Abstract
Economic development practitioners often chase the next great idea to grow their economy, especially their downtowns. A project that many large cities have looked to as a panacea is the sports stadium. Smaller, mid-sized cities have also joined the stadium craze by poaching Minor League Baseball (MiLB) teams via flashy downtown stadium developments, often using the same playbook that large cities have employed.
Recently, the City of Wichita, Kansas, undertook a minor league stadium project as an economic development strategy. This paper uses an urban regime theory lens to track the political deal-making and financial engineering that made it possible for Wichita to lure the “Baby Cakes” MiLB team from New Orleans.
This study demonstrates that mid-sized cities use the same backroom deal-making perfected by their larger peers to push a fragile form of development that frequently makes minimal economic sense.
Read the Full Paper in the Journal of Urban Affairs →