Suburban stadium/arena interest a function of new, younger generations of ownership or a better real estate play?

With a couple of exceptions -- Atlanta Braves to suburban Cobb County, the San Francisco 49ers to Santa Clara, 42 miles from the SF City Hall, and the Buffalo Bills staying in the suburbs outside of Buffalo -- most stadium/arena rebuilding efforts tend to be focused on urban locations, if not necessarily the center city per se, at least in Los Angeles where an NFL stadium and a forthcoming NBA arena are in urban places, but outside of LA proper.

-- "Framework of characteristics that support successful community development in association with the development of professional sports facilities," 2021

The Oakland A's are moving to a more central Las Vegas location, the Tampa Bay Rays to another location in center city St. Petersburg, the Philadelphia 76ers want to move to the heart of Downtown Philadelphia, the Kansas City Royals want to move Downtown from their more suburban location, the Golden State Warriors moved to San Francisco, etc.

That's why I find what's happening in Salt Lake City so interesting as it is counter to these trends.  

(The Larry H. Miller Company) The Salt Lake Bees broke ground on a new stadium in South Jordan's Daybreak neighborhood on Thursday, Oct. 19, 2023. The Triple-A team has released the first renderings of the Bees' new home.

First, earlier this year it was announced that the minor league baseball team Bees will be moving to Daybreak in Draper, 21 miles from Salt Lake City ("Salt Lake Bees break ground on new 2025 Downtown Daybreak ballpark," Ballpark Digest).

A residential community in Daybreak.

But that's because the team owner is a major real estate developer, with big holdings in Draper, and they figure a minor league team can activate the area, even though it never did in the Ballpark neighborhood of SLC 

So the empty land around the stadium as shown in the rendering is a feature, not a bug ("Take a look at the first designs for the Salt Lake Bees’ new Daybreak stadium," Salt Lake Tribune).

Second, Ryan Smith, the new owner of the NBA Jazz, a reasonably young 46 years old guy wealthy from Internet application firm Qualtrics, is talking not only about trying to get a hockey team even though the SLC market is pretty small ("Jazz Owner Ryan Smith Talks NHL, Future Of Utah Sports," KSL), but moving out to the suburbs as well, following the Bees, maybe to Draper as well ("Would Fans Support Jazz Move Out Of Downtown?," KSL, "Salt Lake City is ‘working hard’ to keep the Utah Jazz downtown, city leaders say. What happens next?," Salt Lake Tribune).  

Smith also bought the Real Salt Lake soccer team which is headquartered in suburban Sandy.

Part of the attraction is being closer to Utah County, which is fast growing, 800,000 residents to Salt Lake County's 1.2 million.  But it's also the location of the state's "Silicon Slopes," the home to companies owned by people like Smith.

Suburban mentality?  I wonder if in part this is a function of next generation team owners and executives who weren't party to the lessons that teams learned after moving to the suburbs, that the locations weren't that great, leading them to return to the city.

But also that cities are better places to win subsidies ("The Baseball Stadium That “Forever Changed” Professional Sports," The Ringer).

Real estate play.  But it's also about the opportunity for complementary real estate development.  This isn't new, but the problem with urban locations is the inability to monetize proximate real estate, because it's already owned by other parties.

The Guardian has a good article about this, "‘The stadium is secondary’: how US sports teams became real-estate speculators."  Maybe it's better for team owners to make more money from ancillary real estate that they control, than it is to generate day of game ticket revenues.  From the article:

... More than ever, sports franchises are a real-estate play as owners seek to stimulate revenues amid escalating costs in a period of high inflation. 

Mixed-use developments where people can live, work, shop, dine, drink and play have become ubiquitous as teams seek to squeeze as much profit as possible from their land. The old paradigm was to build a new stadium with high-end facilities inside to cater to the corporate set, boosting matchday income and attracting showpiece events such as Super Bowls, World Cup games and blockbuster concerts by stars like Swift. 

Now teams also want to dictate how dollars are spent each day in the streets around their venues, a trend turning billionaire sports owners into influential city planners.

... Kroenke financed his plans privately, but pledging to revitalize a neighborhood with projects that typically include public green spaces makes giving financial incentives such as tax breaks or covering infrastructure improvements more palatable to municipal leaders and voters who might be wary of handing subsidies worth potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to billionaires.

A problem with this is that the beneficiaries of such "investment" are increasingly just a few players, the team owners.