What could a sports entertainment district in San Antonio look like? (2024)

Major changes to downtown San Antonio and its beloved sports franchises may well be decided over the next few years — but a looming Aug. 19 ballot deadline means any asks for taxpayers to pony up and support a sports district will likely be punted to 2025.

The city is abuzz with chisme and fantasy design renderings, but non-disclosure agreements and the high-stakes nature of the deal have the players holding their cards close to their chests — leaving open the question of exactly where a new basketball arena and baseball field could be built and how to pay for them.

Recent reports have confirmed that Spurs Sports & Entertainment (SS&E) is also negotiating with the City on a joint economic venture involving the ITC property.

In March, a city spokeswoman described several redevelopment projects that could be made possible throughpurchasing or leasingthe ITC property: expanding the Henry B. González Convention Center, renovating the Alamodome and building a land bridge over Interstate 37 to reconnect Hemisfair to the East Side of San Antonio.

In what could be viewed as a preview of what’s to come, late last year the Spurs unveiled the team’s earth-toned City Edition court and uniforms featuring Hemisfair and the Tower of the Americas, which was built for the 1968 World’s Fair.

November, May — or later?

It’s unknown if either of these projects would be funded with tax dollars, but it’s becoming clear that voters are not likely to be asked this year to approve public money to fund these ventures.

Sales taxes, venue taxes and bond dollars are not the only financing tools that could be used, but if the city or county leaders want to use them, they’ll need to ask voters.

And the deadline to place items on the November ballot is Aug. 19.

Voters in San Antonio may see particularly long lines for a longer ballot this year with presidential picks, state legislators and likely several long-awaited municipal propositions amending the city charter. City Council is slated to finalize its portion of the ballot on Thursday, without mention of a sales tax shift or bond.

There have also been no public discussions at Bexar County Commissioners Court about placing additional items on the ballot. Spokespeople for the county and Judge Peter Sakai both said they were unaware of any efforts to do so.

Officials could call a special meeting to add stadium or field funding mechanisms to the ballot, but that’s increasingly unlikely, given the fast-approaching deadline and lack of community engagement on the topic, a source inside City Hall told the San Antonio Report.

Would a high turnout driven by a presidential election work in such a proposition’s favor? What is clear is that the next opportunity comes in May 2025, during the mayoral and council member election. With Mayor Ron Nirenberg up against a term limit and an already contentious battle to replace him, the May ballot is also shaping up to be a high-interest election, by local standards.

Waiting for the next round would allow officials more time to convince voters that a stadium for a multimillion-dollar sports franchise deserves taxpayer dollars.

But it may not be a slam dunk: From 1990 through 2023, voters across the U.S. cast ballots on 57 stadium and arena proposals across the country, approving 35 and rejecting 22 — a 61% average, according to data compiled by Geoffrey Propheter, an associate public finance professor at the University of Colorado Denver, and shared with the Associated Press.

And for no small number of San Antonians, the Frost Bank Center and Alamodome failed to live up to the promises of economic boom and revitalization on the city’s East Side — an area that would no doubt be affected by yet another Spurs move.

During an April 14 telephone call with Nichols Research, San Antonio resident Anne Englert answered numerous questions about her feelings on local sports and potential charter amendments, among other topics. Englert is a member of the local activist group, Infuse SA.

What would it look like?

If a downtown sports entertainment district can be dreamed, can it be built?

That remains the multimillion-dollar question as local politicians and sports franchise owners keep mostly under wraps their ultimate plans and specific whereabouts of proposed new sporting venues.

Experts in the field say there’s ample land to create a downtown sports district in the urban core and at Hemisfair —and precedent for such plans. Now, in the absence of any real clarity on Hemisfair’s future, several local architects are putting their best ideas on paper.

Though unsolicited by the decision-makers of the as-yet-defined project, the drawings illustrate what the future could look like, no holds barred.

“It’s been fun to take a hypothetical stab at it without the complication of budgets or clients and say, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if … ?’” said Brantley Hightower, who founded the architecture HiWorks.

The project is something Hightower has been thinking about since at least 2013, when the San Antonio chapter of the American Institute of Architects hosted a design competition to envision how the brutalist-style ITC building could be reimagined and repurposed.

Hightower’s entry, published here, proposed a network of elevated walkways connecting buildings within the eastern quadrant of Hemisfair, mimicking the River Walk, and repurposing the ITC as an indoor recreation center.

“The roof of the Institute of Texan Cultures, for example, is perfectly sized for a soccer field,” he wrote.

Fast-forward to 2024, and Hightower, who has worked on various projects in San Antonio to include the Stinson Airport Tower, decided to spend a slow day at the office on an exercise laying out plans for “HemisFair Field.”

Posted to his blog, the plans show a baseball stadium that reuses a portion of the ITC building. He added that it would be “unfortunate” if the State of Texas Pavilion “must be sacrificed in order to make such a district possible” — and a sacrifice that he doesn’t believe is necessary.

Card and Company principal Jonathan Card said his ideas for Hemisfair, including a sports district, had been “bouncing around” in his head for a long time. So when he had some free time, he went to the drawing board.

The architect also wanted to get those ideas out into the world so, like his former Lake Flato colleague Hightower, he wrote a series of retrospective blog posts last year on urban planning in San Antonio.

The first asks, “What if … local businessmen had paved over the river that is now the San Antonio Riverwalk?” he wrote.

The fourth installment, published last fall, centers on a more recent question. “What if … a sports district, including an expandable baseball stadium, was built in the urban core?”

Card said he heard people saying it’s either the Spurs or the ballpark. “I’m like, ‘No, you can do both. Let me show you,’” he said.

His proposal calls for an arena south of the Alamodome and housing and other mixed-use buildings to the east. A baseball stadium with an elevated outfield could be built just to the west of there, in the shadow of the Tower of the Americas.

Card is quick to state that he has not been hired by anyone to develop ideas for a sports district . “None of them asked our opinion about this — we just kind of stuck our neck out,” he said.

But he is a proponent of relocating San Antonio sports teams into the urban core, having spent time both in Nashville, where the basketball arena is situated downtown near other amenities, and in Kansas City, where the Royals baseball stadium is located further out.

“I know there’s data out there that paints a picture that sports arenas don’t have a favorable return on investment,” Card said. “But I would really love to see that broken down into suburban or regional sports centers versus downtown-centric sports centers.”

For Hightower, that kind of pondering is what the exercise in developing pie-in-the-sky concepts is all about. They might not make sense on paper from a bottom-line standpoint, he said.

“But if it furthers the conversation a little bit, it’s worthwhile.”