do you think Sacramento will get a new arena built for the Kings? (Los Angeles: square footage, live in)

[Malloric]

Of course I oppose it. The city parking bring in approximately $9 million a year in revenue, revenue that would go to the private operator for the one-time cash buyout. It was an idiot move. Even with the idiot move, you could easily match the minimal Maloof donations you're so concerned with by putting the money in a CD. Basically, since the Maloofs donate $1.3 million to charity and not $9 million, we're better off with the city parking and no Kings than with private parking and Kings in that respect. Even if we had sold the parking rights, we'd still be better off putting the money from selling them in a CD and consuming the interest than by building the arena to keep the Maloofs charity dollars. Stadium for the Maloofs is just a ****-poor investment.

Again, the only real value is the intangible. To you, or someone else who defines a city as "cow pasture" if doesn't have a pro franchise and "aweseome megalopolis" if it does, that may be worth a lot. To me it's not. Put it to the voters since they are the ones paying for it. Oh, wait, we did that in 2006. The voters didn't want to pay for it during good times, so one can assume they certainly don't want to now. If the voters did want to pay for it, well, different issue. I'd still oppose it, but majority rule prevails in these type of things.

[wburg]

The amount of money spent on entertainment during the NBA lockout was pretty much as that spent during the season. People spend generally the same amount of money on entertainment whether or not there is an arena, they just spend it different places--it's called the "substitution effect." Entertainment budgets grow with a market--open up too many entertainment venues in the same market and they end up cannibalizing each other until the market grows to meet the supply.

Assuming that the Kings do move and the city gets the arena, theoretically they could use it the entire year for events instead of having to hold it for Kings games. It's not the prettiest place, but if the city made the entire parking revenue (currently controlled by the Maloofs) that's a pretty penny, and with the right contractor (probably requiring either AEG or LiveNation buy-in) could turn a good profit. It will certainly require some rehab after the decade or so of Maloof ownership and their own obvious failure to maintain the building.

NorCalDude, are you seriously defending the Maloofs now? These are guys who lost money on a Las Vegas casino and the alcohol business, their only source of revenue is an NBA team when most NBA owners use their teams as a write-off--and decided the best sponsor for their arena was a manufacturer of magical rubber bands! If that's what passes for classy in Anaheim, they're more than welcome to them.

[wburg]

Kings co-owner wants mayor removed from arena negotiations



He thinks there are still arena negotiations? Where did these guys learn how to negotiate?

[Malloric]

Hey, I remember Bill Clinton waving one of those about in the day. And if it's good enough for Clinton, and Clinton is good enough for Lewinsky... wait a minute.

[sacramento916]

Originally Posted by wburg

Kings co-owner wants mayor removed from arena negotiations



He thinks there are still arena negotiations? Where did these guys learn how to negotiate?

These Maloofs are a real class act. Amazing. They can really go to hell.

[Curmudgeon]

This just in...

Sacramento leaders, Kings fans angry at Maloofs - Kings/NBA - The Sacramento Bee

[sacramento916]

For once, this city and its leaders responded to this challenge in a way that I can be proud of. They staved off defeat and pushed on to greater ambitions. But in the end, the plans were wrecked by a group of untrustworthy and deceitful snakes.

The Kings can leave, I don't care. But this city has shown that it can and will do great things. I hope this will be an impetus to push ahead with the development of the Railyards nonetheless. And hopefully we can get a better franchise actually owned by business people who understand the value of keeping their word.

The Magoofs are good at only one thing, squandering their forefathers' fortunes. They are nothing but a bunch of spoiled, dim witted, self-important douche bags.

[NewtoSD?]

Originally Posted by wburg

The amount of money spent on entertainment during the NBA lockout was pretty much as that spent during the season. People spend generally the same amount of money on entertainment whether or not there is an arena, they just spend it different places--it's called the "substitution effect." Entertainment budgets grow with a market--open up too many entertainment venues in the same market and they end up cannibalizing each other until the market grows to meet the supply.

