The Five: The Suburbs (2014)
How NFL stadiums moved out and lost their way.
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I.
Ten years ago this month, drawn by the allure of open space and taxpayer money, the San Francisco 49ers officially alighted to a home stadium roughly an hour south of the city of San Francisco. This new edifice—named after an anodyne denim company—is a sterile concrete bowl mired in an uninteresting suburb amid one of the most blandly suburban stretches of the Bay Area. To get there from the city requires a very long train ride, followed by another short train ride.
Levi’s Stadium is so oppressively sun-baked during the day that the people in charge added free sunscreen dispensers on the concourse; it is still, a decade after its opening, surrounded by virtually nothing, save a few cavernous parking lots, a zombie amusement park, and a Marriott.
The reasons for the 49ers’ move out of San Francisco were multifaceted, but also very simple: This was the path of least resistance. It is difficult to build a large stadium in a progressive city where the will to shower public money on billionaires no longer exists. Gavin Newsom—the man who served as the mayor of San Francisco in the years leading up to the 49ers’ decision to build down south—spent years trying to get the 49ers to stay, but ultimately, there was very little he could do.
And so, as it was with millions of other Americans, this promise of an easier life is what led the San Francisco 49ers to move from the city to the suburbs. The fact that the 49ers wound up making their home in this towering mediocrity doesn’t seem to matter to them at all. Their very name reflects the fact that they still want to be associated with the cultural cache of San Francisco, even if they don’t actually want to live there.
II.
A few days ago, a rookie wide receiver for the 49ers named Ricky Pearsall emerged from a high-end retail store in San Francisco’s bustling Union Square neighborhood. A 17-year-old from the suburban city of Tracy, California, allegedly spotted Pearsall’s Rolex watch and tried to rob him. The perpetrator’s gun went off, hitting both him and Pearsall, who was shot in the chest, but somehow avoided major injury.
“This world is a hard place. It’s a very, very hard place,” said 49ers left tackle Trent Williams. “And I think sometimes we are shielded from reality.”
III.
There are a lot of people who use terrible moments like this to express their abhorrence for the very idea of San Francisco. This was true long before a politician from San Francisco became a candidate for president; this has been true for decades, in large part because of what the city has come to represent politically.
I’ve spent the past several years, on and off, working on a podcast about that very idea, and about what San Francisco has come to mean in the larger political landscape. It’s called One Party Town; it’s an attempt to take an honest, non-partisan look at how San Francisco became a stronghold for Democratic politics, and how it’s has impacted the city, both for better and for worse. (It’s going to land on Wondery Plus in the weeks before the election, and you’re probably going to be hearing about it more than you might want until then.)
In our research, one of the first people we spoke to was a longtime political consultant in the city who made an observation that I’d never really considered: While San Francisco has been the incubator for socially progressive ideas, it has never truly been economically progressive. It is, like nearly every other city in America, a place of haves and have-nots, and that has only intensified over the course of the past two decades, as tech money moved in and boosted the city’s fortunes, and then much of that money fled to the suburbs and hollowed the city out in the midst of a pandemic that laid bare the city’s problems.
IV.
Football stadiums, like a lot of suburban homes, are large and unwieldy; in a way, writes Matthew Yglesias for Bloomberg, they kind of belong in the suburbs.
And yet I also think these giant suburban stadiums have cheapened the experience of professional football. Attending an NFL game in person is expensive; it largely pales in comparison to watching the game on a giant television set. And it’s made even worse when you find yourself pointing your car toward a far-flung suburb.
With the exception of Lambeau Field (which is its own unique entity), Arrowhead Stadium (the last of the old greats) and perhaps the new stadium in Minneapolis (which happens to be downtown), I cannot think of many NFL stadiums that I would actually like to visit.1 It just doesn’t work that way anymore.
Most new NFL stadiums aren’t built for people; they’re constructed to maximize revenue. Geography, in many cities, feels irrelevant. And I wonder how much this has to do with the fact that home-field advantage in the NFL appears to be vanishing. Part of the experience of going to a game used to be in the visit from the suburbs to the big city. Why do it in reverse? Why spend a thousand dollars to get all fired up to spend the afternoon at the high-class equivalent of an Applebee’s? Shouldn’t the name on the uniform be a central part of the experience, even if that city is complex and frustrating and problematic?
V.
On Monday night at Levi’s Stadium, the 49ers will host the New York Jets, another team that has borrowed the name of a city that it does not actually play in. The 49ers went 12-5 last season, and 5-3 at home; since they moved to Levi’s Stadium, they are not an appreciably better team at home than they are on the road.
This is the choice the 49ers made a decade ago. They wanted an association with the city without having to take on any of its problems. And I suppose this is part of what makes pro football so fascinating: It is one of the few unifying forces remaining in American life—it draws intense interest in the city and in the suburbs, and in pretty much every corner of the country—and yet it is contested in these gilded stadiums that are entirely removed from reality. Instead, I will be watching this game on television from San Francisco—a city that is fascinating, beautiful, and troubled—and I will know that this is where I belong.
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SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles and Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, like AT&T Stadium in Dallas, strike me as the ultimate in Trump Tower-ish nouveau-riche bullshit. I’m sure Seattle is fine, but I find the whole 12th Man thing insufferable, given that the place isn’t as loud as 90 percent of the stadiums in the Southeastern Conference. Cleveland and Pittsburgh’s stadiums are decent, but only because those cities have souls.
I will quibble that I like the location of Ford Field (unless the entire city of Detroit is a disqualifier), but in large part you're correct about the horrible locations of NFL stadiums sapping the life out of the experience they're supposed to create. There are the NFL die-hards that will sit all day outside waiting for a game to start, but normal (casual) people have no interest in going to a big ugly building surrounded by bigger, uglier, parking lots. Generally, if a stadium does not have a parking lot of significant size anywhere in its vicinity, that means it's been placed well.
The NFL teams will probably be fine, because the stadium experience is not what that league is really about anymore, but looking at smaller leagues like the NHL and MLS, poorly placed stadiums are literally killing teams (just for example, the Ottawa Senators stand a serious chance of moving for this exact reason, and the Phoenix Coyotes just did move for this reason). These soulless suburban buildings create soulless suburban environments, and who would want any part of that? In smaller leagues where gate revenue is still a bigger part of the equation, this will seriously hurt the bottom line.
Teams should make attempts to work a little harder with the cities they represent to put their buildings in better locations, because regular humans don't want to drive 40+ mins out of the city to some big parking lot somewhere. Allowing people to simply walk (or take a train, or anything that isn't driving) to the games will bring the identity of the city back into their teams, by allowing locals to actually see these games, which is why I brought up Ford Field earlier. It's a very easy place to get to, which I think is an underrated reason why that team actually feels like it represents Detroit. Again, to the money hungry corporate NFL owner types, they probably don't care about this, but if you're an owner in a smaller league, it can be (and just was in Phoenix) the difference between life and death.
Wasn't part of the problem that forced the 49ers into Santa Clara was that there was no viable options to build in San Francisco?