Field of dreams may come — if public builds it

I don’t know what downtown real estate investor Graham Weston knows about baseball, but I know that he knows real estate. And I know he’s obsessed with improving downtown San Antonio.

That obsession is behind the effort he’s leading to buy the San Antonio Missions baseball team and move it to a new ballpark downtown. But I’m afraid of what comes next: getting taxpayers to build it.

Weston knows that much of San Antonio’s downtown suffers from a lack of walkability and urban density. Already, Weston-led real estate investments have done more than those of any other private group to bring residential density and Class A office space to the city’s urban core.

He is presumably seeking the synergies of downtown urban density that could come from having a baseball team within walking distance of his group’s existing holdings. So that’s the rationale for the deal. But where to put a stadium? While this remains speculation, indulge me in my thought process. We know Weston and his partners own real estate adjacent to San Pedro Creek Culture Park. They have been attempting to expand their holdings there recently through acquisitions and a swap with the San Antonio Independent School District.

The linear park is the nicest and most completely deserted area in downtown. It was landscaped with riparian and artistic grandeur in 2019 by Bexar County. It was renovated on the theory that — to reference the baseball classic “Field of Dreams” — “If you build it, they will come.”

They didn’t. Three years later, the San Pedro Creek area is always empty. I’ve walked it countless times during the day and have rarely seen another human. It’s just an eight-minute walk from there to Weston’s Frost Tower, Rand Building, Weston Center and the soon-to-be-built 32floor residential tower at 300 Main St.

So that’s the logical place. And here’s something else I know: Next will come the public ask. To put it another way, if you give a pig a pancake, he’s going to want syrup.

As night follows day, so does it follow that new owners of sports teams seek public funding to build their stadiums. This has become a sad American tradition. It’s one that should be broken if the public is included in the process and fully informed.

Weston and his partners must understand the incredible potential savings that can come to their private for-profit business if it could be located in a publicly funded commercial property. But should private property owners receive public housing for their businesses?

Contrary to popular belief, a baseball stadium is not a public good. A stadium is a limiteduse commercial property that houses a privately owned business, in this case a minor league baseball team.

This isn’t the first time an owner of the Missions has sought a new stadium.

After the 2018 season, Elmore Sports Group, which owns multiple minor league teams, moved its Triple-A Colorado Springs (Colo.) Sky Sox to San Antonio and renamed it the Missions — with an expectation that a new stadium, built to the higher league’s standards, would follow. Elmore made way for that Triple-A team by moving its previous Double-A Missions franchise to Amarillo, where it was renamed the Sod Poodles. (No,

that’s not a typo.)

The Soddies, as the team is known, began the 2019 season in a new taxpayer-funded stadium in downtown Amarillo. The Amarillo stadium, which seats 6,600 and cost $45 million to build, is an important data point to keep in mind as we watch what happens after the

Weston group buys the Missions.

The Soddies and the Missions now play in the Double-A Texas League.

Hall of Shame deals

The city of San Antonio and Bexar County have a poor record of economic development when it comes to sports stadium subsidies. Many Hall of Shame stadium deals come to mind as reasons to tread carefully.

There has been precisely zero economic development around the isolated and dilapidated Nelson Wolff Municipal Stadium off U.S. 90 on the West

Side, which is partly why the Missions franchise is for sale.

We think of the AT&T Center as the most successful of these publicly subsidized stadiums — because the Spurs are successful. But as an urban development tool, it has failed to spur much around it that benefits the public or the East Side neighborhood where it was built.

The Alamodome — the white elephant Henry Cisneros built — is the most horrific example of urban planning since the

1968 Hemisfair ripped up an old neighborhood to replace it with a deserted village of haunted buildings in the heart of downtown for the next 45 years. The Alamodome is a one-size-fitsnone eyesore without a dedicated purpose or permanent tenant. The surrounding neighborhood has languished in its hulking shadow.

When cities decide to build stadiums for private businesses, they tend to follow the convention center model, which is what Amarillo did for the Sod Poodles. They use the ongoing revenue stream from a hotel occupancy tax — or HOT — and money saved from the

HOT to build the stadium.

The use of the HOT enables civic leaders to argue with a semistraight face that the taxpaying funders of the stadium are out-of-town visitors, the ones staying at hotels, rather than locals. This passing of the tax buck appears to shift the financial burden from locals to nonlocals. So clever!

This is sleight of hand and a distraction. A more serious person would point out that the HOT revenue could and should instead be used for downtown improvements that benefit the entire public — parks, roads, public safety, homelessness mitigation, public art, sidewalks, music festivals, whatever — rather than to build the limited-use commercial real estate of a privately held business.

When this HOT plan is presented, taxpayers should not fall for the hidden ball trick.

My hopes

As this debate gets underway, my hope is that civic leaders recognize that concentrating public funds to subsidize individual private businesses is always a poor policy choice. With the “equity lens” that the City Council brings to allocating scarce resources to the neediest, will it support public subsidies for a multimillionaire’s sports business?

Will the newly elected county judge, one without a baseball stadium named after him or her, support this?

My hope is that when a private company puts out its hand to civic leaders to fund a stadium, those leaders take a skeptical look at the Spurs’ AT&T Center and often-empty Alamodome and see exactly how little walkable density has emerged in their shadows. These two stadiums in particular have produced the exact opposite of walkable, urban life around them. They are designand-development horror shows.

My hope is that civic leaders encourage private enterprise to invest in its own stadium using private money, which will hopefully yield an excellent return on capital for the downtown real estate empire of Weston and his investment partners. As long as that risk remains private, I am all for it. These guys already understand the risks and opportunity for how a downtown baseball stadium could make their existing downtown commercial real estate empire more valuable. I sincerely hope they can and that it will.

And they should pay for that risk and enjoy that increased value by themselves, and leave the public out of it.

Charlie Blalock/Contributor file photo Fernando Tatis Jr. signs autographs before a San Antonio Missions game in August. With the sale of the Missions in the works, talk of building a stadium for the team downtown has resurfaced.