An arena and a campus where 50,000 people work every day are hugely different things. An arena might create a need for some bars and restaurants for the people who use the arena, but not much else. A campus like that creates a need for bars, restaurants, coffee shops, grocery stores, hardware stores, not to mention enough residential density to allow people to live near work. Basically, it creates a demand for everything. You can go to a hockey game without eating at the restaurant next to the arena, but if you want to live near work (and people do), you can't avoid buying things to support your life.
That demand far outstrips the value of the surrounding real estate. Said real estate gets bought up and turned into malls, apartment buildings and other facilities to house businesses that will service the people who work at the campus.
__________________
"The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
|