Indianapolis and Indiana plan to give the team money to build a stadium-village.
Here we go again, another city, another state will be propping up a stadium-village concept, this time in Indianapolis for a second tier or minor league soccer team. The Indy 11 United Soccer League franchise will have a new stadium, if all goes according to plan, in 2025. It will be a 20,000-seat facility in an 18-acre area and the project will cost more than a billion dollars. The venue probably would be good enough to use in Major League Soccer, a circuit that according to its commissioner, Don Garber, needs to get bigger. The stadium will be the center of a project called Eleven Park that will include more than 600 apartments, 205,000 square feet of office space, 197,000 square feet for retail space and restaurants, parking garages, a hotel, and public plazas with green space. The concept for retail space is a selling point of the stadium-village plan but malls around the country are dying and some malls are suffering from enormous debt. Still the stadium or arena-village plan always calls for retail space.
The Indy 11 franchise owner Ersal Ozdemir is of the opinion that Eleven Park is going to be an economic game changer for Indianapolis. But he is taking Indianapolis and Indiana public funding and tax breaks to build the stadium village because private developers cannot afford the tab. “Eleven Park will not only change the skyline of Indianapolis, but will add over a thousand jobs, have a huge economic impact, create quality of life benefits and attract talent and opportunities to our city and state. Our goal for Eleven Park is to continue the city’s tradition of using sports as a business driver for Indiana by increasing Indianapolis’ profile as a global city and showcasing the world’s most popular sport.” Indianapolis has the Indy 500 which is known globally.
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