A Pro Sports Stadium for Montgomery?
By Silver Springer • Oct 19th, 2007 • Category: Arts, Food and Entertainment, Business and Economic Development, Government and Politics, Real Estate
Mayor Fenty and the District of Columbia have pissed off Victor B. MacFarlane, owner of D.C. United and San Francisco based MacFarlane Partners, a real estate investment firm.
Now MacFarlane is looking for a new spot to place a new soccer stadium, outside D.C. proper.
Comptroller Peter Franchot has called upon the Maryland Stadium Authority to find a stadium site and lure D.C. United to Maryland.
Does Montgomery have space the space?
Montgomery County doesn’t really have any strong and large entertainment attractions.
Prince George’s County has Fed Ex Field, Six Flags, University of Maryland, College Park including Comcast Center, and soon National Harbor (arguably the largest mixed-use project on the east coast).
That’s why I say it would only be fitting if Montgomery finally got a large attraction of its own.
The most logical and effective location would be one close to a metro station but does such place large enough exist in Montgomery County? Shady Grove station is the only open parcel that comes to mind but it already has huge plans in place that would be thrown off course if a station could even fit.
Better yet a station inside that the beltway would be best, because as the saying goes your ties to D.C. are far closer if you’re inside the beltway than outside.
But while there are places like Silver Spring and Bethesda some of the stations are inefficiently littered with low-rise residential housing and other structures, a 355 redevelopment plan can’t come soon enough and even Silver Spring and Bethesda are capped at a turgid 200’ft. This in a time when land prices are through the roof and disappearing fast and I can only recall one farm left outside the Agricultural Reserve which will soon be redeveloped.
If not close to a metro station then there are plenty of spaces in County but they wouldn’t be as economically potent. You could go up Route 29 in Northern Silver Spring (I can hear the screams already) or place it somewhere close to the Maryland SoccerPlex and Discovery Sports Center in Germantown.
Also in Montgomery’s arsenal is the fact that it has the largest soccer following in the region, the county already sports the most advanced soccer complex in D.C. area.
I think Discovery Stadium has a nice ring to it.
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No professional sports stadiums in Montgomery County. These should be left to second rate quality of life places like PG and DC and Arlington. Traffic congestion, waste of land, and negative economic impact. No. No. No. Neighborhs for a better Montgomery does not want this piece of crap here.
Yeah! You tell ‘em NBM! Progress sucks! (sarcasm)
Second rate quality of life places like PG, DC, and Arlington??
NBM - I’ll give you PG but from the ignorance you posted above it dosen’t sound like you get out much lately, and by “lately” I mean in the last 7-10 years.
DC and Arlington have a lot going for them, and perhaps the PG Waterfront can push that one little chunk of the county to the right direction.
We need to step back and think about how boring soccer is when considering whether a soccer stadium should be built in Montgomery County. Because it is boring.
This post really turned into a rant about zoning restrictions remarkably quickly after establishing its putative topic, didn’t it?
I see no advantages to having a professional sports stadium in Montgomery County, let alone in Silver Spring. A stadium used only a few days a year does little or nothing for economic development, but does make for traffic disasters when there are games. Furthermore, even if the stadium is privately funded (which isn’t what Franchot is proposing), lots of tax dollars are needed for road improvements near the stadium — pulling limited resources away from other needed projects. I usually agree with Franchot, but I think he is wrong on this. Let DC or VA have it; we are better off without it.
Let us see how else the politicians can waste tax payers money,
We have a lack of affordable housing, no plan on how to handle the
homeless, a budget problem and some idiot wants to build a soccer stadium.
We have a soccer stadium–its called RFK and it is located in DC- we also have plenty of open fields enoug of this idiotic waste of taxpayers money.
If Montgomery County could use and make good economic use out of any sort of facility, it would be a minor league baseball stadium.
A well designed stadium wouldn’t need too large of a footprint, and would draw people 60-75 times per year. If you put found a place for it near the Bethesda or Silver Spring Metro stations, you could draw a lot of people who wouldn’t otherwise come to those places (taking advantage of the fact that Bowie and Prince William don’t have good public transportation options) on a fairly regular basis without making too much of a traffic impact.
The Bethesda Big Train already has a beautiful stadium near Montgomery Mall.
I LOVE baseball, football & soccer (in that order). Soccer interest is rising, baseball interest is decreasing, football is #1. If they could build a soccer stadium anywhere in MoCo, the long term benefits would be outstanding.
Oliver: That is neither minor league baseball NOR a metro accessable stadium.
I love soccer, born and bred Arsenal fan from England which is the stadium used in the picture above. Soccer in the DC area is now rather big with DC united boasting a decent average attendance per year, more so than anywhere else in the country.
My problem with MoCo getting it would be that its to far from its current fanbase and then may become pointless. I live in moco and dont quite know where it could feasibly go to maximise usefulness to the team and for the community.