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Smaller, Versatile Concert Halls Step Out of the Shadow of Stadiums
As live entertainment rebounds, developers are using midsize venues to anchor their projects and energize the surrounding neighborhood.
By Amy Zipkin for The New York Times
April 18, 2023
As the summer concert season approaches and marquee acts like Beyoncé, Metallica and Taylor Swift fill stadiums around the country, developers are casting their eye on a smaller type of entertainment venue: the concert hall.
With state-of-the-art design that allows for flexible configurations, these midsize auditoriums can accommodate 1,000 to 6,500 patrons, helping promoters broaden the definition of live entertainment to include concerts, D.J. sets, e-sports and raves, as well as launch parties and trade shows.
The versatility of concert halls has led developers to use them to anchor their projects and energize the surrounding neighborhood, a trend that is revitalizing many moribund markets, said Aaron Jensen, who heads commercial and mixed use at HKS, a design firm.
“The concert venues are part of a broader mix, conveniently located to transit and residences,” he said.
Three miles north of downtown Denver, in a former industrial area known as the River North Art District, acts like Billy Idol and the Roots draw crowds to the Mission Ballroom, a concert hall adorned with psychedelic murals and a gigantic disco ball hovering over the dance floor.
The auditorium, which has a movable stage and can accommodate up to 3,950 guests, is an integral part of North Wynkoop, a complex stretching across three blocks of former warehouses that was redeveloped by Westfield, a Denver developer, and now includes artists’ studios and shopping. Every month, 50,000 visitors go to the Mile High City hot spot.
“The right location, a cultural ethos, brings people,” said Chris Crawford, a senior managing director at Hines, a real estate investment firm that is planning two residential towers in North Wynkoop.
AEG Presents, the operator of the Mission Ballroom, is using it as a blueprint for venues in Atlanta, Boston, Nashville and the Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina. And other concert halls are popping up in cities around the country.
For example, the Anthem, with a capacity of 2,500 to 6,000, is the centerpiece of the Wharf, a waterfront reclamation project in Washington, D.C. YouTube Theater, a 6,000-seat venue, shares a roof with SoFi Stadium, home of the Rams and Chargers, in Los Angeles’s Hollywood Park. And in Anaheim, Calif., the City Council in September approved a $4 billion entertainment district with a 5,700-seat concert hall called ocVIBE, which is expected to break ground this year.
“In the U.S., the top 10 markets like L.A., New York and Chicago are doing more shows than ever, yet the next 40 cities collectively have been adding even more growth — which just shows how much opportunity there is for midsize venue developments,” Jordan Zachary, a co-president of U.S. concerts at Live Nation Entertainment, wrote in an email.
After a bumpy recovery in 2022, when many venues struggled with rapid inflation and labor shortages, live entertainment is expected to rebound this year. Revenue from U.S. events is expected to climb to $65 billion in 2023, from $58 billion last year, according to IBISWorld, a market research firm.
“Artists make money from touring, not recording,” said Armen Shaomian, a professor of sports and entertainment management at the University of South Carolina.
Promoters say concert halls, which cost $50 million to $150 million to build, fill a void in the market between clubs, which can hold up to 1,000 patrons, and arenas, which have a capacity of 5,000 to 20,000.
And many offer features that make them attractive to performers, including spaces with flexible seating for standing or dancing, said John Storyk, the director of design at WSDG, an architectural acoustical and design firm.
Some venues use curtains to camouflage empty space for smaller events. Technology allows for flat or raked seating or a combination that creates levels. Other features include advanced projector techniques, wall videos and lighting and special effects.
And acoustic predictive software allows sound engineers to know how sound behaves. “Engineers often use the first song of a set or an opening act to ‘tune/adjust’ a system in a performance venue,” Mr. Storyk said. “Acoustics can often change dramatically as audience fill up seats, particularly in larger halls.”
And acoustic predictive software allows sound engineers to know how sound behaves. “Engineers often use the first song of a set or an opening act to ‘tune/adjust’ a system in a performance venue,” Mr. Storyk said. “Acoustics can often change dramatically as audience fill up seats, particularly in larger halls.”
