Countering Terrain Vague With the NFL

by Tony Chavira

When you own a city, you can do whatever you want with the land. This is how the city of Irvine is able to mandate its development priority: simply because the Irvine company owns all of the land on which the city resides. So if Ed Roski wanted to build a stadium on his super-massive parcel in the city of Industry, he could. Easily. And no one could say anything about it because he straight-up owns that land.

So why doesn’t he?

Sam Farmer at the Los Angeles Times shed a little light on this recently:

One of the widely held misconceptions is that he's going to build a stadium and then hand it over to a team. In fact, what he wants to do is hand over the land and the entitlements to build a stadium, and be rewarded with an equity share in a team. Then it would be up to the team and the NFL to privately finance the stadium.

Roski is a real estate magnate, and what he has is a clean and fully entitled piece of land in Industry, complete with the freeway access and infrastructure, room for related development, and without the political headaches of L.A. The site is accessible not just to L.A. but to San Bernardino and Orange counties.

Another option is Roski buying a team outright. He has been lining up a group of investors to do so with him.

And Farmer’s absolutely right. Dealing with the state of California and getting official approval, working with the cities of Walnut and Diamond Bar to prevent their lawsuits, finding investors, developing renderings, and clearing the way for his super developments have all just been gigantic ploys to bait the NFL. As Roski removes more and more roadblocks, he (in turn) seeks to bait the NFL more and more into buying space on his lot.

But let’s not forget for a moment that it’s not a done deal and it won't be his stadium if he brings anyone in. Roski could possibly buy a team himself, but that would be ridiculous if the space doesn’t have an official NFL endorsement. Plus, Roski’s ownership in a casino would disallow him from owning an NFL team.

It doesn’t, on the other hand, disallow him from owning the property on which the stadium will be built.

That’s what this is really about anyway. Land value. Roski and AEG did something similar with the construction of the Staples Center, although that was possibly more difficult in terms of redevelopment because of all of the residents and businesses they were forced to relocate. At the very least, Roski and AEG Owner Philip Anschutz knew that the $375 million they put into the Staples Center would actually be able to serve a team (and thereby increase the value of the land). In case you forgot, Roski owned a minority of the Kings and by constructing Staples Center, he also got a minority ownership in the Lakers. That’s what land use can and will can do for you: leverage ownership in profitable business ventures. No one ever said Roski was a dumb guy.

Despite the press storm, Industry doesn’t have as many roadblocks to the stadium’s actual development. The South Park area of Downtown Los Angeles where Staples Center was built had a terrible fifty-year history of uprooting its residents and businesses for the sake of large developer projects, from the development of the 110 freeway to the installation of the Convention Center. The city of Industry is—obviously enough—marked industrial land ... zoned only for industry. And following the brutality of the recession, this area may officially be called “terrain vague,” a term the Spanish urbanist, architect, and writer Ignasi de Solà-Morales coined. In a nutshell, terrain vague is essentially desolate, unused, in some cases formerly industrial space hidden in pockets throughout our cities. De Solà-Morales spent much of his writing career devising innovative and interesting ideas and systems for how to rearrange this space and find a way to incorporate it into the productive network of a city, but Roski (coming from a purely business standpoint) might actually have it right: stick your shovel into the ground and just start building. If no one’s going to use it, he might as well.

As Roski’s public relations ploy to gain the NFL’s (and in turn, investors’) attention plays out, it’s easy to forget that the city of Industry has almost no residents. The existence of this terrain vague is exactly what draws residents instead to the nearby communities of Diamond Bar and Walnut, which are still in the process of finding ways to hinder its development. The city is empty and quiet in the evening, and easily accessible as a shopping or restaurant hub. It’s not a space for urbanism, it’s only a space to visit. It’s not a space to gather community, only a space to pass through. It is a functional space without an identity. A non-place, if you will ... like a mall or an airport. It doesn’t matter what it looks like or if it adds anything to the community. All that matters if that it’s not a blight as you go about your business.

De Solà-Morales’s idea to manage terrain vague was to develop a broad, interconnected system of community development that allowed for the spaces to change constantly in their use and function. He felt that if these spaces took on a single use again, they would be destined for doom. For example, if one of the many out-of-business big box stores were bought and just became another big box, they would be fated to fail once the economy inevitably took another nose dive.

I could make the argument that Roski, in baiting people with the mouth-watering allure of gridiron exhilaration, is actually attempting to develop a space that is both a centralized urban hub and adheres to De Solà-Morales’s requirements for ending terrain vague. The existence of an NFL stadium means neither that the community will necessarily become loud and dangerous nor that we’ll have more dead blight on our hands. A season only has 16 NFL games, eight at home and eight away over 17 weeks (not including playoffs, etc.). It would clearly be moronic to bank entirely on profits from NFL games and merchandise once a team either moves to or is magically created in Los Angeles. Concerts, car shows, festivals, swap meets ... these things haven’t hurt or killed other communities with stadiums (think about how the Rose Bowl fits into Pasadena, for example), so it’s a strange idea that the cities of Walnut or Diamond Bar believe it might kill theirs. Aside from the point that the stadium can serve several types of events, it can bring a surge of money to nearby businesses. Sure, Roski and the city of Industry hope that it benefits business in Industry, but the NFL stadium is actually planned to be closer to Diamond Bar than the center of Industry (which is just a long strip of a city against the freeway anyway). Besides, both Walnut and Diamond Bar have seasonal community festivals that need funding from taxpayers and local businesses.

This is actually an interesting and new opportunity for the east side of Los Angeles County: boost the local economy, reconfigure and eventually eliminate the terrain vague of the city of Industry, and literally build something from nothing ... which is more than I can say for Staples Center and LA Live, which at one point contained affordable housing and jobs. Ignasi de Solà-Morales may not approve of the brutal and overtly manipulative handling of the city of Industry’s post-recession terrain vague blow-off, but many of the mandates and strategies he suggested may actually come into effect.

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