Forgotten article where Spurs promise development on San Antonio's East Side recirculates on social media

A Spurs game transpires at the SBC Center, the arena since renamed Frost Bank Center. Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Henry Camacho

A 23-year-old article in which then-Spurs Chairman Peter Holt said he was “dedicated” to bringing economic development to the East Side is making the rounds on social media.

In the piece, San Antonio Business Journal reporter W. Scott Bailey wrote that even though the economic development that San Antonio leaders promised never sprouted up around the Alamodome, things would be different when it came to the Spurs’ then-new arena, the SBC Center.

“We learned a lot of lessons from the Alamodome,” Holt told SABJ’s Bailey. “We have purposefully tried not to over-promise. People’s hopes do get raised. We can’t change this neighborhood overnight. However, there is the beginning of some momentum here. Now we have to keep it going.”

The October 2022 article went to print a few weeks before the SBC Center — now known as the Frost Bank Center — opened on East Side. At the time, Holt gushed optimistically about the future of the 170 acres around the arena.

“There’s a lot we can do there,” said Holt, whose son Peter J. Holt now chairs the Spurs organization. “Freeman Coliseum is something we’re going to have to keep working on.”

Indeed, a finalized 2003 community plan for the land surrounding the Spurs’ current home featured $250 million in projects spread across the 8 square miles surrounding the basketball arena. The plan included a district with interconnected parks along with a new town center full of shops and restaurants, all anchored by the new arena.

Sound familiar?

Obviously, those plans never came to fruition. And that’s led activists to recirculate the decades-old SABJ article online as a warning about Project Marvel, the proposed $4 billion sports-and-entertainment district the Spurs hope to build at Hemisfair, anchored by a new arena for the team.

“All this bs about building yet another arena, go fulfill the promises to the Eastside,” Instagram user @vampora commented on an image of the original SABJ article posted on social media by local activist Kathy Vale.

According to old contracts about the proposed East Side development reviewed by the San Antonio Report earlier this year, development around the arena never came about because the contracts never legally bound Spurs Sports & Entertainment to do anything other than pay the county back for a portion of its own facility.

Project Marvel opponents argue the current term sheet between the city and the Spurs has similar loopholes when it comes to requiring the team bankroll development.

A political advertisement sent to Bexar County residents by San Antonio Spurs LLC last month states that the NBA franchise will invest $2.1 billion in economic development surrounding the new arena.

However, Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College and one of the nation’s leading experts in sports and entertainment districts, raised concerns in comments to the Current about just how much wiggle room local leaders have given the Spurs.

“What kind of commitment do the Spurs actually have to go through with this?” Zimbalist asked, rhetorically. “Will the Spurs down the road say, ‘Oh well, we were going to go through with it, but … Donald Trump messed up the economy and we can’t go forward?’ What if there’s some kind of natural disaster, so they can’t come up with it, or they come up with some other reason and say [they] need some additional incentives from the city?”

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Forgotten article where Spurs promise development on San Antonio’s East Side recirculates on social media

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