and Philadelphia had opened major convention center expansions in 2011, each armed with consultant forecasts that they would see a sizable boost in convention attendance and resulting hotel demand.12
It would appear highly unlikely—indeed implausible—that each of these cities would see its convention attendance effectively double. With overall national convention and tradeshow attendance still depressed as a result of the “Great Recession” and economic restructuring, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Diego, Cleveland—and others like Miami Beach, Dallas, and San Francisco—would be able to increase attendance only by attracting events and people away from their competitors. And those competing cities would be unlikely to stand still and simply accept losing convention business. Communities such as Las Vegas and Orlando, Anaheim and Washington, supported by regular streams of public revenues fueled by visitors, would themselves respond by investing in more convention space and hotel rooms.
After the public promises of new spending, economic impact, job creation, and development often comes a reality that is rather different. City after city builds a big new center, only to realize little or no new convention activity and see no real job creation. The big new hotel that was supposed to be a direct product of the public investment in a convention center simply doesn’t appear. The promised economic impact is often missing or minimal. Yet that apparent failure—the center that sees half or a third of the attendance projected by a consultant, the convention venue that is obliged to give away its space, the tradeshow mecca that largely attracts local or drive-in attendees—invariably yields a call for more space, an adjacent hotel, or a new “entertainment district” that will propel the city into the front rank of convention destinations.
The “arms race” that has propelled this massive expansion in convention center space over the last two decades has been fueled by a dramatic change in convention center financing. During the 1950s, 1960s, and into the 1970s, new convention center proposals generally had to run the gauntlet of voter review and approval. But by the 1980s state and local governments were able to adopt new financing and development mechanisms that effectively insulated center plans from local voters. The shift to public authorities or state governments from general purpose local governments, and from general taxes to dedicated visitor-based revenues, also put the choice to invest in a massive convention facility in the hands of business interests usually focused on sustaining and boosting property values and development prospects in the downtown core. The result has been to privilege convention center spending over other, alternative public investments.
At the same period as convention center finance was being reshaped and eased, the arguments and rationale for convention facilities as major sources of economic development and job creation were gaining wider visibility. The same consultant who assured Chicago and Illinois officials of the benefits from a larger McCormick Place, Charles H. Johnson, had provided much the same advice earlier to St. Louis. He would go on to offer a justification and set of forecasts for new convention centers in Charlotte, and Richmond, a bigger one in Austin, and one in Boston. The same consulting firm that advised the Georgia World Congress Center Authority on expansion in the mid-1990s would provide remarkably parallel advice and economic impact forecasts to Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and New York City. The consistent finding was that more space would bring more business, and more jobs.
Much as consultant forecasts of demand and center performance have proven faulty, the basic assumptions about convention and tradeshow attendees, their visitation and spending patterns, have proved unrealistic. Consultants and convention center backers have routinely assumed that convention attendees stay in a city some 3.5 days, with attendees assumed to come from out of town. Yet convention and tradeshow events often draw a substantial volume of local attendees, or those who simply visit for the day. In 2009, more than half the convention and tradeshow attendance at New York’s Javits Center (excluding events like the New York Auto Show or similar public shows) was made up of “day-trippers” or other local attendees. Or take the case of one of the largest annual events at Orlando’s Orange County Convention Center, the PGA Merchandise Show for the golfing industry. For the 2008 edition, 31 percent of the attendees came from Florida—many of whom likely just attended for the day. And one measure of that phenomenon is the volume of hotel room nights used by PGA show attendees. The 43,000 estimated attendees actually booked only 29,178 room nights—rather less than three, or even two, room nights per attendee. With more day-trippers and fewer out-of-town attendees, the economic impact produced by centers like these, and others, is actually far more modest than backers claim.13
Even as convention center building has boomed in American cities, these centers have proved remarkably unproductive as public investments, failing to provide the benefits that justify their construction. Yet even in the face of failure—a new center in Boston generating less than half the hotel room nights promised by consultants, an expanded center in downtown Atlanta yielding fewer convention attendees in fiscal year 2010 than it saw in 1989—local officials and consultants continue to argue for more space and more building. Why are center consultants not held to account for their forecast errors? How is it that these failed public projects are followed not by expressions of outrage and apology, but by calls for even more? Why is it that governors and mayors, business and civic leaders, have promoted, built, and continue to call for more convention center spending, in the face of nonperformance and an evident glut?
Though the phenomenon of the boom in convention center development has been widely recognized, there is no agreement among scholars on its roots and causes, on the interests of the elected officials who sustain it, or the interests of the business and civic leaders behind it. For some academic observers, it represents an unalloyed positive in enhancing the local economy. For others, it is a necessary adaptation to central city decline or the product of political pressures from narrow interests such as hotel owners and developers. Still others point to the existence of business-dominated coalitions or regimes or “growth machines.” Yet all point to the role of local business interests and the organized business community as central to the initiation and promotion of these projects.14
If these academic analyses all point to some—perhaps the most central—role of local business in promoting and supporting convention centers and related public projects, the central paradox of center development remains. Why would business interests—narrowly focused ones such as hotels and restaurants, or broader ones such as department store chains, local utilities, and locally headquartered corporations—embrace public projects that appear to have such a modest and uncertain economic return? And why, when these convention centers produce far less activity than had been forecast and assumed, do supporters invariably call for more space, or a new publicly financed hotel or entertainment district next door? The answers to these questions, and to the fundamental interests and expectations that drive convention center investment, require a focus on local business and business interests, the apparently essential element in pressing and realizing the major public investment in convention centers.
For business leaders like “Cubby” Baer and Leif Sverdrup in St. Louis, the public investment in a new convention center offered the opportunity to remedy “property decay” and provide an “effective barrier against further deterioration.” For Atlanta’s business leaders, a convention venue on an urban renewal site could yield “protection of the Uptown area.” And in these cities and others, a major public investment project would provide development “momentum,” evidence of the public commitment to the downtown core, and a means to be “a big-league city.”
In this context, the dual imperatives of land value reshaping and momentum creation have led many cities to replace one modern convention center with another as the frontier for development and investment opportunity shifted. Thus Washington, D.C., replaced one convention center opened at Mount Vernon Square in 1983 with a far larger one to the north in the Shaw neighborhood, completed in 2003. New Orleans replaced its 1968 Rivergate with the Morial Convention Center in 1985, then expanded the Morial in 1991 and again in 1999. Houston replaced the Albert Thomas Convention Center, opened in 1967, with the new George R. Brown Convention Center on the opposite side of downtown in
