The owners of the Bulls and the Blackhawks are putting a reported US$7bn into 55 acres around the United Center. The Chicago 1901 Project is the largest private investment ever made on the city’s West Side, and it starts with an anchor that fills 200 nights a year.
The 1901 Project is a 55-acre mixed-use development around the United Center, announced by the Reinsdorf and Wirtz families. The figures are the developers’ own: a US$7bn private investment, 5,000 to 6,000 homes with a fifth designated affordable, a 6,000-seat music hall, a hotel, retail, and a 2.5-acre elevated park. The first phase is the music hall, the park, and a mixed-use building, and the project says it is not seeking public financing. The United Center hosts more than 200 events a year and ranks as the second busiest arena in the United States.
An arena that fills 200 nights a year is a rare asset. Most sports venues sit dark for most of the year, and a district built around them has to create its own foot traffic. The 1901 Project starts with that foot traffic, so the opportunity is to convert it. People attending the 200 nights spend in the district rather than driving home. The other 165 nights carry enough resident and worker demand to keep the retail trading all year. Both are measurable before the first lease is signed.
The United Center’s traffic draw is a real advantage for master planners and developers.
How much of the arena’s attendance converts to spend in the district? The catchment and the dwell time decide it, and both can be measured and grown before the retail is leased. What carries the dark nights? The homes and the hotel, phased in early enough to give the shops their base load from the first winter. What does the district do for the neighbourhood around it? The West Side has a poverty rate the developers themselves cite at 18.3%. The affordable-housing commitment is a promise. The project can lead on measuring how many local residents end up in the jobs and the homes, and be credited for it.
The integrated model, where a venue is knitted into the streets around it rather than fenced off from them, is one we worked on at the OAKA Olympic site in Athens. The lesson there was to remove the barrier between the venue and the neighbourhood first. The case for it sits in the dark-night economics: a district that is busy every day is the one the venue lifts on event nights.
The case grows on the nights the arena is dark. A developer who shows the demand on those nights has a scheme a lender can fund, and a district that keeps growing after the arena opens. The method is on the pages for developers and venue site selection. For further reading, see the Chicago Sun-Times.
For any venue-anchored district, ask what the arena’s attendance converts to in the streets around it, what carries the district on the 165 nights the arena is dark, and how the two lift each other.
A hotel, a resort, or a mixed-use scheme fails underwriting when a single route, a single annual event, or a single source market turns out to be carrying more of the demand case than the committee realised. The dependency is the risk, and it can be measured before signature.
Oman has announced plans for a high-altitude destination at Jabal al Akhdar, combining sports training, wellness, and tourism at 2,400 metres. It is the kind of project a Gulf government can commit to at once, and the kind that lives or dies on a demand case nobody has yet published.
A major event is a rallying point for civic pride, and just as easily a rallying point for protest. The difference is usually whether residents can see what the event does for their street, in terms they recognise, before the road closures start.
A race track, an arena, a stadium: each is built for a peak it reaches a few dozen times a year. The gap between peak and off-peak operational need is the commercial challenge behind every sports-anchored development, and the reason mixed use is the answer rather than the fashion.
Manchester United’s proposed stadium is a £2bn, 100,000-seat ground by Foster + Partners, with a target opening of 2030-31. The club and the regeneration case cite £7.3bn a year for the economy and 92,000 jobs. Those are the promoters’ projections. Here is what to test before believing them.
The owners of the Bulls and the Blackhawks are putting a reported US$7bn into 55 acres around the United Center: housing, a music hall, a hotel, retail, a park. The arena already hosts more than 200 events a year. The question a developer should ask is what the other 165 nights are worth.
