Voight
#winning
Portland Diamond Project picks land for potential MLB team stadium
The Portland Diamond Project announced Tuesday that they are in negotiations to acquire the 164-acre Red Tail Golf Course.
www.kptv.com
Portland Diamond Project picks land for potential MLB team stadium
- Thread starter Voight
- Start date
www.kptv.com
LightningStorm
Lightning/Mets/Vikings
I'd love having a 2nd team in the Pacific Northwest. Ideally it would be an NL team with the Mariners in the AL.
Voight
#winning
If they wanted any sort of balance, could put a team in Nashvegas and Portland.
No Fun Shogun
34-38-61-10-13-15
Portland in the MLB would be a major positive in reversing the isolation of Seattle, though watch 'em get an NL team instead.
Too late, though. Portland Athletics would've made worlds more sense than the reality.
Too late, though. Portland Athletics would've made worlds more sense than the reality.
PCSPounder
Stadium Groupie
Most people in the Portland area are incredulous about this. They shouldn’t be.
What they see is a site across from a mall on a four-lane freeway where the mall already overloads the traffic. There’s not sufficient transit there, the crowding can be more than a bit much, there’s not exactly straight routes to the site from points east, and the local terrain and price of land prevents improvements to traffic and transit from those points east.
(By the way, not necessarily disclaimers… I live 2.5 miles from the site, traffic isn’t great along that way anyway, and I pretty much learned golf at Progress Downs, now known as RedTail.)
Meanwhile, I would tell the incredulous the following:
I think it’s virtually assured that the city of Portland will counteroffer for AT LEAST $100 million for the site. Some of the incredulous already noted that $7 per square foot (for the $50 million offer) was really damn cheap.
The city didn’t exactly provoke a public examination of how to improve transit and driving options when PDP originally proposed the Terminal 2 site. Which is to say that, while the city says they support the PDP effort, they’re not exactly helping.
PDP gave up on a much more centrally located site at the failing Lloyd Center mall. They’re probably right to assert that dealing with more than 30 landowners caused more problems than they could solve. But I suspect they’re not funded well enough to make Lloyd Center work, and that means they aren’t going to be able to handle franchise inflation should that occur. That’s probably one reason the city of Portland kept them at arm’s length in the first place.
I don’t think Washington County or Beaverton or Tigard or the state of Oregon really wants to deal with this. Highway 217 has been under “realignment” adding auxiliary lanes to both sides of the freeway for the last two years, and the project will take almost two more years. An actual widening requires buying more property. So does a transit reroute.
But let’s say that PDP actually does buy the land. It is too close to 217, and the city of Portland isn’t making money from golf operation, and that’s not including the property tax they’re now paying because the city of Portland owns this land, but Beaverton annexed it. So I don’t think the golf course is long for the world regardless. What you can put in there will eventually divert revenue from the mall. Even though Washington Square is one of the top performing malls in the USA, it isn’t what it was. I can see a future where the mall is repurposed and the major access to the RedTail property goes through the mall site rather than Scholls Ferry Road.
So I don’t give 50-50 odds of this happening. If some of it does happen, it’ll be somewhat self-mitigating. Except I don’t think PDP is actually mindful of the rational solution.
What they see is a site across from a mall on a four-lane freeway where the mall already overloads the traffic. There’s not sufficient transit there, the crowding can be more than a bit much, there’s not exactly straight routes to the site from points east, and the local terrain and price of land prevents improvements to traffic and transit from those points east.
(By the way, not necessarily disclaimers… I live 2.5 miles from the site, traffic isn’t great along that way anyway, and I pretty much learned golf at Progress Downs, now known as RedTail.)
Meanwhile, I would tell the incredulous the following:
I think it’s virtually assured that the city of Portland will counteroffer for AT LEAST $100 million for the site. Some of the incredulous already noted that $7 per square foot (for the $50 million offer) was really damn cheap.
