San Francisco Reality Check ✔︎ Article #1

Topic: YBC Soccer Stadium

Oh No Not Again!

Off-The-Wall Plan To Demolish $1 Billion Of Yerba Buena For A  City Soccer Stadium Brings Back Dead End Stadium Memories Of The Past

Our poor Yerba Buena Neighborhood! So many years, so many bad ideas. First of course in the ‘60’s came the Redevelopment bulldozers to tear down 4000 SRO homes for a convention center (Moscone Center since expanded three times). Then the ‘70’s, a basketball arena (hello Chase Center). Then the ‘80’s, Quentin Kopp’s proposed baseball stadium (hello Oracle Park).

At least the 49ers never tried. But now the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce is proposing that the City buy and demolish the moribund San Francisco Center and the rest of its big YBC block – and the Fifth and Mission Garage too, all worth more than a $Billion, for someone, somehow, to build a Pro sports soccer stadium there: (https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/the-city/sf-biz-leaders-refloat-sf-centre-mall-soccer-stadium-idea/article_7b296918-f4ad-11ef-bf90-5f520124cde1.html).

Where the City can find a $billion to condemn and buy all those properties is not explained. Nor how the City would make up for losing $15 million plus of yearly property and business tax revenues. Or who would finance a $2 billion 20,000 seat domed stadium, and how. Oh, and Mission Street would have to be closed too by the way, sorry MUNI riders.

The multiple misbegotten San Francisco stadium schemes of the last century all trigged bitter civic debates, lawsuits, political fights, and even ballot measures until, at last, realistic proposals in the right place at modest City expense were responsibly crafted. That responsible process resulted in the two that were actually built in Mission Bay to general acclaim: Oracle Park and Chase Center.

But there is a much better and much more realistic future use for the very strategic City-owned Fifth and Mission Garage site alone that will achieve the same goal to bring tens of thousands of City visitors Downtown as espoused by the Chamber of Commerce – at far less public cost and with far less urban destruction and disruption - and civic dispute. That Alternative will be the topic of next week’s Reality Check ✔︎. Stay tuned.

- John Elberling, Editor