Could a Browns dome stadium in Brook Park spawn a vibrant entertainment district and what might it look like?

CLEVELAND, Ohio — From 1974 to 94, the Cleveland Cavaliers played its home games at the Richfield Coliseum. But during that time, the sleepy little town between Cleveland and Akron never transformed into the kind of entertainment district typically associated with sports stadiums these days. It was never designed to.

In fact, the site on a prairie between I-271 and I-77 was chosen specifically to draw people who could drive to the arena in less than an hour and designed to get them in and out as quickly and efficiently as possible.

“The idea was you build a massive parking lot around the facility. Therefore, there’s no retail activity there, no restaurants, no shops,” said Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College who has consulted on stadium projects. “When people got to the arena and got hungry, they had to go inside to buy their hot dogs and drink their beer.”

“That was a very different model and, hence, I don’t think what happened 50 years ago is pertinent to this.”

This is the estimated $2 billion-plus dome stadium Cleveland Browns owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam are considering building on the 176 acres in Brook Park they have the option to buy while simultaneously remaining open to renovating the existing stadium on the lakefront. The Haslams have not released specific plans or renderings for the potential dome project, but their comments this week combined with league-wide trends and the size of the property suggest their concept consists of much more than a solitary stadium in the middle of big parking lot.

“You could paint the vision of what our community could be and the jobs it can provide and the surrounding development or just the growth that could happen from it,” Dee Haslam told cleveland.com’s Mary Kay Cabot and four other reporters who cover the team. “I look at it as very positive.”

Such a project could have the potential to “transform our area,” Haslam said. It would almost certainly include plans for restaurants, bars, shopping — all sorts of attractions — that people could enjoy not just on game days, but year-round.

Zimbalist says a Brook Park dome would need to be part of a designed district with mixed-used development around the stadium to have “even a remote chance of making sense economically.”

Victor Matheson, an economics professor at the College of the Holy Cross who studies public stadium deals, agrees, saying most new stadiums in the suburbs feature adjoining, entertainment districts.

“Owners don’t just want to be in the sports business, they want to be in the real estate business as well,” he said.

Of the NFL’s 10 suburban stadiums, nearly all are located either near existing mixed-use development with entertainment or land that is currently being developed for that purpose. The trend started in the early 2000s with the New England Patriots, who play their games in Foxborough, 30 miles south of Boston.

The Patriots are owned by the Kraft family, who built their own stadium there and left it “basically surrounded by a sea of parking for nearly a full decade,” Matheson said. By 2007, they realized they could get a better return on their investment.

The result was Patriot Place, a 1.35-million square feet lifestyle center with about 30 stores, including a giant Bass Pro Shop, more than two dozen bars and restaurants, a 14-screen cinema, a bowling alley, two hotels and even a medical center. The complex draws more than nine million people every year

“We were the first and I think we’ve been very, very successful,” Patriot Place general manager Brian Earley told WGRZ-TV in Buffalo in 2022.

Patriot Place, however, might not be the best example of what could happen in Brook Park. The Foxborough site is more than double the size of the parcel the Haslams are eyeing. And its isolated location along a four-lane state route can sometimes make it feel empty, as it did when I strolled its promenade on a random Thursday in 2018.

But perhaps more noteworthy, Gillette Stadium and Patriot Place were almost entirely privately funded. The Haslams are pursuing a public-private partnership for the lakefront stadium renovation, and it’s believed they’d want the same for a dome.

“I can’t imagine the Cleveland Browns owners building this thing on their own dime,” Matheson said.

Some have pointed to suburban Phoenix as an example of a thriving stadium entertainment development. The Westgate Entertainment District is located opposite State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, the home of the NFL’s Cardinals. It bills itself as a “livable, walkable outdoor oasis” offering an eclectic mix of retail, dining and entertainment, plus loft-style apartments and several hotels. Highlights include nearly 50 restaurants and bars, a 20-screen movie theater, a Dave & Buster’s and a pickleball bar.

But like Patriot Place, Westgate is a private venture. It was built as a complementary piece to not one, but two publicly financed stadiums — the 19,000-seat Desert Diamond Arena is the other — making it a less analogous comparison.

On paper, Texas Live!, the lively $250 million entertainment complex in Arlington, outside of Dallas, might seem like a better harbinger if a dome is built in Brook Park. But while it was developed as a public-private partnership, Texas Live! is more focused on nightlife, with a dozen restaurants, bars, clubs and live music venues — not exactly Brook Park vibes.

Not to mention, the district is adjacent to three stadiums: the Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium, Globe Life Field, where Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers play, and Choctaw Stadium, home to professional rugby, soccer and spring football teams.

Could the Browns organization perhaps glean something from the league’s two existing dome stadiums in the midwest, Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis and Ford Field in Detroit?

Matheson notes the Brook Park option is different than a downtown stadium, which are used as anchors to spur organic urban development. “(With suburban projects), there’s generally not a lot there to begin with and so you have to artificially create it with the idea that if you build it, they will come.”

Instead, he said the template the Browns and their fans should be looking at is what MLB’s Atlanta Braves pulled off several years ago.

“That tells you what’s possible, but it also very clearly shows the drawbacks.”

In 2017, the Braves were lured to Cobb County, 10 miles northwest of downtown, as the centerpiece of a $1 billion mixed-use development that included $300 million in taxpayer money. To put the scope of it in Northeast Ohio terms: think Crocker Park or Pinecrest and then add a 41,000-seat baseball stadium and a 4,000-seat concert venue.

The project, known collectively as Truist Park and The Battery Atlanta, has been touted as a financial success. In its annual report last year, the Cobb County government reported the ballpark district hosted more than 10 million visitors and generated $38 million in tax revenue during fiscal 2022. What’s more, the Braves earned $59 million from rental income from The Battery tenants in 2023, making it their third largest source of income, the Atlanta Journal-Consitution reported.

But there is a big caveat behind all of this. Experts say developments like these don’t create new spending.

“The success (of The Battery) has come at the expense of other restaurants and retail in the rest of the county,” Matheson said. “You didn’t get anything new for Atlanta as a whole, you didn’t even get anything new for Cobb County. You just redirected where the spending in Greater Atlanta was being done.

“But the county still is on the hook for these huge subsidies.”

Could the Haslams replicate something close to The Battery? Again, it might not be an apples-to-apples comparison. Truist Park hosts 81 baseball games — that’s a lot more events than a Brook Park dome could likely book even under the best circumstances. The Atlanta metropolitan area has a much bigger population than Cleveland, too, and it’s a warm-weather city.

“NFL stadiums are a real tricky thing to get right,” Matheson said. “Even the best of them sit dark most of the year, and that makes it hard to build neighborhoods around them.”

“I think it’s a real stretch,” Zimbalist said of the Browns’ suburban stadium aspirations. “I would want to study the area where they’re putting it and the plan for mixed-use development. But I start out being very skeptical and pessimistic. It would depend on the details (of the financing).”

This much is clear: if a dome were to spawn an entertainment district in Brook Park, it would require the sort of intention and momentum that didn’t exist when the Richfield Coliseum opened all those decades ago.

“What you need is not just a plan of the kinds of structures you’d like to see,” Zimbalist said. “You’ve got to have commitments from private capital. What often happens is that owners simply have ideas about what could happen, but there’s no commitment.”

“There’s no reason it can’t work if you throw enough public subsidy at it,” Matheson said. “The real question is: is there any rational reason why you should throw the sort of public money at this that would be required to make it work? We have reams and reams of evidence that stadiums are not particularly good economic drivers and tend to be a poor public investment.”