“There’s a variety of offerings, reflective of the community,” said Jason Gannon, managing director of SoFi Stadium and Hollywood Park, a former racetrack that now includes retail and office space and a 12-theater cinema.
As part of the contractual agreement to name the theater, YouTube can livestream events. The theater also features an interactive digital wall to showcase YouTube creators and artists and interactive video screens throughout.
E-sports venues require steeper seating to bring fans closer to the action and broadband to interact with devices of a technologically sophisticated fan base, said Larry Miller, the director of the music business program at New York University Steinhardt.
But “frothy pandemic-era forecasts on the sustainability of livestreaming have not panned out,” he said, adding that “2023 is looking like the biggest year ever in touring, and livestreaming has become a rounding error for most acts.”
Developers prefer new construction over old theaters, which pose retrofitting challenges. Acoustics that worked perfectly for opera and musical theater may not work for today’s music, Mr. Storyk said.
In older structures, air-conditioning systems cannot be moved, steel beams on the roof may not accommodate heavier equipment, and loading docks may require expansion, said Ryan Knutson, president of Brown Note Productions in Thornton, Colo., who worked on the Mission Ballroom.
Technological advances can make renovating older theaters a little easier, but the costs can be high, experts say.
“Older buildings are a constant source of repair and maintenance and can get quite expensive,” said Seth Hurwitz, chairman of I.M.P., a concert promoter that operates the Anthem. Even newer facilities require an acoustician to prescribe solutions; the Anthem required soundproofing that cost $3 million, for example.
The latest technology and design features matter to musicians and fans, said Michal Dalal, a research analyst at IBISWorld.
“Companies that offer performers and spectators the best facilities, such as strong acoustics, backstage amenities, private changing rooms, bars, restrooms and catering services, will likely be favored over promoters that provide substandard facilities,” she said.
A correction was made on
April 18, 2023
:
A previous version of this article misstated the location of a planned office building being built by the developer Hines. It will be near the North Wynkoop complex, not in it.
Vertical Farms Expand as Demand for Year-Round Produce Grows
By Amy Zipkin
- April 6, 2022
A recently constructed 95,000-square-foot warehouse in Compton, Calif., ticks off all the boxes for the booming storage industry: 32-foot-high ceilings, a secure truck court and access to truck routes.
But it won’t be used for cargo or storage. Plenty Unlimited, an agricultural start-up, is using the site for an indoor vertical farm, expected to open later this year.
“It’s the ability to put production anywhere without considering climate,” said Arama Kukutai, the company’s chief executive. The lease terms were not disclosed. Vacancy rates in the area are about 0.6 percent, according to Kidder Mathews, a commercial real estate firm on the West Coast.
Plenty Unlimited supplies Albertsons grocery stores with lettuce varieties grown on a smaller-scale farm outside San Francisco. Walmart, an investor, will soon sell Plenty’s produce throughout California. And Plenty has aspirations beyond greens: Last month, it announced plans with Driscoll’s, a berry seller, to develop an indoor farm in the Northeast devoted to strawberries.
At a time when supply chain disruptions continue to slow distribution, consumers embrace healthy eating habits and climate change is expected to affect crop yields, a practice known as controlled-environment agriculture, including indoor vertical farms relying on artificial light and technology, is attracting venture capitalists.
But the industry faces challenges, including high costs for energy, technological limitations and the ability to scale production to keep expenses down.
Agriculture in a controlled environment has been around since the 1970s, said Gene A. Giacomelli, a professor of biosystems engineering at the University of Arizona. What made moving indoors possible was a drop in price in LED lights, which plunged as much as 94 percent in 2015 from 2008.
The term vertical farm was popularized by Dickson Despommier, a professor emeritus of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. Vertical farming is expected to grow to $9.7 billion worldwide by 2026, from $3.1 billion in 2021, according to ResearchAndMarkets.com, a data analysis firm. Pitchbook, a financial data and software company in Seattle, tracked 33 deals worth nearly $960 million in 2021, up from $865 million the year before and $484 million in 2019.
AppHarvest, a greenhouse grower, recently went public via a merger with Novus Capital. And in August, BrightFarms, another greenhouse operator, was acquired by Cox Enterprises in Atlanta.
