The District Creates the Value

At Bisnow’s recent Sports, Entertainment and Retail Summit in Schaumburg, Illinois, Aria’s Shannon Sterne joined a panel alongside industry leaders including Scott McCubbrey (Marquee Development), Molly Phelan (Siegel Jennings), Andrew Totten (McHugh Construction), Grace Rappe (HDR), and Moderator Steve Eskildsen (Mortenson). The conversation centered on what it takes to create sports, entertainment, and retail districts that work beyond the main event. 

From Aria’s perspective, the sport may be the anchor, but the surrounding experience is what gives people a reason to stay, spend, and return.  A successful sports-anchored district can’t rely on gameday attendance alone. It has to create daily relevance. 

In many sports developments, the stadium gets the attention while the spaces around it are treated as support. That approach limits both the guest experience and the long-term value of the project. 

The venues around the stadium aren’t secondary — they’re where the revenue comes from outside the event. Food and beverage venues, social spaces, patios, premium areas, private event rooms, family-friendly zones, and public plazas are what bring people in and keep them coming back. A guest may come for the game, but they remember where they had dinner, where they met friends, where their kids could move around, and where they can come back for a weeknight dinner.

That thinking runs through Aria’s work across hospitality and entertainment destinations, including Flight Club, Topgolf, and Yard 99, an entertainment district joining the Valley Ranch Town Center development in New Caney, TX. The strongest destinations aren’t built around a single moment of use. They’re designed to be multi-faceted spaces that facilitate community. 

F&B is no longer a supporting element of sports and entertainment districts. It is central to the fan experience and one of the strongest drivers of non-event revenue. The best F&B environments can absorb game-day volume and still feel like a great restaurant, bar, patio, or social space on an off-season Tuesday night. That takes venues with their own identity and daily-use appeal. They have to connect to the sidewalk, plaza, or public realm, and they need zones that open and close with demand — energetic when the place is packed, comfortable when it’s not. 

The stadium creates the first visit. Strong F&B creates the next one.

“365-day venue” gets said a lot, but real flexibility isn’t about making a space look adaptable on a plan. It has to work physically, operationally, and experientially. An event space can be labeled multi-use and still need the right storage, kitchen access, bar capacity, lighting, acoustics, and security strategy. A plaza can look strong in a rendering, but it still needs shade, power, furniture, lighting, and infrastructure to support a wide range of programming. 

The real test is whether the space can feel active with 50 people and still function with 500. These are difficult and expensive problems to solve after the fact, so they have to be designed in from the start.

People come for the event. What stays with them is everything around it — where they gathered, what they ate, how the place felt, and whether it gave them a reason to come back. That’s where hospitality design does its work. It connects the stadium to the guest, the event to the memory, and the district to the neighborhood. Done well, a sports-anchored development becomes more than a place to hold an event. It becomes a destination with a daily life of its own. 

The district is not extra. The district creates the value.