The city didn’t exactly provoke a public examination of how to improve transit and driving options when PDP originally proposed the Terminal 2 site. Which is to say that, while the city says they support the PDP effort, they’re not exactly helping.
PDP gave up on a much more centrally located site at the failing Lloyd Center mall. They’re probably right to assert that dealing with more than 30 landowners caused more problems than they could solve. But I suspect they’re not funded well enough to make Lloyd Center work, and that means they aren’t going to be able to handle franchise inflation should that occur. That’s probably one reason the city of Portland kept them at arm’s length in the first place.
I don’t think Washington County or Beaverton or Tigard or the state of Oregon really wants to deal with this. Highway 217 has been under “realignment” adding auxiliary lanes to both sides of the freeway for the last two years, and the project will take almost two more years. An actual widening requires buying more property. So does a transit reroute.
But let’s say that PDP actually does buy the land. It is too close to 217, and the city of Portland isn’t making money from golf operation, and that’s not including the property tax they’re now paying because the city of Portland owns this land, but Beaverton annexed it. So I don’t think the golf course is long for the world regardless. What you can put in there will eventually divert revenue from the mall. Even though Washington Square is one of the top performing malls in the USA, it isn’t what it was. I can see a future where the mall is repurposed and the major access to the RedTail property goes through the mall site rather than Scholls Ferry Road.
So I don’t give 50-50 odds of this happening. If some of it does happen, it’ll be somewhat self-mitigating. Except I don’t think PDP is actually mindful of the rational solution.
KevFu
Registered User
The concept of AL & NL each having a rep in each area made perfect sense, and still does.
However they screwed the pooch in the 1990s, when they ticked off Tampa and had to expand to get Congress off their backs.
MLB needed someone to join with the Rays, and Jerry Colangelo used that desperation to get an NL team instead of an AL team, when Arizona should have been the "AL's Mountain Team" opposite Colorado.
If they put Arizona and Tampa in the AL for 16 teams and did three divisions, but with 5-6-5 in the AL, and 4-5-5 in the NL, it's much cleaner.
PCSPounder
Stadium Groupie
There was a tweet from a current commissioner and mayoral candidate last night that flew under the radar. He‘s not someone who’s deserving of me posting the tweet here. However, it’s both curious and telling.
”We have to protect and strengthen the heart of the city. Baseball at Lloyd Center would do that.” (Um, not really)
”There are considerable challenges with the site. If we can work to get a deal done there, we should. If we can’t, we should be able to explain why. The window is closing rapidly.” (I recall a comment this week about the mayor supposedly saying he was trying to work with them, but PDP’s comments about having to work with more than 30 landowners at the site tells me a few things, some not good for anyone. No doubt it’s the better site. But the city is known to have a close group of developer friends with their own visions for the site.)
“Before any vote to put Red Tail Golf Course on the table as an alternative, the City should receive answers to the following questions: Who is the ownership/investing group? Will it only be for baseball? How do they plan to address the major traffic issues that would come with this development in the suburbs? Most importantly, what will the impact of such major suburban development be on Portland’s urban core?”
That first question was the boom. PDP is pretty public about the peripheral investors in the organization, but those people do not represent enough money to get any of this done. So they’re hiding something… but are they hiding the whale investor, or are they hiding the lack of a whale investor? Some say PDP is good at selling merch and less good at, well, anything else. So it seems like neither side is really suited to work with the other.
It’s even more telling that PDP made noise about negotiating with suburbs after Terminal 2 fell out of favor, and the only site to come out of that is owned by Portland. Shrug.
”We have to protect and strengthen the heart of the city. Baseball at Lloyd Center would do that.” (Um, not really)
”There are considerable challenges with the site. If we can work to get a deal done there, we should. If we can’t, we should be able to explain why. The window is closing rapidly.” (I recall a comment this week about the mayor supposedly saying he was trying to work with them, but PDP’s comments about having to work with more than 30 landowners at the site tells me a few things, some not good for anyone. No doubt it’s the better site. But the city is known to have a close group of developer friends with their own visions for the site.)
