Downtown Salt Lake City is home to two major league sports teams: The Utah Jazz and the Utah Mammoth. Both are owned by the Smith Entertainment Group.
SEG also has big plans to invest heavily in the downtown core with what the city calls a “sports, entertainment, culture and convention district.” It spans from 500 West all the way to West Temple and contains the Delta Center, Salt Palace Convention Center and The Gateway shopping center.
Part of the deal to lure the NHL to Utah and keep pro sports in Salt Lake City included $1 billion in public funding through a city sales tax increase. It was written into a 2024 state law that created the framework for the district and effectively mandated the tax increase.
The money will go toward the renovation of the Delta Center for dual hockey and basketball use and other projects related to the district. The total cost of the work could be in the billions.
Since then, questions have been raised about the economic benefits pro sports teams have on their surrounding communities — namely, are the supposed benefits worth the public cost?
Unfortunately for Salt Lake City, the research points toward pro sports having little positive economic benefit.
According to a 2022 analysis of research and data on North American pro sports that goes back to the 1960s, the presence of a team has “little to no tangible impacts” on the local economy, and the level of public subsidies for those projects “far exceeds any observed economic benefits.” Still, some Utah experts, like University of Utah Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute Director Natalie Gochnour, think Salt Lake City is in a prime position nonetheless.
“Pro sports are a powerful tool because of their singularity,” she said. “Essentially, a major metro like Salt Lake City will only secure one NBA franchise, and so a downtown NBA franchise will not have to compete with the suburbs. The same holds true for other professional sports.”
In short, Gochnour believes Salt Lake City is in a different position than many other pro sports cities. Since there is no other metro area in the state that comes close to Salt Lake’s sports and entertainment offerings, there’s less competition for downtown businesses and more opportunities for economic growth.
The same can’t be said for shopping centers or office buildings, which can — and often do — spring up in the urban cores of many cities.
Gochnour even told city councilors at a May 13 meeting that pro sports could be the city’s economic secret weapon.
“I think [the city’s] most powerful tool to reinvest in your downtown is professional sports,” she said. “And I believe that because it's a monopoly, nobody else has it.”
The inaugural season of NHL hockey in Utah proved to be popular. Another factor that could work in the city’s favor is the density of downtown. The Delta Center is only three city blocks from Main Street and the city’s economic core.
Speaking at the State of Downtown event on May 22, Mayor Erin Mendenhall said the urban center is “not just about business.”
“It's a place where people want to live and work and visit and eat and play and shop and have fun here,” she said. “Downtown Salt Lake City is a place where you can leave your office at 5 p.m. and you can be at the ballet or the symphony or the opera or an art museum or concert or bar or restaurant by 5:15.”
Mendenhall called the greater sports district project “a vision that will transform our downtown for years.”
Recent economic trends — tariffs and a potential recession notwithstanding — are in the city’s favor. According to data compiled by the Salt Lake City Downtown Alliance, discretionary spending in food & drink, accommodation and arts, entertainment and recreation has fully recovered from the pandemic and is at record levels.
For Gochnour, investing in sports is a unique way for the city to resist market forces that can pull people, jobs and other economic drivers elsewhere.
“In order to keep a vibrant core, community leaders must find amenities that bring activity and money back to the urban center,” she said. “The triad of sports, entertainment, and culture is the best amenity because each region, except for the very largest like LA, will only have one Broadway theater, one NHL franchise, one natural history museum, and so on. These amenities bring vibrancy to the core and prevent urban decline.”
And Utah is not done with pro sports yet. The city still hopes to land a major league baseball team in the coming years.
