Oklahoma City is the latest place to pin its hopes of becoming a "big league city" on a taxpayer financed arena to land a professional sports team. The team is the Seattle Supersonics, acquired by an Oklahoma ownership group that has barely concealed its intentions to move the team, especially after Seattle balked at another taxpayer-financed renovation of Key Arena.
These are two cities passing each other in the night.
Seattle, with one of the most vibrant economies in the nation, doesn’t
really need the Sonics, sad as that is to say. This city is on the
leading edge of the world economy, as well as quality of life. While it
has two teams that play in beautiful downtown stadiums, it realizes
that what really makes a great city has little to do with arenas. It’s
a busy, exciting downtown; abundant transit; great universities;
world-class industries; diversity and culture; walkable neighborhoods,
rich in distinctive character, each with its own business district,
rather than ugly shopping strips.
Oklahoma City, like much of America, is still stuck in 1960. Thus
suburban sprawl has hurt downtown. A limited economy leaves it vulnerable to busts. And the global competition for talent and capital has not been kind to most of the heartland. It rightly understands that no successful metropolitan area can have a dead downtown. Throw in some powerful people pushing an NBA team, and the Sonics assume the role of savior.
Pro sports teams are fine, and a case can be made for taxpayer assistance. Although, as one watches these millionaires run up and down a court, with their even richer owners…wow, what if every city had said no?
Oklahoma City already has some fine assets. Thanks to a community effort to help downtown, it has revived its wonderful old warehouse district into Bricktown. It also has some lovely old neighborhoods close to downtown. Oklahomans fought to get Amtrak to restore service to the city, in a beautiful art deco station downtown.
As we think of how different the coming decades will be, OKC could leverage its historic energy expertise, especially if it could focus it downtown — not only in corporate settings but in R&D. Peak oil doesn’t mean the end of oil, but it will put an even higher premium on innovation, expertise, brains.
Real things that could further help downtown — and the quality, dense living that will be more and more appealing — include great schools, better transit, aid for small business, zoning that aids historic rehab. They aren’t as sexy as an NBA team. They would be a better use of the money. The fine-grained, human scale quality issues are essential. Otherwise, as Phoenix learned, a nice arena alone can’t revive a downtown.
Oklahoma City has more on the ball, according to your recommendations, than its appearance suggests. You are correct that decades of suburban flight have emptied a downtown that was buzzing in its heyday (see https://www.okchistory.com/photo_player_flash.html) and that the energy sector is the major driver of the economy. But it has learned the lessons of urban renewal and the oil bust.
Oklahoma City is serious about downtown redevelopment. An agile and professional nonprofit serves as downtown’s front door to development, caretaker of appearance, marketer, and event programmer. Efforts of the city planning department currently focus on downtown streetscaping, the formation of distinct downtown neighborhoods (Midtown, Automobile Alley), and the visioning of a south downtown oriented to new Central Park-type public space (https://www.okc.gov/planning/coretoshore/index.html). Historic preservation districts add another layer of zoning in and near downtown (https://www.okc.gov/Planning/hp/index.html). Not often publicized is the fact that the city is willing to deal incentives with employers seeking to move downtown.
In addition, the MAPS for Kids project is renovating or rebuilding dozens of inner city schools (https://www.okc.gov/OCMAPS/index.html). It is providing the impetus for improving technology and parental involvement in the school district.
Over 1,500 new housing units have been added the past few years and the downtown population has nearly doubled in that space of time (from 4,000 residents around 1999 to 7600+ today). It’s a light population, for sure, but most think we haven’t seen half of the buildout of potential downtown housing.
Finally, the economy is much more diverse than people think. In addition to the energy, government, and manufacturing mainstays, the city is growing clusters in aerospace, business services (advertising, customer service, consulting, etc), telecommunications, health care, logistics, hospitality and the biosciences (https://www.okbio.org/).
I will say this about the Ford Center tax: the NBA is not the major league stamp some make it out to be. Major league status in my opinion goes to cities whose depth, breadth, and quality of businesses and culture contribute to the shaping of the country. But for a city that has been branded by tragedy and otherwise flown under the radar, the rewards of NBA membership are priceless.
https://www.downtownokc.com/
https://www.okcchamber.com/page.asp?atomid=816
https://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4182/is_20060316/ai_n16155170