Messenger: Key to MLS stadium proposal is its connection to rest of St. Louis
Date Posted: November 29, 2016
Posted In: Ideas,
From St. Louis Post-Dispatch: As a youth soccer coach, I often modified drills I learned from my dad watching him coach high school basketball. Some of the kids I coached felt more comfortable with a ball in their hands than one on their feet, and some of the passing concepts in both sports are similar.
Ball movement creates space, and space creates an area to attack offensively.
It is in that regard that I ponder the proposed new MLS stadium west of Union Station along Market Street. Proponents of the new stadium rightly suggest that the location would create a tourist nirvana of sorts in downtown St. Louis, with the Gateway Arch leading to Citygarden, to Busch Stadium and its now growing Ballpark Village, continuing to the soon-to-be renamed Scottrade Center and the attached Peabody Opera House, then west to a remodeled Union Station and, finally, a new 20,000-seat Major League Soccer stadium.
That would be quite a central corridor in downtown.
But if investing tax dollars in big development projects in the city’s central corridor were a panacea for economic morass, St. Louis would have been the hottest city in the country decades ago.
This is the lesson of “Mapping Decline,” the 2008 book by University of Iowa professor Colin Gordon that examines the city’s decades-long population and economic decline. In the book, Gordon lays map upon map of the central corridor showing tax abatement upon tax incentive in the city while investments lagged to the north and the south, particularly in areas where African-Americans have historically lived.
Back by popular demand, some of the same gang that shepherded through a secretive and failed attempt to build a new NFL stadium on the city’s riverfront, drawing a line north from the Arch, is now tracing that line straight west, and encouraging taxpayers to get on board.
The group is seeking in the neighborhood of $80 million from taxpayers, and, unlike the NFL project, is committed to asking voters for approval, which makes the effort immediately more appealing than the failed football stadium shenanigans.
If the organizing partners behind the SC STL proposal, including World Wide Technology’s Jim Kavanaugh and former Anheuser-Busch executive Dave Peacock, are to be successful, though, they’re going to have to think about connecting on a few passes that are more complicated than ones straight down Market Street.