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Before the White Sox can build their next stadium, Chicago may have to do something slightly more complicated:
Move nearly $900 million worth of railroad infrastructure.
The proposed riverfront development, The Railyards, would transform roughly 47 acres of Amtrak maintenance land into a new ballpark district with housing, retail, healthcare and public space.
And I think the stadium is almost the least interesting part.
For most of the last century, the most valuable urban land was where cities moved things.
Rail yards. Ports. Warehouses. Industrial sites.
Now some of that same land is becoming more valuable as somewhere people stay.
Live here. Eat here. Shop here. Watch baseball here. Walk the river afterward.
That’s a fascinating inversion.
Chicago originally became powerful because of transportation infrastructure.
Now one of those old transportation sites may become more valuable by removing the transportation from it.
The land didn’t change.
Its highest-value use did.
And sports is increasingly becoming the ignition switch developers use to make that transition happen.
#stadium #billionaire #sportsbusiness #sports #realestate
Transcript
This is the wildest best I've ever seen, and that's saying a lot considering football's back. But currently, there's a 47 acre piece of Chicago Riverfront that is doing something very unsexy, fixing trains. Amtrak at the moment is using this land as a maintenance yard just south of downtown, but the new billionaire expected to take control of the White Sox soon has a different plan. Justin Ischbio wants to move the trains and build a world class new stadium. In fact, stealing the playbook from another NL team, he wants to go full battery on this thing. The project is being called right now the rank yards. New apartments, health care, retail, restaurants, the whole shebang. Rank wants a mixed use district riverfront ballpark. I think the pope would even approve. Now the breaking news here is that Amtrak just received 659,000,000 in federal grants to relocate and upgrade its maintenance yard, which would be one of the first cases in which we see a private investor rearrange urban infrastructure to unlock a stadium. Tier we're going to continue to see more of it because the question is no longer where should we put the stadium. It's what businesses or infrastructure can be rearranged to make that current land more valuable with the stadium on it. Railroads, parking garages, warehouses, ports, they're all fair game in the future. However, it does help if you have a 125,000,000 of your own capital to put up to make this happen. If you're trying to put sports on boring land, comment connect down below and send this to a White Sox fan.
