Do the Tsais have their eyes on Site 5 for "hotels and restaurants"? Well, NY State has already endorsed a large hotel there, but it needs public approval.

Last week Bloomberg published a predictably reverential article, With the New York Liberty, Clara Wu Tsai Aims for the First $1 Billion Women’s Sports Franchise, which repeats the lore about the Tsais' (Clara and husband Joe Tsai, the Alibaba billionaire) savvy willingness to spend big, beyond the WNBA's salary cap, to make it a magnet for stars, and rebuild the fan base.

The article also states, "They also bought the Nets’ home arena, the Barclays Center." Not quite. They own the operating company. The fig leaf of public ownership allows for a tax-exempt site and tax-exempt financing.

Hotels and restaurants to help Brooklyn?

From the article:

Through the Liberty and Nets’ parent company, BSE Global, meanwhile, the Tsais are planning a major development initiative in the traffic-clogged area around Barclays. Adding hotels and restaurants, Wu Tsai says, will help draw more fans for the Liberty and Nets while also benefiting Brooklyn more broadly: Only a fraction of New York City’s 63 million annual tourists ever set foot in the borough.

That sounds so eleemosynary. As a tourism professional in my other career, I've seen Brooklyn do pretty well attracting visitors, and I'm not sure a new hotel or restaurant near the arena would move the needle more for the borough as opposed to, say BSE Global.

There are tons of restaurants, plus numerous new hotels, in Downtown Brooklyn and environs. See hotel map below. 

Screenshot from Google Maps. Barclays Center bottom right.

The BSE value proposition

Yes, Brooklyn does lack a flagship hotel close to the arena. The largest is the New York Marriott at Brooklyn Bridge. So a new hotel near Atlantic and Flatbush avenues would make sense as a magnet for both high rollers and even visiting teams and performers.

I'm not sure if "hotels" is just rhetoric, but if the Tsais wanted multiple hotels, the first step, I suspect, would be to buy and brand an existing one.

The next step would be to build one. There are, perhaps, a few development sites in Downtown Brooklyn or along Fourth Avenue near the arena.

However, the obvious location would be Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Site 5, the parcel catercorner from the arena, longtime home to big-box stores P.C. Richard and the now-closed Modell's.

That was approved in 2006 as a 250-foot tower with about 440,000 square feet. In 2015-16, developer Greenland USA began the process to move the unbuilt bulk of the flagship tower B1 (aka "Miss Brooklyn"), once slated to loom over the arena, across Flatbush Avenue to create a giant, two-tower complex.

As I wrote in October, BSE Global may envision a hotel and/or conference center at Site 5, for which Greenland in 2021 got support from state officials for an even larger complex, with a 550-room hotel as part of a two-tower complex. 

 

(Previously, a smaller hotel, with 180 rooms, was contemplated as part of the flagship tower, B1, which won't be built.)

If so, the Site 5 project won't be built immediately. It could take at least a year for the public approval process before construction at Site 5. 

And BSE Global would have to partner with Greenland, or its successor, which likely would be building a residential project in the larger of the two towers.

 

New focus

A hotel across the street would not only become the location of choice for visiting teams, performers, and high-roller visitors.

 

The parcel could include a large restaurant (or restaurants), thus funneling revenue to the Tsais, and boast valuable neon signage, again bolstering BSE as much as "Brooklyn."

Doing all this also would "preserve" the temporary arena plaza, a huge gift to the arena operator, since it serves as a place for crowds to gather, as well as a canvas for advertising and promotion. 

That, as I've argued, is a privilege for which the Tsais should pay, not only for the emerging benefit but because they, along with previous team/ArenaCo owner Mikhail Prokhorov, have been the project's big winners.