My son and I attended an Atlanta Braves baseball game at Truist Park in the Battery. It’s a mixed-use area, with high-rise hotels, restaurants, entertainment venues, condominiums, retail spaces, and office spaces compressed into a hub around a sports complex. It’s an attractive concept, and it’s the proposed business model for a new arena at Carolina North.
After the game, we explored a bit while hunting a beverage. I tried to imagine something similar along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and the more
I did so, I came up with some questions.
First, Major League Baseball hosts 81 home games a year. UNC men’s basketball hosts 15.
Truist Park has a capacity of 41,000. The new UNC basketball arena seems to aim for 16,000.
82 x 41,000 = 3,321,000
15 x 16,000 = 240,000
Some portion of that 240,000 (to be determined) will be students who will not be spending the night and have university meal plans.
C0nclusion: UNC men’s basketball will not support a 365-day a year restaurant or lodging.
Second, Truist Park in Atlanta draws on a local population of approximately 7,000,000. Birmingham, Greenville, SC, Jacksonville, FL, and Chattanooga are all a two hour drive, but the Battery has a massive population to support it without much immediate competition. It also has all the other major attractions in Atlanta to draw tourists who might opt to stay there while visiting for something else.
The Piedmont Crescent (the area along the I-85 corridor in North Carolina) has a similar population, but it also has metro centers – with attached entertainment and arena options – in Raleigh, Winston-Salem/Greensboro, and Charlotte. Carolina North would compete with those venues for non-basketball events.
Conclusion: Orange County is situated in an area saturated with competition for other events that could fill a 16,000 seat arena.
I understand that the scale of a Carolina North wouldn’t approach the Battery, but frankly, the scale of the Battery is part of the appeal, given the variety of options that scale entails.
So, would a hotelier or restauranteur look at a Carolina North and see a viable business the 350 days the area isn’t hosting a home basketball game? Add a concert a month, which seems ambitious given all the other venues in central NC. That would makes 27 event days a year, with 338 other days to try to make a profit.
The more I think about the math, the less it all seems to add up.
I’m not opposed to a new arena at Carolina North, but if we do put a new arena there, we need to get it right. What do you think? Would that area draw enough visitors to support hotels and restaurants year round?
