When Dick’s Sporting Goods Park, the $71 million home of the Rapids, opened in 2007, there were high hopes in Commerce City that it would become a destination for more people than just soccer fans.
They’re still waiting.
And wondering.
“I’m not an anti-KSE guy,” offered Dave Wegner, president of the Centennial 38 supporters club for the Major League Soccer franchise that calls Commerce City home. “I think they do wonderful things. It’s that they run their sports business like a business. And other (owners) run their sports business like a sports business.”
The Rapids are owned by Kroenke Sports & Entertainment — billionaire Stan Kroenke’s global company that also owns the Los Angeles Rams, London’s Arsenal soccer club, and the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche and Colorado Mammoth. KSE signed a 25-year lease with Commerce City for $1 per year in exchange for financing, building and managing the stadium and soccer fields around it.
There were plans for housing, shops, restaurants and bars, and office space. But Victory Crossing, the proposed 600,000-square-foot development around the stadium, has never crossed over from mock-ups to reality.
“It’s a shame that (Kroenke) has not done anything with it,” at-large Commerce City councilman Craig Kim said. “It’s a shame to me that the city is at his mercy.”
The inactivity around Dick’s Sporting Goods Park is especially notable when contrasted against the other sports properties under the KSE umbrella. SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., the $4.963 billion home of the Rams, opened in September 2020. Bloomberg reported in November that Arsenal is exploring adding 20,000 in capacity to Emirates Stadium. And the company recently announced a 25-year redevelopment “super project” that would create a new commercial and housing district around Ball Arena, home of KSE’s Nuggets, Avalanche and Mammoth.
Add it all up, and Rapids fans feel as if their favorite club is a Kroenke afterthought.
“He’s done a lot of good for other cities,” Kim said, “but my god, when are we going to see something here in Commerce City that we were promised 20 years ago?”
“Missed opportunity”
In 2023, a KSE representative told the City Council in Commerce City that mixed-use development was still the vision for the property. He showed them a PowerPoint presentation with pictures of the company’s other sports and entertainment complexes in the United States and said the same intentions exist for DSGP.
Given the acreage owned by the Kroenkes within the city limits — 269 total, a Denver Post public records review found — the family has plenty of motivation for that to be the case.
“KSE continues to make progress on our development strategy in Commerce City,” Mike Neary, KSE executive vice president for business operations and real estate, told The Post via a written statement. “We are having meaningful conversations with the city’s development team and productive dialogue about various options for the land around Dick’s Sporting Goods Park and along 56th Street. These types of developments take time to get right, but we are committed, and we look forward to sharing details about our progress when appropriate.”
As of late December, no new proposals were on the table, and the Council is waiting on Kroenke to make the next move, said Travis Huntington, a Commerce City spokesman.
“There’s conversations continuing and we expect another proposal,” Huntington said, “but we don’t know when.”
DSGP was born out of a $183 million public-private partnership, as local voters approved a $64 million bond sale in 2004 that offset part of a $93 million investment in infrastructure improvements. KSE put up $45 million in debt and $20 million in cash toward the stadium complex.
The intent was to do for the east side of Commerce City what Coors Field did for Lower Downtown — bring a “destination vibe” and spur tourism dollars to the area, generating revenue for KSE, the Rapids and the stadium itself.
Instead, the nearest restaurants reside roughly a mile west of the stadium, along Quebec Street, and a 15-minute walk for fans. Centennial 38 has regularly bused fans from Denver while organizing tailgate parties before matches to make up for the lack of food and entertainment options nearby.
“If it were developed, it may put what we like most about our game days at risk,” Wegner admitted, adding that it’s a risk he wishes KSE were willing to take.
“We’ve got 100 parking spaces. We’ve got the West VIP (lot). At the end of the day, it’s such a missed opportunity.”
Frustration over delayed development around Dick’s Sporting Goods Park flared up in that 2023 meeting when KSE executives went before the City Council to propose a land swap.
The company wanted the city to give it 88.2 acres. In exchange, KSE would give 9.7 acres to the South Adams County Water and Sanitation District and the water district would hand over 6 acres to Commerce City.