Assuming that the Kings do move and the city gets the arena, theoretically they could use it the entire year for events instead of having to hold it for Kings games. It's not the prettiest place, but if the city made the entire parking revenue (currently controlled by the Maloofs) that's a pretty penny, and with the right contractor (probably requiring either AEG or LiveNation buy-in) could turn a good profit. It will certainly require some rehab after the decade or so of Maloof ownership and their own obvious failure to maintain the building.

NorCalDude, are you seriously defending the Maloofs now? These are guys who lost money on a Las Vegas casino and the alcohol business, their only source of revenue is an NBA team when most NBA owners use their teams as a write-off--and decided the best sponsor for their arena was a manufacturer of magical rubber bands! If that's what passes for classy in Anaheim, they're more than welcome to them.

LOL my god W-burg. If the "substitution effect" is real, then why do cities/government even build arenas, float small busineses loans, or flat out GIVE them money in the first place? I get it - THOSE cities are NOT oversaturated with entertainment options, but WE are. I mean we have...and....? Plenty of cheap great options, yes, but we're not exactly at our max spending capacity in terms of real dollar entertainment.

There is another more widely acknowledged common sense economic principle; the economic multiplier of a dollar. Every dollar spent cycles through the economic ecosystem several times and spurs growth. With growth comes jobs and increased discretionairy spending. This arena would do wonders for the local economy. It would actually bring people into this desolate core that some refer to as downtown.

Like I said, two types of people. "Can" and "cannots". Look at AT&T Park in SF. People that are not even fans of baseball come to that park just to be in it. Same thing would happen here. People with money would come from El Dorado Hills and other places to watch the Kings if they built a new stadium with nice surrounding amenities. But NO ONE will drive to watch them in the dump they currenlty play in.

[NewtoSD?]

Originally Posted by Malloric

It's not like an arena downtown sandwiched between I-5 and the federal courthouse would really have done anything to revitalize that corner of downtown. The area is a bureaucratic dead-zone. You're not going to revitalize the auditor's office, the federal courthouse, the county jail, or the bail bonds operations. There's not really any blight in the area, either. The closest thing to blight is the old Amtrak building, and if you think that's blight, then you need to leave the cow pasture and go to a real city -- or just go down J Street, either one. The only thing the area could use is a bit of streetscaping. Repave the roads and put some landscaping in front of Amtrak. Done. It's not a high priority because it's bureaucrat land. Not having pretty streets isn't going to have any effect on the auditors, the federal courts, or the local residents residing in the county jail.

I rest my case. If you cannot even acknowledge there is a problem, then how can you fix it? The downtown is disgraceful for a city of over 450,000 people and a metro of 2.5 mil. People from outside the area uniformly comment and notice this (cue: this means save what person X, Y or Z that you know from Louisiana said when they visited. The overall impression is negative).

We have a rusted railyard abutting downtown, and that's not blight?? How exactly do you define blight? Shrapnel and blown up buildings? Portland and countless other cities acknowldeged their flaws and actually did something to convert their railyards and delapidated areas. But here, people convince themselves they either do not exist or worse yet, are part of the city's "history".

There's a reason downtown urban living does not exist here. Reason #1, by far, is that no one wants to spend more than 2 min in downtown.

[wburg]

It's called "smokestack chasing" when it is done to try to lure businesses, and it's basically a cargo-cult phenomenon. It has minimal effect on the real economy, it just squeezes money from one part of town to the other.

There are things that produce multiplier effects--the most important is transportation infrastructure. Arenas generally don't have that effect on a local economy, and the more heavily subsidized they are, the worse the effect is--you'd do a better job of improving the economy by just dumping the money from a helicopter. Not all investments are good investments! And the studies done by economists who aren't trying to sell people a new arena show that, no, they aren't good investments.

AT&T Park is a very different scenario--its funding was mostly private, and the area was up-and-coming already. Downtown Sacramento is already up-and-coming, even if plenty of people who don't live there and don't go there claim it isn't, and the arena proponents want to capitalize on that success. In their minds, the only business model is the "create an attraction downtown so suburbanites can visit it, then drive home" model. That was the idea behind the K Street pedestrian mall--and how well did that work?