayor was in the process of asking people to join his theme park task force when the pandemic arrived and became the administration’s main focus. Still, she said, Turner has not abandoned the goal.
“The mayor looks forward to resuming work on developing a theme park as soon as possible,” Benton said. “There is strong interest among developers who recognize the value of building a new theme park venue in Houston.”
Scott, for his part, told an interviewer this summer that he dreams of rekindling AstroWorld in amore permanent form than as a tour or music festival.
Simply copying AstroWorld on its former tract seems unlikely. The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo bought roughly half of the original park site in 2012. Attempts to develop another part of the site were the subject of litigation for several years; the land remains vacant.
The Park Database, which tracks attractions worldwide, lists Texas as being home to eight water parks and six theme parks, including Six Flags Over Texas and the State Fair in Dallas-Fort Worth, Six Flags Fiesta Texas, Morgan’s Wonderland and Sea World in San Antonio, the Kemah Boardwalk in the Houston area and Wonderland Amusement Park in Amarillo. One indoor attraction, the Lego Discovery Center near Dallas, also is listed.
Also in the Houston region are the Galveston Pleasure Pier, which opened in 2012 as the rebirth of an attraction Hurricane Carla destroyed in 1961, and Big Rivers Waterpark & Adventures, which opened last year inNewCaney as part of a development called Grand Texas that investors hope will include a long-delayed theme park in the coming years.
Martin Lewison, a business professor at Farmingdale State College in New York who researches theme parks — and has ridden 2,077 coasters at 798 differentamusement venues around the world — said Houston could support a theme park.
Fewlarge parks have been built outside California and Florida since the1970s, hesaid, but the attractions industry has shown strong growth since the 2008 recession andHouston is among the biggest cities without a park nearby.
“Any developer has to do their due diligence, but Houston is a giant city, it’s still growing, you’re in the Sun Belt so the climate is good,” he said. “I’m a theme park guy, I always bet on more roller coasters than fewer.”
There are many reasons why few major parks have been developed in the U.S. in recent decades, however, and that still fewer have been built without public subsidies, said Wonwhee Kim, chief intelligence officer for the Park Database, whose staff also work with developers hoping to build new parks.
“They’re a type of infrastructure costing hundreds of millions of dollars, and once you build it, it can’t easily be changed,” Kim said. “In the 1970s you could get by with opening a theme park with 10 attractions because that was the beginning of the industry. But now because expectations are so high, a developer would have to come in and build to the level of the existing parks. It’s very risky, and so most theme parks these days are built with some kind of public-private partnership.”
This is true even of smaller attractions, Kim said, such as the Great Wolf Lodge chain of hotel-water parks. Indeed, Harris County Commissioners Court in May approved an estimated $7 million to $10 million abatement of county hotel taxes to a proposed Great Wolf Lodge in Webster, pairing those funds with an estimated $30 million in public incentives from the city of Webster.
Turner has not ruled out public subsidies to encourage the construction of a theme park in Houston, but said last year that the investors interested at the time had the financial capability to act on their own.
City Councilman Greg Travis spoke fondly of the Six Flags park he visited growing up near St. Louis, but said he doesn’t view attracting a theme park as a toppriority for the city and would not support using public money as an incentive to its construction.
“If (the mayor) wants to be a cheerleader for a project and encourage people to come down here and invest in Houston — whether it’s high-tech, whether it’s oil and gas, whether it’s a theme park — that’s fine,” Travis said. “I just don’t think we should be giving up any tax abatements.”