Scientists caution that technology has limitations, with LED lights, sensors and operating systems adding to utility costs. “They don’t want to be warehouses, they want to be food production facilities,” Professor Giacomelli said. “And food production facilities have never had this kind of money.”
The money is creating demand for warehouse space. Kalera, a vertical farm company based in Orlando, Fla., harvests greens and culinary herbs there and in Houston and Atlanta. Farms in Denver, Seattle, Honolulu and St. Paul are opening later this year, and one in Columbus, Ohio, is planned for 2023. Farms are also open in Munich and Kuwait.
Details are hard to come by because the farms closely guard their intellectual property, growing system designs, material and structures.
“Everyone has their own secret sauce,” said Brent de Jong, chairman and chief executive of Agrico Acquisition Corporation, which in January announced a merger with Kalera.
But as long as the building being used as a vertical farm meets height criteria and avoids high utility costs, “there’s no limit where I can put a farm,” said Austin Martin, Kalera’s chief operating officer.
The basic requirements for vertical farm warehouses include access to major highways, a one-day drive to major population centers and an educated work force that understands automation and plant science.
“The factory for leafy greens and micro greens production is similar to a semiconductor factory providing a controlled environment to predictably manufacture on an automated basis its products,” Mr. de Jong said in an email.
Plants are stacked in vertical rows reaching heights of 30 feet or more, said Neil Mattson, a horticulture professor at Cornell. Additional space is reserved for aisles, harvesting and packing, but there are no common metrics or industry standard.
One example of how controlled-environment agriculture is transforming industrial space is evolving in Pennsylvania, which serves markets from Boston to Richmond, Va.
Bowery Farming, which is based in Manhattan, is outfitting a 150,000-square-foot farm on the site of a former steel plant in Bethlehem, Pa., that is scheduled to open in May.
Bowery also has three farms in Kearny, N.J., two of which are for research and development. The third is a commercial operation serving grocers and e-commerce companies in the Northeast. Another facility, in Nottingham, Md., runs on hydroelectric energy. And the company has announced plans to expand near Atlanta and in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
“It’s all about speed to market,” said Hans Tung, a managing partner at GGV Capital, formerly Granite Global Ventures, an investor in Bowery Farming.
Darren Thompson, Bowery’s chief financial officer, said he expected Bowery’s new farms to be similar in size to the one in Bethlehem. “Having too many differences from farm to farm hurts my ability to drive costs,” he said.
The Bethlehem site has heavy power support, sewer and water capacity and fiber-optic cable, said Peter Polt, an executive vice president of J.G. Petrucci Company, which built the shell of the building and office space. “But the tenant outfitted the building for the grow process,” he added.
Developers also request proximity to food distribution centers to save on transportation costs, said Brent Vernon, executive director of the Pennsylvania governor’s action team, which works to bring businesses to the state. And he said state funding and grants are evaluated based on factors including brownfield redevelopment, unemployment rates and the potential for job creation.
Bowery will create and retain at least 70 full-time jobs within the next three years and pledged to invest at least $32 million, Pennsylvania officials said.
Upward Farms, a start-up based in Brooklyn that blends vertical farming with aquaponics and uses fish waste as fertilizer, is building a 250,000-square-foot warehouse on six acres in Luzerne County, Pa., about 100 miles from Manhattan.
Local production is better because it brings leafy greens closer to the retailer and the consumer, said Jason Green, the chief executive and a co-founder of Upward.
Further west, in Selinsgrove, is a 280,000-square-foot greenhouse that belongs to BrightFarms. That company has begun developing five new greenhouses that will be 10 times that size, said Steve Platt, the chief executive of BrightFarms.
Reaching a scale that will be sustainable for businesses may mean expanding the types of crops grown in vertical systems, from leafy greens to vine and fruiting crops, said Russell Redding, the Pennsylvania agriculture secretary. For example, Bowery Farming announced plans to distribute strawberries in limited release in New York.
