All-Star Youth Sports Versus Real Estate Consultants And Politicians

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catlady

Cheer Parent
Jun 6, 2012
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Meet Charles A Johnson IV <click here> of Johnson Consulting. He is one of many consultants that specialize in youth sport and other destination/tourism real estate development <click here>. All of these consultants have one mantra in common: "If your city builds it, they will come." City politicians of both parties and local business leadership have all bought into this mentality. The problem, the success of a Convention Center, Sport Park, Professional Sport, etc is measured by hotel stays, and these consultants keep telling these politicians if they aren't getting the tourism (hotel stays) they need to build/expand a convention center and build a mega convention center hotel to go with it. If hotel stays don't increase to the promised projected levels after the expansions, which in most cases they don't, they bring in more real estate consultants which tell them to build, expand and renovate more. Heywood T Sanders wrote the book Convention Center Follies: Politics, Power and Public Investment. Below is Prof Sanders speaking, it's long, it's boring, and if you watch it skip the first 20 minutes which is just his introduction, but it provides a lot of insight on what AS is up against with convention centers and youth sports with sport parks concerning hotel and venue pricing. He doesn't expand on it in the video, but many of these publicly financed businesses (through tax increment financing) go into foreclosure and are bought up at a fraction of the actual building cost..... pretty nice investment.
"Things that make you go hmmmm."
 
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