But council members objected to the deal while lambasting KSE for failing to live up to promises about developing the soccer stadium into a Front Range destination.
“You could have shown good faith to everybody involved that this is something your organization is committed to do,” former Commerce City Mayor Benjamin Huseman said during a May 2023 meeting, “but nothing has happened.”
Huseman declined to comment last month when reached by The Post.
Kim said there is no indication that Kroenke will present a new development plan in 2025.
“Crickets,” he answered when asked if he had heard from KSE since the infamous 2023 council meeting.
“Not up to the standard”
As is often the case with land targeted for stadium construction in metro areas, the site around Dick’s Sporting Goods Park has a history that made it easier to acquire but harder to develop.
The land once housed a chemical weapons arsenal, which means it has land-use restrictions set by the Environmental Protection Agency. Kroenke would need clearance from the EPA before building houses there, which could take years. Retail and other commercial properties would have fewer restrictions.
In 2032, the company will also have the option to buy the land where the stadium sits for $1 and the option to buy the surrounding soccer fields at a price set by an appraiser.
None of that, however, guarantees anything will ever come of the land around Dick’s.
J.C. Bradbury, an economics professor at Kennesaw State University in Georgia and past president of the North American Association of Sports Economists, said the future of Commerce City’s development around the soccer stadium comes down to dollars.
And it is unlikely that Dick’s Sporting Goods Park can anchor a development boom for the city.
“There’s this sort of myth of, ‘Oh, if you build it, they will come,’” Bradbury said. “It doesn’t happen.”
When a successful neighborhood or commercial district emerges around a stadium, it is usually because key pieces, such as a young, emerging bar scene or reliable public transit, already were in place, Bradbury said.
“The thing that’s going to work around a stadium is restaurants and bars. That’s it. People don’t want to grocery shop near stadiums, and they really don’t want to live near stadiums,” he said.
Developers like Kroenke are going to focus on projects where they can make the biggest profit — the SoFi Stadium project in Inglewood or the Ball Arena project in downtown Denver.
“There’s just not a lot of money to be made in terms of developing around an MLS stadium,” Bradbury said.
Geoffrey Propheter, an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver who studies property taxes and land development around sports facilities, said one way to predict what will happen is to look at the overall economy.
KSE had a window before the 2020 pandemic to develop the land when interest rates and building costs were lower, but the company did not move. Now interest rates are higher, so financing for projects is more expensive.
Propheter speculated that the hold-up could be the land-use restrictions imposed by the EPA. But that can be overcome. After all, developers on the Denver side of the soccer complex have built a subdivision since the stadium deal was inked.
Propheter agreed with City Council’s decision in 2023 to reject the land swap proposal, saying it is bad public policy to give away land in exchange for hope.
“Back in 2004 they approved a hope,” he said. “They approved a development agreement that gave KSE exclusive rights to develop. At that point, the city wrote themselves out of any future development.”
Still waiting
Since the 2023 blow-up, Commerce City has continued to wait on a new proposal from Kroenke, and the prairie dog fields surrounding the soccer stadium remain undeveloped.
Centennial 38 has criticized Kroenke for poor upkeep at the stadium, stating in a 2023 letter to KSE that it was, “not up to the standard of a modern professional sports venue.”
The missive cited “a scoreboard that has more non-functioning pixels than not; an electrical system that barely functions and often leaves fans to find their cars in darkness after games; a (public address) system that is inaudible in large portions of the stands and concourse; and signage that is shabby and faded.”
Rapids owner and alternate governor Josh Kroenke, Stan Kroenke’s son, responded to C38’s concerns with a five-paragraph open letter to fans in September 2023.
In it, he vowed to produce a feasibility study and a master plan for Victory Crossing in “early 2024,” although neither city officials nor KSE would address the status of either as of late December.
Wegner said that, as of late December, neither he nor C38 had seen a master plan from KSE of any kind.
Kroenke’s rebuttal “(was) not what we were looking for,” Wegner noted. “He addressed the elephant in the room. It was just the wrong room.”
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