But some scientists have doubts about the industry’s ability to scale and diversify given the limitations of current technology. Tomatoes take 60 percent more electricity to grow than lettuce, and strawberries take twice that amount, said Bruce Bugbee, director of the Crop Physiology Laboratory of Utah State University in Logan.
“LED lights are about 70 percent, close to their theoretical maximum” of efficiency, he said. The consumer is paying for the energy costs.
Morgan Pattison, president of Solid State Lighting Services in Johnson, Tenn., and an adviser to the Department of Energy, was more blunt. “LED’s are not going to go down much more” in cost, he said. “Where investors are going against physics, they are going to have a hard time.”
Airports Installing Clean Energy
What to do when land is scarce and you are a city with aspirations to become carbon neutral? Turn to a local source of unused land, the airport.
Seeking Space for Solar Farms, Cities Find Room at Their Airports
Airports around the nation are installing solar arrays on unused land, roofs and parking garages, helping them achieve self-sufficiency while also providing power to their communities.
By Amy ZipkinDec. 7, 2021, 9:00 a.m. ET
THE NEW YORK TIMES
When city commissioners in Tallahassee, Fla., passed a resolution in early 2019 to rely exclusively on renewable energy by 2050, one cornerstone was already in place: a 120-acre, 20-megawatt solar farm at Tallahassee International Airport.
The solar arrays had been installed just over a year earlier by a private developer in an effort to combat climate change and curtail emissions. An additional 330 acres producing 42 megawatts came online in late 2019, supplying solar power to more than 100 municipal buildings, including City Hall, the airport terminal and a sewage treatment plant.
“We were thinking we would do less, because land was limited,” said Reese Goad, the Tallahassee city manager. “It’s difficult to find land in an urban setting.” But the airport provided city officials with a parcel of undeveloped land that also allowed for connection to the grid.
As the country considers its carbon footprint and alternative energy sources, the nation’s airports are turning their unused land, roofs and parking garages into solar farms. Twenty percent of public airports have adopted solar power in the last decade, according to a study last year at the University of Colorado.
Despite the interest, challenges still remain: Adoption is limited and varies by location, and officials can encounter environmental and bureaucratic hurdles. But airports are required by law to be financially self-sufficient, and the prospect of earning extra revenue is a powerful draw for governments.
“It’s an addition to the power grid, a revenue generator and energy for the airport itself,” said Peter J. Kirsch, a lawyer at Kaplan, Kirsch & Rockwell in Denver whose practice focuses on regulation and transportation infrastructure. “Airports are enormous users of power, and any effort to rely on renewable energy sources in lieu of traditional carbon-based ones will create a positive community reaction.”
Community solar programs, which allow some utility customers to buy solar power instead of using traditional fossil fuel, are in place at airports in Tallahassee; Tampa, Fla.; and Austin, Texas, among others. At Kennedy International Airport, a planned solar array is expected to be the largest in New York State when it is completed next year. These efforts give renters and those with limited means the ability to shift to clean energy.
Some airports, like San Francisco’s, use municipal bonds to finance the installation of solar farms, but most typically enter into a power purchase agreement with a third-party energy provider, which owns and operates an energy system after it is installed on the airport’s property.
“The government incentivizes development of renewable energy, such as solar and wind, through the use of tax credits and accelerated depreciation,” said Miriam S. Wrobel, a senior managing director at FTI Consulting in San Francisco. “Often, public entities such as airports cannot utilize the tax benefits, so third parties own the assets and sell the energy generated to the airport.”
Prices are locked for 20 to 25 years, but the owner gets paid only when the energy is flowing.
The bid for the Tallahassee project was won by Origis Energy, a Miami firm that offers clean energy storage solutions. Johan Vanhee, Origis’s chief commercial officer, said the airport project was a departure for the company. “We are a wholesale generator of renewable energy,” he said. “Ninety-nine percent of our plants are not on airports.”
But experts say the decreasing price of solar modules and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allocating $25 billion to airports may alter the percentage.
A decade ago, a module alone cost around $2.50 per watt, and now an entire utility-scale photovoltaic system costs around $1 per watt, said David J. Feldman, a senior financial analyst in Washington for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a research center based in Golden, Colo., and funded by the Energy Department.
