Downtown Minneapolis is struggling. Would a new Wolves and Lynx arena help?
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Lynx fan Erica Mauter remembers going to her first game at Target Center.
It was summer of 1999, the first season the women’s basketball team played. The arena was impressive.
Twenty years later, Mauter is still a season ticket holder. She still loves the team, the experience, the way the fanbase is a big community.
The arena, on the other hand?
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“I mean, it just definitely feels like an older building,” she said. “You know, there‘s a lot of cement and cinder block. Those restrooms look like they've been there for 20 years.”
The restrooms — and the rest of the arena — have actually been there almost twice that. And franchise owners Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez want a new arena for the Timberwolves and Lynx.
They say a new downtown arena would not only spur development, but also keep their teams competitive, both on the court and financially.
“A new arena is what our fans deserve,” Rodriguez said back in June. “An arena is an anchor to the community.”
Rodriguez is pitching a new arena as a public good for Minneapolis.
And many city leaders seem to view it that way, too.
In a mayoral debate this year, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said he’s already working with the Timberwolves to find a piece of land for a new arena.
“Look, they’re an awesome team and a massive asset to downtown Minneapolis,” Frey said. “And we are already doing the work necessary to work with them to see through what could very well be a new arena, and to make sure that we’re doing it in partnership, ultimately, with community and everybody else that’s a stakeholder.”
Could an arena fix downtown?
Frey is skeptical that taxpayers should be one of those stakeholders. But he has reason to want to work with the teams: Downtown Minneapolis is struggling.
More than a third of offices are still vacant. The streets feel quieter.
Property values there, in downtown St. Paul and in other mid-sized cities across the United States plunged over the past five years — in part because COVID-19 sent office workers home.
When Target Center opened in November 1990, downtown Minneapolis faced similar challenges. Property values neared rock bottom. The central business district had emptied out over decades of migration to the suburbs.
Proponents back then said the new space would help revitalize downtown. And Target Center brought 1.75 million new customers to the neighborhood in its first year.
But more than three decades later, city leaders are looking for ways to revitalize downtown once again.
Economist J.C. Bradbury of Kennesaw State University said new sports venues will increase economic activity and ticket sales for five to 10 years. But most of that money goes to the team, not the surrounding neighborhood.
And while Target Center did drive traffic to Minneapolis back in 1990, it didn’t last.
Bradbury’s writing a book about what he calls the false promises of publicly funded stadiums. He said 50 years of research shows arenas are bad public investments.
“You go and you poll economists, they all agree on this. This isn’t some rogue opinion I have. It’s something that’s shared by the entire discipline,” Bradbury said. “If you ask doctors, ‘Is smoking bad?’ They'll universally say yes. If you ask economists, ‘Are stadiums bad public investments?’ They'll universally say yes.”
Voters tend to oppose public funding for sports arenas, Bradbury said. But sports teams often collaborate with business groups to push forward funding anyway.
Rising costs
Stadiums and arenas in the United States are more expensive than ever.
The newest court in the NBA — the Intuit Dome outside Los Angeles — cost more than $2 billion to build. Target Center was a mere $277 million in today’s dollars.
The Intuit Dome is famous for its giant, 360-degree LED video board — the largest in the NBA. There are games on the screen, and buttons on each seat to keep fans engaged and interactive.
Structural engineer Bart Miller helped design the Intuit Dome. He said teams are looking for new ways to engage fans and maximize revenue at the same time.
Target Center, for instance, has more lower-priced seats in the upper deck than in what’s called the lower bowl. But a larger lower bowl has more opportunity for profit.
“Most of the buildings that we are designing now, the lower bowl will have 10,000 or more seats, so it is a much larger lower bowl. People are willing to spend a little more money to get down there,” he said.
The aging Target Center is mostly upper deck seats. That makes it more affordable for many fans than newer, fancier arenas.
Nate Pentz of Minneapolis is a Lynx and Timberwolves fan. He worries about what a new basketball palace could do to ticket prices.
“They’re charging a lot to make up for the cost of it, right? And then it’s all bunch of beautiful people who are there to be seen, or corporations who are buying it for their clients or their employees,” Pentz said.
“And so I what I like about Target Center is, because it’s somewhat affordable still, you still get a lot of fans who are fans.”
Funding challenges
It’s unlikely any public dollars for a new arena would be popular at the state Capitol.
Last year, Minnesota’s hockey team, the Wild, asked the state to pay half of a major renovation of its arena, or at least 10 percent.
Neither request passed at the Legislature.
The Timberwolves and Lynx owners say that if there isn’t any state money, they’d go ahead and build a new space themselves.
But even privately funded arenas typically involve taxpayer dollars — sometimes less transparently.
In Los Angeles, the new Rams football stadium was privately funded. But the team owner was allowed to keep $180 million in sales taxes from the venue.
While the Wolves and Lynx organization wants a new building, it has already made upgrades to the teams’ current home.
Target Center spent $1.5 million on a new lighting system that illuminates the court and leaves the crowd in the dark, in a “theater” style meant to dramatize the game.
Sheridan West is the Vice President of Live Programming and Entertainment for the Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx. He said fans have given great feedback about the new lights.
“As a game entertainment and game experience nerd, I’ve been really energized and excited by this whole project. It feels like a new building,” West said.
It might feel like a new building, but those renovation costs haven’t been passed on to fans — at least not yet.
