CHICAGO — If the Chicago Bears dare to dream big about a new stadium in Arlington Heights, they can find inspiration in SoFi Stadium, the new star attraction of the NFL.
The league’s largest and most expensive arena and the site of Sunday’s Super Bowl, SoFi, just outside Los Angeles, is overwhelming fans with its sweeping curves and epic scale. The stadium and its development highlight certain parallels to the Bears’ proposal to buy and redevelop Arlington International Racecourse. Both reflect desires to leave century-old stadiums and home cities for vast sites that allow for planned enclaves of surrounding restaurants, hotels, offices, stores and homes.
Attending a game at SoFi could make a Bears fans swoon. Visitors arrive through a huge entrance hall, bathed in sunlight from a towering translucent canopy. Fans descend palm-tree lined staircases to seats wrapped in a tight bowl around the playing field, built 100 feet underground. Once the game begins, the space lights up with images from the world’s largest center-hung video screen, and vibrates with deafening crowd noise.
But several key elements make SoFi an unlikely model for the Bears to follow. First, it’s home to two NFL teams, the Rams and the Chargers, as well as NFL Media, which increases its usage and revenue. Second, it has open sides, so is not a true dome, as would be required to hold other events such as the Super Bowl in the Midwest.
Most crucially, the stadium alone, which was privately financed, reportedly cost more than $5 billion. That’s money that Rams owner and real estate developer Stan Kroenke, who married into the family that owns Walmart, apparently can afford. It might be impossible for the McCaskey family-owned Bears, who don’t have a similar independent source of wealth. And there has been little support for taxpayers to pay for a new home.
Differences aside, the main takeaway for the Bears is that SoFi is not just a stadium. It’s part of a 300-acre complex in Inglewood called Hollywood Park— named after a former racetrack on the site — that’s integrated with a concert hall, entertainment district and plans for 2,500 homes. There’s even a lake designed to catch rainwater and recycle it to irrigate the landscaping. Local developers who have weighed in say that any construction on Arlington’s 326 acres would require a similar mix of uses.
Such developments are a trend in modern sports, following multiuse sites such as those surrounding the New England Patriots and Dallas Cowboys stadiums. Other new stadiums, including those outside of Dallas, Las Vegas, and New York, cost less than $2 billion, but don’t have the same wow factor as SoFi.
For the Rams, their new home ended an odyssey that saw the franchise move to St. Louis from 1995 to 2015, before paying the NFL a $550 million relocation fee to move back to the bigger market of Los Angeles. Adding to the costs, the NFL and Kroenke recently agreed to pay $790 million to St. Louis-area entities to settle a lawsuit over the team’s departure. The league reportedly has helped finance much of the cost of the stadium, while the sale of personal seat licenses priced at up to $100,000 each was meant to generate much of the revenue.
Last year, the Bears entered a purchase agreement to buy Arlington for $197 million, and are in the process of assessing the property to see if they will finalize the deal this year or next. The team may yet stay at century-old Soldier Field, if the club can negotiate improvements with the city of Chicago.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Friday she plans to present the Bears with a “very compelling financial case” to stay in Chicago, including exploring adding a roof. She said the city offers a “tier-one market,” unlike Arlington Heights.
But if the Bears end up leaving, any new stadium will take time to build. SoFi took about six years from conception to its opening in 2020.
If the Bears leave, the Chicago Tribune found that the team would owe the Park District $84 million to break its lease in 2026.
‘A phenomenal venue’
Rams fans at a recent playoff game at SoFi regretted seeing the old Hollywood Park racetrack on the site get demolished, but they gushed over the new stadium, using words such as “grandiose,” “a sports cathedral” and “dope,” — but pricey.
Mark Gross previously had season tickets to Rams games, but didn’t get them after they moved to SoFi, saying the personal seat licenses he looked at would have cost $5,000, on top of the season ticket cost of $1,200.
But, he said, “This is a phenomenal venue. It is truly fantastic. State of the art. Every seat is a good seat.”
SoFi’s normal capacity is about 70,000, but it can be expanded to accommodate 100,000. The capacity of Soldier Field is 61,500, smallest in the NFL.
As for comparing SoFi with the Rams’ previous home at Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles or Levi’s Stadium south of San Francisco, Gross said, “I would say from an old-timer’s perspective that the Coliseum has its own charms. The sound in this place is amazing. It’s very, very loud, comparatively speaking, to the stadium in San Francisco or the Coliseum.”
Jose Rivera, a delivery truck driver who has season tickets, said the video screen and crowd noise at the new stadium are hair-raising. “It’s a super upgrade from the Coliseum,” he said.
