Chicago 1901 Project arena district. Arena district economic impact. 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. Reference data is published by the OECD.
the 1901 Project is a 55-acre mixed-use development around the United Center on Chicago’s West Side, announced by the Reinsdorf and Wirtz families, who own the Bulls and the Blackhawks. 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. The project says it is not seeking public financing.
The United Center is the anchor. It hosts more than 200 events a year and ranks as the second busiest arena in the United States. That is the demand the district is built on.
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 survive on the nights nothing is on. The United Center’s calendar means the 1901 Project starts with foot traffic that most arena districts have to invent.
That is also the thing to test. The district’s case rests on those 200 nights continuing, on the people attending them spending in the district rather than driving home, and on the other 165 nights carrying enough resident and worker demand to keep the retail open.
The significant traffic draw generated by the United Center presents a real advantage that master planners and developers should take note of.
How much of the arena’s attendance converts to spend in the district? A visitor who parks, watches, and leaves adds nothing to the retail. The catchment and the dwell time decide it, and both can be measured before the retail is leased.
What happens on a dark night? The homes and the hotel are the answer, and the phasing has to put them in early enough to carry the shops.
What does the district do to the neighbourhood around it? The West Side has a poverty rate the developers themselves cite at 18.3%. An affordable-housing commitment is a promise; whether local residents end up in the jobs and the homes is a measurement.
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 that the barrier between the venue and the neighbourhood is the thing to remove first, and that the case for doing so is made in the dark-night economics, not the event-night ones.
Chicago’s project is the largest private investment ever made on the West Side, according to the developers, and it has the strongest anchor a district can have. The case still turns on the nights the arena is dark. A developer who can show the demand on those nights has a scheme a lender can fund. One who can only show the event nights has a stadium car park with ambitions.
The method is on the pages for developers and venue, location, and site strategy.
For further reading, see Chicago Sun-Times.
For any venue-anchored scheme, ask for the demand case on the dark nights first. If the developer leads with the event nights, they have not done it yet.
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 Ā£2bn, 100,000-seat ground by Foster + Partners, with a target opening of 2030-31. The club and the regeneration case cite Ā£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.
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