http://www.oursportscentral.com/services/releases/?id=3844645 D-League Management, LLC, has purchased the Colorado 14ers and will relocate the team to Frisco, Texas, it was announced today by NBA Development League President Dan Reed. The team will begin play in Frisco at the Dr. Pepper Arena for the 2010-11 season, but will not play during 2009-10 in order to transition.
Yes, but for now it's much nicer. Of course, Arlington used to be nicer too. The trick will be seeing if Frisco can avoid Arlington's mistakes.
Having only moved to the area a few years ago, do you care to expand on the mistakes Arlington has made?
Luckily the seasons have very little overlap, plus i'm not sure there's much overlap in fan basis, other then the casual fans of sports in general, which hopefully aren't really FCDs core audience...
Now granted, you'll still find a core of folks who think that Arlington is a great place, and I've only lived here full time for four and a half years myself, but given the current state of affairs and what I've read about local history, I think Arlington has missed the boat in a lot of ways. Some of them are not so much bad choices as unfortunate timing/circumstances, but the results are that Arlington is not what it could have been. The main thing seems to be that Arlington's growth almost all came after the war and during the car culture. The completion of the Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike (now the part of I-30 between the downtowns) is the main reason it started growing (men with cars could now reasonably easily commute to eithre D or FW). This caused several cascading issues: 1. Arlington didn't have a chance to generate an urban core with business and cultural institutions of its own, and as it grew into a huge city no one ever invested in one, and you got a version of the Gertrude Stein "There is no there there" effect. http://www.texasmonthly.com/2005-12-01/webextra6.php 2. Arlington, as a product of the car age and white flight, never had a commitment to mass transit (it still has NONE whatsoever), social services, or anything that might seem welcoming to those who were not like the people who first grew Arlington into a large population center. As the housing stock has aged and the demographics have changed, the city still lacks any institutional history of working on these things, so you have people who could desperately use things like a bus system going without them. 3. Arlington, unable to truly transform itself, and knowing that one of the ways it came to prominence was being the home of the Rangers, decided a shortcut to vitality and prominence was to make it financially attractive to build a large number of high-traffic attractions (the Ballpark, the Arlington convention center, Six Flags, Hurricane Harbor, and now Jerry World. I understand that at one point they were also in the running to get the new home for the Stars/Mavs). Frankly, these things have probably kept the city afloat, but they've come at the cost of unusually bad traffic and poor city layout, and the tax breaks that have had to be given up to attract them mean that three is much less money for the community than one might think. While the attractions have made the city a place tons of people visit, many of those same people would never consider living in Arlington, which continues the cycle of depressed property values, causing the city to feel like it needs to bid for the next big project, etc etc. I'm sure I'm forgetting things, and I'm sure there are people who love Arlington who will defend it, but the above is a start to why those people who actively choose not to live in Arlington do so. To be fair, there are a lot of areas in DFW that are similar (east Fort Worth, Grand Prairie, and the Mid-Cities all exhibit various subsets and degrees of Arlington's issues), and Arlington itself still has its wealthier areas and higher-end shopping, but it's kind of becomea poster child for what is not quite right about DFW specifically and post-war development patterns generally. Frisco is car-based, has opted-out of mass transit, has given large tax breaks to attract stadiums, convention centers, and "destination" shopping, and has terrible traffic. So far, though, it has maintained the desirability of its housing stock (and therefore property tax base), and it seems like they're trying to create a bit of an urban core around PHP and to learn from the Arlington example about how fast they grow. Time will tell whether they have done a better job of creating a city with long-term desirability.
I'll agree with all of these things, but what about frisco is terrible traffic? Sure Preston north of El Dorado is too narrow, Eldorado itself is too narrow est of the toll road, but other then that I've never experienced anything I'd even remotely describe as terrible traffic in the area... though I grew up in Southern California and did a LA commute for multiple years so I'm probably just oblivious to what people consider "terrible" traffic.
To be fair, it's better since the tollway opend up, but with Preston, 121, and the Tollway all coming together in one awkward interchange, and with so much crap all slammed right together, with no possibility of public transit to let up, I don't feel bad saying the area is one of those parts pf twon with pretty awful traffic. I don't live over there, though, so if any other Frisco-area commuters want to comment, I'll be happy to defer.
Heh. Well then, basically, if your demographics never change, you'll be fine. If they do, you need to be sure that you have more visionary leadership than Arlington did/does.
Just be thankful the WNBA has never awarded a team to Dallas. If people had to choose between sitting at PHP in the heat or watching women play basketball in an air-conditioned arena, we know what would win. FCD's attendance would drop from 8500 to about 4000 for games played on the same day as a WNBA game.
If that were the case, the Sidekicks would still be in business. They went head-to-head with the Burn for a few years in a variety of summer pro indoor soccer leagues, and while they had a few initial successes, the Burn eventually sucked the life out of them. Granted, that was because the Sidekicks and the Burn were competing for the same demographic, which wouldn't be the case with a WNBA team, but the bottom line is that air conditioning in and of itself is not an attraction. People won't turn out to the WNBA, just because it's air-conditioned, not even in Houston, where their WNBA team went tits-up this past offseason.
http://dallas.bizjournals.com/dallas/stories/2009/06/29/story11.html?b=1246248000^1851884 Nice story taken from MLS:N/A about how profitable the pro sports have been for the city.