An electrician foreman named Manny, who declined to give his last name, said he worked on SoFi. Manny splurged to take his son to a playoff game there. He said the stadium boosted the local economy, with new buildings and people spending more money at restaurants.
“It’s a shot in the arm for Inglewood, for sure,” said Manny, who lives 10 minutes from the stadium.
The biggest complaints fans had were traffic jams and lack of public transportation and parking. The stadium is about 12 miles from downtown Los Angeles. A rail connection is planned before the stadium hosts the Summer Olympics opening and closing ceremonies in 2028, but for now, fans must use shuttle buses.
Impact on housing
Despite accolades from outside Inglewood, some residents resent SoFi. Demonstrators have protested against the development causing rent increases, displacement and homelessness in the city of Inglewood.
Home prices rose about 63% from 2014, before the project came together, to 2018, PropertyShark reported. That increase prompted some owners to sell, while soaring rents are pushing out longtime tenants, according to Rick Foard, an organizer with the local Lennox Inglewood Tenants Union.
His daughter, a high school teacher, told him students have shared “horror stories” about having to leave the school district.
As a result, residents pushed for the city to impose rent control, which it did in 2019, limiting increases at large complexes to 3% or cost-of-living hikes, whichever is greater. Evicted tenants are eligible for relocation assistance ranging from $2,000 to $7,500.
Because the rent cap only applies to current tenants, not new ones, tenants say landlords have incentive to drive them out by not maintaining their properties. And traffic can cause hourlong delays for residents on game days.
“This is definitely having an effect on long-term working-class residents,” Foard said. “All this should have been thought of before. That would be a great idea for the Bears.”
As an example of how a stadium project can affect a town, SoFi managing director Jason Gannon said the developers worked hard to involve the community and have a positive impact, spending more than $100 million to contract with local businesses.
Ongoing development has helped reverse the economic fortunes of Inglewood, which previously had deep debt, high unemployment and crime. Along with SoFi, the renovation of the former Los Angeles Lakers home at The Forum into a concert hall, and the coming $1 billion Los Angeles Clippers basketball stadium, are turning Inglewood into a boom town, Mayor James Butts said.
The investments have helped pay for millions of dollars in road and infrastructure improvements, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic just built a new center for its youth orchestra in the city, which has more than 90% Black and Latino residents.
“The main thing we wanted was this not to be a football stadium only,” Butts said. “We wanted see an expansion of the Hollywood Park project. … Now we’re proud to be part of history.”
Arlington Heights has a mostly white, upper-middle-class population, but town officials expect it to benefit similarly from a stadium, through jobs, economic development and a higher public profile.
Will Bears have the money?
Chicago sports consultant Marc Ganis said he’d be surprised if the Bears built a dome, because it adds tremendously to the cost — and it doesn’t fit the Bears’ brand of playing in “Bears weather.” As an alternative, Ganis said, a lot of seats may be enclosed and climate controlled.
“The return on investment is always going to be an issue — what makes sense to build, what do they need,” Ganis said. He estimated the price tag is likely to start around $2 billion, slightly more than the average cost of recently built stadiums other than SoFi.
A more likely model for the Bears, Ganis said, might be Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in England, a multiuse facility that has a partial covering of seats but not a roof, features luxury suites and clubs, and features a compact design to put fans on top of the action.
Despite the allure of a stadium like SoFi, everything works against the Bears building a stadium, according to Allen Sanderson, an economist at the University of Chicago.
The problem with outdoor sports stadiums, he said, is their low utilization rate. A pro football team only plays at home 10 days a year, and most stadiums have little economic impact on surrounding neighborhoods. NFL teams make most of their money from television revenue anyway, he said.
There appears to be little public appetite for more government subsidies for the Bears, while taxpayers are still paying for $432 million of the $690 million cost to renovate Soldier Field, completed in 2004.
“When people get down to the table and do the math, it’s going to be a pretty hard sell,” Sanderson said. “Who exactly is going to come up with $2 billion?”
One potential chunk of revenue would come from selling the naming rights to a new stadium, which the Bears can’t do at Soldier Field, since they don’t own it. SoFi reportedly made $400 million from selling its name to Social Finance Inc., an online finance company.
As for the Bears, spokesman Scott Hagel wrote to the Tribune, “We continue to assess the viability of the Arlington Park land and if it’s financially feasible to develop upon it. We also continue to maintain an open dialogue with the Chicago Park District and the city regarding our current operations at Soldier Field.”
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Freelance reporter Josh Gross reported from California.
