Phoenix had bet big on a massive convention center expansion and city-owned hotel. The initial results did not bear out consultant forecasts or city expectations. Yet Phoenix’s investment in tripling the size of its center proved remarkably effective ammunition for the small group of industry consultants, including PriceWaterhouseCoopers and HVS. They were now in a position to tell any number of other cities that the Phoenix expansion posed a direct competitive threat to them.
Impressive and expensive as the Phoenix Convention Center expansion was, it was by no means unique or unusual. Vancouver, British Columbia, opened a major center expansion just a couple of months after Phoenix, and Daytona Beach, Florida, had opened its own expanded Ocean Center shortly before. Raleigh, North Carolina, opened an entirely new center in September 2008, followed in June 2009 by the new Lancaster County Convention Center in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The first few months of 2011 saw convention center expansions open in Indianapolis and Philadelphia, with construction under way on new centers in Cleveland and Nashville. During 2011 and 2012 plans were under way for center expansions in Boston, Miami Beach, Detroit, Anaheim, San Antonio, Oklahoma City, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers, having recommended that Phoenix expand in part to keep up with the competition, could report to San Diego officials in December 2007 that “Upon completion of its expansion, exhibit space at the Phoenix Convention Center will exceed that of the SDCC, thereby lowering San Diego’s rank to seventh among the Western centers.”30
For convention center consulting firm Conventions, Sports & Leisure, founded in 1988 by the former heads of Coopers & Lybrand’s convention center practice, the bigger new Phoenix Convention Center also neatly functioned as an argument and foil. The CSL firm could argue, in a November 2010 presentation to Boston convention center managers and supporters, that Phoenix had “nearly tripled the size” of its center, complementing it with a “downtown entertainment complex that consists of the U.S. Airways Center, Chase Field, Symphony Hall, Science Center, etc.”
The firm also pointed to the Phoenix expansion as a competitor for San Antonio’s Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in a study in July 2008. CSL reported that the expansion was due to open in late 2008, and that “340,000 estimated room nights have already been booked for 2009.” In an updated study for San Antonio in December 2010, CSL again pointed to the opening of the expanded Phoenix center, and an expansion of Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Convention Center—also a CSL client—due to open in 2011, noting that the San Antonio center’s “exhibit space continues to rank very low relative to the centers reviewed.” The CSL firm had completed a “market demand analysis” for the New Orleans Morial Convention Center in February 2009 that noted the increased competition from the expanded Phoenix Center. It also described the more than 1.1 million square feet of new center exhibit space being planned in cities such as Boston, Miami Beach, Detroit, San Antonio, Las Vegas, and Anaheim—all also CSL clients, all advised of the growing competition from new and expanded convention centers in other cities, and all advised to add more space or improved facilities.31
The CSL consultants managed to tell a wide array of city clients that they were facing a growing stock of competitive convention center space. The firm also managed to tell some cities an additional tale—that beyond the need for more exhibit space, a new ballroom, or more meeting rooms, they needed a very large new “headquarters hotel.” A series of CSL studies in 2007-2011 presented the need for a thousand-room headquarters hotel adjacent to Kansas City’s convention center. A CSL analysis had argued the case for a 1,200-room hotel to serve the Washington, D.C., Convention Center in 2004. And in studies for Boston and San Diego in 2009 and 2010, CSL could point to both the Phoenix Convention Center expansion and the adjacent Sheraton and recommend that each of those cities expand and add a headquarters hotel.
The argument that growing competition requires more public spending on more convention center space—bigger, newer, enhanced with the latest technology—has helped sustain a massive boom in convention facilities. From just 193 centers with at least 25,000 square feet of exhibit space in 1986, the U.S. convention center count reached 254 by 1996 and 325 in 2010.
As the number of convention centers grew, so did the stock of exhibit hall space. That total, 32.5 million square feet in 1986, hit 49.1 million in 1996 66.8 million square feet in 2006, and 70.5 million in 2011. Thus over two and a half decades, available space in U.S. convention facilities more than doubled. And with new centers under construction in places as diverse as Cleveland, Nashville, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the total will inevitably continue to grow.32
The convention center building boom has been remarkable not just for its scale. New and expanded centers cover a wide array of urban and suburban communities, across all geographic regions and city-size categories. Major visitor destination cities have committed substantial public revenues to center development. Chicago’s McCormick Place, with a total of 1.8 million square feet of space in 1986, developed a major addition in the mid-1990s that brought the complex to 2.2 million square feet; another expansion, adding 470,000 square feet, opened in July 2007. Las Vegas doubled the size of its center over these two decades, to 1.94 million square feet in early 2002. And Orlando’s Orange County Convention Center, which covered just 180,000 square feet in 1986, reached 2.05 million square feet in late 2003, fueled by the growing river of revenues from a tax on the county’s more than 100,000 hotel rooms.
Many growing Sunbelt cities have also chosen to invest in ever larger and more expansive convention centers, much as Phoenix did. Dallas expanded its center steadily through the 1990s, reaching over one million square feet of exhibit space in 2002. Houston added 420,000 square feet of space, almost doubling the size of the George R. Brown Convention Center, in November 2003. Two years earlier, San Antonio had opened an expansion of its Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center that doubled its size.
While the total center space has been boosted by the growth of very large centers in places like Chicago, Las Vegas, and Orlando, a broad array of cities now also boast up-to-date convention facilities intended to lure the proverbially lucrative meeting and tradeshow business. In California, the Ontario Convention Center opened in late 1997, San Jose’s new McEnery Convention Center in 1989, and Sacramento’s expanded center in 1996. Denver’s Colorado Convention Center opened for business in 1990 and was doubled in size in 2004. Hartford’s new Connecticut Convention Center began operation in 2005, the Rhode Island Convention Center in Providence in 1993, and the new Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in 2004.
The Baltimore Convention Center was expanded to more than double its original size in 1997, and entirely new centers have opened in Ocean City, Maryland; Richmond, Hampton, and Virginia Beach, Virginia. In the Midwest, the new Greater Columbus Convention Center opened its doors in 1993, Cincinnati completed a major expansion of its Duke Energy Center in 2006, and Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Grand Rapids, Michigan, are home to newly expanded centers as of 2005. Branson, Missouri, opened its new center in 2007 and Peoria, Illinois, completed an expansion the same year. The Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis has also seen a series of expansions—in 1993, 2001, and most recently early 2011.
The convention center building boom has not been limited to central cities. Suburban communities have also sought their share of the visitor activity and economic impact promised by convention center backers. Overland Park, Kansas, a Kansas City suburb, opened its new convention center and publicly financed hotel in 2002, and Chicago suburb Schaumburg, Illinois, opened a new convention center and an adjacent publicly owned hotel in 2006. Also in suburban Chicago, Rosemont’s Donald Stephens Convention Center more than doubled in size from 1986 to 2001, to 845,000 square feet of exhibit space. The suburban Atlanta area includes the Cobb Galleria Center, the North Atlanta Trade Center, the Georgia International Convention Center (near Hartsfield-Jackson Airport), and the Gwinnett Center in Duluth.
The contemporary convention center building boom is in many ways a dual triumph of politics and finance. Convention centers and expansions are major public investments, commonly in hundreds of millions of dollars. They most