“Solar costs have come down significantly in the last decade,” said Alicen Kandt, senior engineer at the National Renewable Energy Lab. “It becomes appealing in areas that may seem less than ideal.”
One of those overlooked locations is Maine, where a solar project proposed for Augusta State Airport is expected to provide 7.5 megawatts of capacity, all of it returned to the grid.
“It’s open space, no hazard to anybody, the state owns it, and it helps taxpayers and the environment,” Paul Merrill, a spokesman for Maine’s Department of Transportation, said of the project, which is expected to save the state $6 million over 20 years.
But there is resistance. At a recent city meeting, several elected representatives expressed reservations about the impact the project would have on a city recreation area. Mr. Merrill said the state was working with the city to get approval for a local permit and easement.
And Evergy, the utility that serves Kansas City, Mo., scrapped plans last year for an airport solar array after an engineering study found design problems. A 5-megawatt array was proposed to be built atop a new parking garage, part of a terminal renovation costing $1.5 billion, but the garage is between the air traffic control tower and the runway, and at times glare obscured the view of air traffic controllers.
Now, Brian Platt, the city manager, has more ambitious plans. Approximately 5,000 acres of the 11,000-acre airport are undeveloped, and a feasibility study is underway to see how much can be used for solar arrays. “We’re looking to power the entire city,” he said.
The Federal Aviation Administration provides guidance for evaluating solar technology for airports. In May, the agency streamlined its process evaluating glint and glare, allowing airports to evaluate potential impact to a control tower.
Austin International Airport, which previously installed 84 kilowatts of solar power in the cargo area and 27 kilowatts in the taxi area, recently added more than 6,600 solar panels on a garage roof. Airport officials entered into a 25-year power purchase agreement with the North American subsidiary of the French multinational company Engie when they realized installing solar panels on the roof instead of steel would cost $2.7 million, saving the airport $1.5 million.
“Solar is cheaper than steel,” said Tim Harvey, a customer renewable solutions manager at Austin Energy, the city’s utility, which signed a power purchase agreement with Engie. A separate agreement between Austin Energy and the airport allocates 300 kilowatts’ worth of renewable energy credits to the airport.
Through a community program, the deal provides power for 425 Austin Energy customers, fewer than 1 percent of the utility’s base. But advocates say size may not be the point.
“Some of the solutions may not provide a large amount of energy but still show a responsibility by the airport to do what they can to mitigate the burning of fossil fuels if they install solar,” said Jorge Barrero, a regional design director in Chicago at HKS, a global design firm based in Dallas.
Happy New Year
What Price–Opting Out
This weekend in The New York Times Magazine Judith Warner, known for her book Perfect Madness Motherhood in an Age of Anxiety writes about a generation of women who want back into the workforce after leaving it a decade ago. Read the rest of this entry »
Why Did She Get Hired?
Didn’t get the job even though you were qualified? Wonder what happened? Perhaps someone else was more qualified. It could just be a case of ” fundamental attribution error. ” The hiring manager may have used erroneous information based on attribution to give the candidate an edge. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: career choice, employee attitudes
What’s the Solution to Bullying in the Workplace?
Certainly there has been no shortage of new books about bullying as Leslie Kaufman recently pointed out in The New York Times . Emily Bazelon’s Sticks and Stones is among them.
Now, Jody Foster, chair of the psychiatry at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia talks to Knowledge at Wharton about the impact of disruptive behavior in the workplace. Knowledge at Wharton about the impact of disruptive behavior in the workplace and what can be done about it.
Tags: bullying, employee attitudes, leadership, management, workplace
The End of Men, The Rise of Women, Not So Clear Cut
When Hanna Rosin first raised the issue of “The End of Men” in The Atlantic in the summer of 2010, it certainly seemed that way. The Great Recession of 2008, was also being called the “Mancession” because of the loss of typically male jobs from construction work to finance. Read the rest of this entry »
Do Quotas Work on Corporate Boards?
Into the debate about women on corporate boards Boris Groysberg has introduced a new dimension. He has found wide differences in opinion about quotas for women on corporate boards of directors. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: corporate executives, employee attitudes, female executives, gender parity, management, work-life balance
