Sources: Retail Dive, Chain Store Age, Creditntell, QSR Magazine

As the baseball season winds down and those of us who set our internal calendars by the 162 game schedule prepare to go into hibernation, looking back on this season, we are clearly on the precipice of a wave of new stadium development. The Tampa Bay Rays partnered with Hines on a new ballpark in St. Petersburg, the Oakland A’s are plotting their move to Las Vegas, and cities like Nashville, Charlotte, Portland, and Salt Lake City among others have begun vying for expansion teams that will also come with new stadiums. Suddenly, it seems like the value of a baseball franchise is increasingly tied up in the real estate possibilities around each ballpark.

While the Atlanta Braves are not playing in the World Series this year, I did have the opportunity last week to check out The Battery at Truist Park – which is perhaps the development more than any other that has sparked this gold rush on new stadium deals. Truist Park is a pioneering project, not because of its on-field dimensions or sightlines from the upper deck, but because it is the one of the first “ballpark villages” – taking the idea of a live, work, play development to another level. In addition to the ballpark, the adjacent land is home to a hotel, Comcast offices, over 500 apartment units, and plenty of retail and dining establishments. And the boom is just getting started!

One might wonder what people would do around a baseball stadium on the 284 days there isn’t a game being played each year. While there was no baseball on tap on the Thursday afternoon I was there, the restaurants were packed with local office workers and ICSC Southeast convention goers. Most importantly, pedestrian bridges linked the ballpark to nearby malls, office buildings and the Cobb Galleria convention center providing connectivity to an area that would otherwise be difficult to access even in the offseason.

It's easy to see why sports team owners would want a year round revenue stream to go with the prestige of owning a valuable local cultural asset, however taxpayers are often sold on the idea that having residents and businesses paying sales and property taxes in these districts can help offset the soaring costs of building a new facility.

So far, the results on Atlanta’s experiment may be aesthetically pleasing but the economic story is a bit more muted largely because tax dollars allocated to “pay off” the stadium are largely being redirected from other sources such as education and public transit that can have longer lasting impacts on a community, while sales tax dollars from restaurants and retail merely get shifted from other neighborhoods and businesses.

It seems as long as Americans value professional sports as a common ground in an increasingly divided culture, our local leaders will likely continue to foot much of the bill to fund these mega-projects and maybe that’s reason enough to ignore the impact to the bottom line. However, as more of these projects get proposed over the next decade, citizens would do well to hone in on the details to ensure taxpayers don’t keep getting the short end of the stick.

Mike Jordan