KEEPING UP WITH JONESES
The 49ers and the NFL want a new stadium soon

Nancy Gay
Friday, November 10, 2006

A few months ago, 49ers co-owner Denise DeBartolo York extended an
invitation to visit her in her office in Youngstown, Ohio. As we
chatted, she gestured to a huge stack of thick bound documents filling
an entire corner in a small conference room, all of them various
stadium plans and proposals.

Most of them were scrapped San Francisco stadium ideas, all of them
victims of logistics, funding or both.

Building an NFL stadium isn't easy.

"The pile gets taller every week," she said with a smile.

Getting the 49ers out of the NFL's most decrepit stadium and one of
its oldest has been an obsession for DeBartolo York. She knows real
estate and real estate development. She is one of 13 directors of the
Simon Property Group (SPG), which is the largest publicly traded
retail real estate company in North America, with a total
capitalization of about $46 billion.

DeBartolo York also knows her franchise cannot be profitable while the
team plays in a crumbling, archaic facility without lucrative luxury
suite amenities and sufficient corporate sponsorship.

So, if she and her husband, Dr. John York, have concluded the decaying
Candlestick Point stadium site and its associated physical limitations
won't work, they're probably right.

Wednesday night's "surprise" announcement to San Francisco officials
that the team was pulling the plug on its Candlestick stadium
development plan and focusing its efforts on Santa Clara was not a
surprise to NFL officials.

"We knew of the 49ers' plans beforehand. They kept us informed the
whole way," said NFL spokesman Greg Aiello, who answers a lot of
questions these days about new stadium projects.

They are in the works all over, from Minnesota to New York to Texas.
Everywhere except in Southern California, where the NFL is having
trouble finding a home.

On that subject, you can discount any notion that the 49ers' decision
to build in Santa Clara is some power play to move the franchise
eventually to the lucrative Los Angeles market.

Certainly the NFL doesn't smell anything funny here.

"I think the team's announcement speaks for itself," Aiello said. "The
49ers have said the team will remain the San Francisco 49ers. The
issue now is replacing the oldest stadium in the league with a new
facility. This has nothing to do with Los Angeles."

Provided the city of Santa Clara and Santa Clara County are willing to
cooperate financially, the 49ers will need three-quarters of the NFL's
ownership (24 of 32) to approve a new stadium location. That should be
no problem.

The NFL's wealthier owners -- the Redskins' Daniel Snyder, the
Seahawks' Paul Allen, the Patriots' Robert Kraft, the Panthers' Jerry
Richardson, the Eagles' Jeffrey Lurie -- all enjoy the benefits from
new stadiums.

Not surprisingly, Snyder and Richardson are among those deep-pocketed
NFL owners who have been advising the 49ers all the way.

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones owns the NFL's second-most-valuable
franchise, which Forbes estimated was worth $1.063 billion in 2005. He
is ready to leave Texas Stadium for a new $650 million facility
scheduled to open in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Arlington in
2009.

The 49ers need to get their stadium done just to keep up.

Their dalliances with the City and County of San Francisco and
reluctant voters who, understandably, don't want to fund a
multimillion-dollar playground for NFL athletes would likely continue
into the next decade if they didn't cut bait.

The 49ers want this new stadium built by 2012.

In reality, the rest of the NFL, which shares its revenues from
television, fancy club suites and other amenities, would like to see
it happen much sooner.

Like it or not, the notion of a San Francisco NFL stadium with
stunning city and bridge views is about as feasible as the Washington
Redskins actually playing in the nation's capital.

Sure, Santa Clara doesn't really impress. But if you visit other NFL
stadiums around the country, you see some in similar nondescript
locations.

FedEx Field, home of the Redskins, sits atop a hill amid
lower-middle-class housing in suburban Landover, Md.

That is the unofficial location. FedEx Field -- and the emphasis in on
"field" -- actually is in Hyattsville, Md., a town of about 16,000 and
a median family income of about $46,000 a year, according to 2000 U.S.
Census figures.

Can you see the Capitol or 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. from there? Not
unless you've got a Hubble Telescope handy. The White House is 13
long, long miles away.

The Dolphins don't play in Miami. Their stadium is 20 miles away in
Davie, Fla., in the middle of a subdivision. Getting there is like
driving to Aunt Millie's house for Thanksgiving.

Yet, as the 49ers' lead project architect on Thursday described the
myriad infrastructure problems associated with waterlogged Candlestick
Point and then referred to the proposed Santa Clara site as
"exciting," the disconnect between reality and sentimentality really
kicked in.

You've probably seen the area around Great America. It's clean. It's
warmer. There are pretty palm trees. The huge Santa Clara Convention
Center and the amusement park are surrounded by acres of nice
apartment complexes and pothole-free parking lots.

As a fan, you can count on parking there on rainy days in December
without half the lot closed by flooding, or your tailgate bash set in
a pool of quicksand.

But the Santa Clara site is pure California sprawl, the kind of flat,
soulless landscape that makes you think of the San Fernando Valley or
the Inland Empire.

Sure, the Seahawks were able to implode the former Kingdome and build
beautiful Qwest Field at the same downtown Seattle location. But it
took unpopular seat-licensing sales and considerable taxpayer help for
Allen, a multi-billionaire, to finance the stadium's $600 million
price (with interest).

The 49ers (and the Giants, and the A's) know Bay Area taxpayers aren't
the most giving bunch when it comes to helping fund stadium
construction.

The NFL helps, of course, with its unique League Stadium Funding
Program, also known as G-3 funding, which provides low-interest loans
to help franchises build new stadiums. Aiello said the NFL has
contributed close to a billion dollars in financing to 10 new stadium
projects.

The fund, which was created in 1999, extends financing well below
market rate -- at last estimate, the interest rate was just above 4.7
percent -- and comes from a share of each NFL team's media revenue as
well as the visiting team's share of club-seat money that will be
generated by the new stadium.

The Giants and the Jets, for example, have applied for $300 million in
G-3 funding to help finance their planned $1.5 billion shared
replacement for the New Jersey Meadowlands facility.

As a team in one of the top six U.S. markets, the 49ers will be
entitled to receive from the NFL50 percent of whatever private
contributions they make. That will help. By moving south they're more
likely to get Silicon Valley corporations to play along with the
development, too.

So you ask yourself: What matters to you as a fan? Do you want to
glance over your shoulder and see the Transamerica Building and the
Bay Bridge off in the distance, or do you want to watch the game in a
state-of-the-art environment?

"There is no cookie-cutter answer. It's very specific to each market
as to what works, for that city, for that market, for that area, for
that team," Aiello said of the city-proper stadium notion.

Next time you trip over a crumbling chunk of concrete at Candlestick,
remember that point. And start making your plans to drive about 35
more miles south for NFL games.

With better cup holders.