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Comment by raldi | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, having the stadium built in SF was arguably the primary catalyst in the transformation of SOMA from an underused-warehouse district to the new tech epicenter of the world, stealing Silicon Valley's fire in a way previously thought impossible.

If the stadium had been built in the south bay, SF might today be saying, "Whew, we really dodged a bullet there", and meanwhile Twitter and Dropbox and Uber and Airbnb would all be headquartered in Santa Clara county and giving them all their employees' tax revenue.

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Well we have a comparison here, right? Levi's Stadium, where the 49ers play, was built in the South Bay. I wouldn't say that Levi's Stadium sparked a major transformation in the area even after being open nearly 8 years now. Usually the opinion is that Levi's is (relatively) in the middle of nowhere.

I'm not arguing that you can plop a stadium down anywhere and be assured of an entire industry swooping in to cluster around it; I'm arguing that in some situations (particularly the transit-rich urban shells of former industrial/pier/warehouse areas) a stadium can be the catalyst that breaks through the chicken-and-egg barrier and unleashes the neighborhood's latent potential.

The area around Levi's Stadium didn't really have much latent potential waiting to be unleashed.

SOMA would have developed regardless, and it is nonsense to suggest tech companies want to locate near baseball stadiums.

I never said tech companies want to be near baseball stadiums.

Rather (like in Baltimore and San Diego), the new stadium revitalized a neighborhood whose original reason for being had mostly dried up, bringing enough business to support the (re)emergence of nearby restaurants and other amenities, and those investments in the neighborhood made it an attractive place to have offices that eventually became the new primary source of support for the restaurants, condos, hotel, etc.

The stadium was what broke the neighborhood out of the chicken-and-egg quandary.

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