“Before any vote to put Red Tail Golf Course on the table as an alternative, the City should receive answers to the following questions: Who is the ownership/investing group? Will it only be for baseball? How do they plan to address the major traffic issues that would come with this development in the suburbs? Most importantly, what will the impact of such major suburban development be on Portland’s urban core?”
That first question was the boom. PDP is pretty public about the peripheral investors in the organization, but those people do not represent enough money to get any of this done. So they’re hiding something… but are they hiding the whale investor, or are they hiding the lack of a whale investor? Some say PDP is good at selling merch and less good at, well, anything else. So it seems like neither side is really suited to work with the other.
It’s even more telling that PDP made noise about negotiating with suburbs after Terminal 2 fell out of favor, and the only site to come out of that is owned by Portland. Shrug.
KevFu
Registered User
I've kind of been rooting for Portland to get a team simply because their merch was cool.
The logo that had Portland: AL OR NL, with the OR part applying both to Portland and league choice was clever AF.
The logo that had Portland: AL OR NL, with the OR part applying both to Portland and league choice was clever AF.
hangman005
Mark Stones Spleen
PCSPounder
Stadium Groupie
I have seen numerous accusations for some time that they’re in existence to sell merch and… ummmm… we’re waiting.
Just know that I made a blog post daring them to actually buy the golf course and wreck my traffic… the inference being at what the city would eventually ask, not the piddly $53 million.
KevFu
Registered User
Yeah, they definitely seem like a "don't have a really serious bid" group.
Like I said in the other thread (SLC), the lack of momentum on expansion by MLB (caused by the A's and Rays) has really led to a lot of stadium fatigue.
"Missing a window" is very real in expansion. The Nashville was gung-ho and then they built an MLS stadium on that land instead, forcing the baseball group to pick a new spot, which has tons of opposition. Montreal sounded like they could be serious, and working with the Rays on the weird split plan... but that died and instead of "good, we need a full-time team" it's now "Why are we spending $1 billion on the Big O's roof again?"
The idea was that expansion would hurt the chances of TB/OAK to get stadium deals done, because it would eliminate places for them to relocate to. Back 5-6 years ago, maybe even 2-3, I said that was smart because it's like a game of musical chairs: The goal was to have 4 markets seriously interested in adding baseball so that Tampa and Oakland moved on stadiums, fearing they could both lose their teams to those four markets plus two expansion teams.
But that works both ways: NOT going forward with an expansion committee and exploratory process, the eagerness of cities waned.
Manfred and Fisher bungled this where it seems we're down to one city for two expansion teams and no stadium deals in Oakland and Tampa.
Like I said in the other thread (SLC), the lack of momentum on expansion by MLB (caused by the A's and Rays) has really led to a lot of stadium fatigue.
"Missing a window" is very real in expansion. The Nashville was gung-ho and then they built an MLS stadium on that land instead, forcing the baseball group to pick a new spot, which has tons of opposition. Montreal sounded like they could be serious, and working with the Rays on the weird split plan... but that died and instead of "good, we need a full-time team" it's now "Why are we spending $1 billion on the Big O's roof again?"
The idea was that expansion would hurt the chances of TB/OAK to get stadium deals done, because it would eliminate places for them to relocate to. Back 5-6 years ago, maybe even 2-3, I said that was smart because it's like a game of musical chairs: The goal was to have 4 markets seriously interested in adding baseball so that Tampa and Oakland moved on stadiums, fearing they could both lose their teams to those four markets plus two expansion teams.
But that works both ways: NOT going forward with an expansion committee and exploratory process, the eagerness of cities waned.
Manfred and Fisher bungled this where it seems we're down to one city for two expansion teams and no stadium deals in Oakland and Tampa.
HisIceness
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