Special Series: "When Pigs Fly" This is a collection of articles on the facts, problems and issues other communities are having with their current or planned Conference/Convention Centers. CONTENTS: - Executive Summary - The Great Space Race - Revenue Bonds and Dedicated Visitor - Taxes - The Big Fish - Promising Predictions - Facing the Facts - The Hynes and the Lessons of History - Expanding the Hynes - From Projections to Performance - The Gap - Between Projections and Performance - The Larger Question The Question for Boston - Conclusion

If We Build It, Will They Come?
And Other Questions About the Proposed Boston Convention Center

The Larger Question

Heywood T. Sanders - Department of Urban Administration - Trinity University White Paper No. 1 - February 1997

In early 1960, two of Atlanta’s corporate titans, Richard Rich of Rich’s Department Stores and Robert Woodruff, head of Coca Cola, commissioned economic consultant Phil Hammer to evaluate alternative sites for a new auditorium/coliseum/convention center. Hammer would recommend a site on the western edge of downtown Atlanta, the air rights above the complex of railroad yards that bordered the downtown core. The largely undeveloped site seemed prime for development and profit. In Hammer’s words,

[The site] would provide a major part of the justification for large-scale public improvement in streets and traffic facilities which in turn would be essential for the private development effort. In turn, the large scale private-development over the air right would generate heavy tax revenues which could substantially pay off the cost of the public improvements in a relatively few years.

The new Atlanta civic center would eventually rise on a different site. But Hammer was correct in recognizing that any private development on the air rights site required a massive public investment to make it viable.

In 1972, the Omni Coliseum would rise on precisely the air rights site laid out by Hammer, built by the Atlanta-Fulton County Recreation Authority. A few years later, it would be followed by Atlanta’s massive new convention center, the Georgia World Congress Center, opened in 1976 right next door on land donated by the developer. Today it has been joined by the 70,500 seat Georgia Dome.

The Omni International hotel/office/retail/entertainment complex that was built in 1976 adjacent to the convention center and coliseum was the first installment in the "large scale private development" projected by Hammer in 1960. The Omni complex would prove something less than the economic boon and tax generator Atlanta business leaders had planned. In the word of journalist and author Frederick Allen, "The problem was that [developer] Cousins guessed wrong." BusinessWeek would term it "one of the worst real estate disasters in history" in 1978. Barely evading repeated foreclosure attempts, the developer eventually sold it to Ted Turner, who renamed it CNN Center and has housed his television network there.

If the coliseum and convention center were seen as the foundation of a failed effort at private land development, the result of those public investments on the surrounding area was no less mixed. In their analysis of the development induced by major convention centers in other cities around the country commissioned by the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, Price Waterhouse concluded about the Omni and the Georgia World Congress Center,

Officials representing the City, GWCC, private industry and nearby hotels agree that the economics of the downtown area have been boosted by the development of the GWCC. However, the immediate vicinity of the convention center has seen no new development in hotel, restaurant and retail business resulting directly from the facility’s development [italics mine].

For Atlanta in 1960 and 1976, Boston in 1997, and dozens of other cities in the years in between, convention centers were the public investment linchpin in private land development efforts. In some communities, they were built to sustain the urban renewal of the downtown core, or to wall off the central business district from some unpleasant neighborhoods uncomfortably nearby. In others, they were intended to spur land values and private investment in adjacent properties. Sometimes the new or expanded centers worked. More commonly they did not.

The prospects for Boston are similarly open to question. But for all the hopes of job creation, economic growth, and visitor dollars, the one certainty of big city convention centers is that they are publicly-subsidized land development projects that generate revenue for private developers.

The Question for Boston

Boston and the Commonwealth are in an unusual situation compared to many jurisdictions around the country. In Chicago and Atlanta, San Francisco and Orlando, revenues from visitor-oriented taxes on hotel rooms, restaurant meals, alcoholic drinks, and auto rentals are dedicated to convention center and stadium building.

The citizens and elected officials of the Commonwealth have a choice about where and how to invest their public resources. The appropriate question under consideration is not what a $600 or $700 million convention center will do for the economy—that requires a great many guesses about an uncertain future. The appropriate question is what kind of a state and community the citizens of the Commonwealth want to invest in and build. One remarkably relevant set of answers was provided by a group of researchers at the Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard in Future Boston, written in 1982:

Anyone who had walked in Boston lately knows that a great deal of construction is either going on or just been completed in the downtown. Many commentators believe that this extensive renewal is the medicine the economy has needed, and that it will produce a new growth dynamic capable of shaking off the economic doldrums of the early 1970s. The argument, briefly put, is that the availability of new commercial and hotel space will bring office-based businesses back into Boston in large numbers; economic renewal will thus make the city more attractive as a place to live, and therefore stem the population decline.

The basic assumption underlying this view—that the physical resources of the city are important attractions to business—is clearly correct. The assumption that renewing its physical resources is all that Boston needs to do to maintain or improve its economic and demo graphic lot, though, is less acceptable. Business does not flourish on space alone; it needs a supply of educated job candidates. Urban redevelopment will not train workers.... And people do not choose a place to live on the basis of job or housing opportunities alone; they also consider the quality of life that the location offers.

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