Build it...

Geez, I had no idea the Times-Dispatch was as popular a place to write for as it appears to be. Four weeks ago, I submitted an op-ed to it. Today, after intervention from an editor I badgered into listening to me, I heard back--there's no room, and no plans, for outside contributors right now. (They did suggest I could cut it to 250 words and submit a letter.) So I guess I'll just run my op-ed here!

“Build it and they will come.” Of all the things we have to thank Kevin Costner for—Robin Hood with an American accent, teenage mailmen saving the world, “Tin Cup”—this sentence is perhaps his worst legacy. Because the tagline for Costner’s 1989 baseball fantasy “Field of Dreams” has been become a rallying cry for consultants who specialize in convincing American cities to try to revive their downtowns with convention centers.

Last week, the Brookings Institution published a study called “Space Available: The Realities of Convention Centers as Economic Development Strategy.” The study’s author, Dr. Heywood Sanders of the University of Texas at San Antonio, has been a frequent critic of such projects, so it’s not surprising he hasn’t come around.

What’s noteworthy about this study is that he’s proved that the convention business is a loser—in more ways than one.

Convention-center boosters maintain that the depressed state of the event-planning business is due to the recession and the attacks of September 11, 2001. But Sanders shows that convention box office started to head toward the earth long before Space.com did the same.

In big cities, conventions and tradeshow business is slowly evaporating. Attendance at Chicago’s McCormick Place is down 25 percent in the last three years. New York’s Javits Center is off 37 percent since 1997. Atlanta’s Georgia World Conference Center is down a staggering 50 percent since the same year.

Las Vegas and Orlando have picked up some of this business. But after years of growth, attendance in these destination cities has dropped to pre-millennial numbers.

And in smaller cities such as Richmond? Don’t ask. Sanders says an “arms race” between places like Charlotte, St. Louis and our town has lead to mutual assured desertion downtown, with convention centers often landing events only when exhibition space is offered gratis.

There are a lot of reasons for the decline in business. One is that in industries that used to account for a lot of trade shows, such as computing and electronics, there are simply fewer companies sending employees to shows, as well as fewer companies. In 1997 Las Vegas’ COMDEX show boasted 1.38 million square feet of exhibition space and attracted over two hundred thousand attendees. In 2003, it was down to 150,000 square feet and about thirty-nine thousand attendees. It wasn’t held in 2004.

Add in better technology for selling at distances—Internet videoconferencing, for instance--and you’re looking at an industry in a death spiral. Add a glut of new convention space—nearly 12 million square feet in the past five years—and the body begins to stink.

The main culprit, Sanders concludes, is consultant studies that promise the moon. One of the examples he gives smarts a bit, because it’s Richmond. Studies in 1995 and 1999 projected a total of 556,000 new hotel room nights per year. According to John F. “Jack” Berry, president of the Richmond Metropolitan Convention & Visitors Bureau, there were 44,762 new room nights in 2004. Yup, less than a tenth of what the consultants predicted.

Sanders’ report calls for public review of consultant studies when it comes to future projects, so cities don’t end up throwing good money after bad—building, for example, a performing arts center to attract conventioneers--to try to prop up their failing exhibition centers. That would be a good start. Because the costs of these turkeys aren’t confined to their construction and maintenance—as Sanders points out, every dollar spent chasing imaginary business is one that can’t go to time-tested forms of economic stimulus like transportation, small-business incentives and improving schools.

Because in the end, “Field of Dreams” is just a movie. And the man who made “Waterworld”? Not such a great business guru.