KEY POINTS:
Stop me if you've heard this one. There's a Pacific Rim city that needs to make a decision about a major sports stadium, and soon. Politicians and business leaders are arguing about who will pay for it. Possible sites are being suggested all over the place, until a piece of land on the waterfront, owned by the port company, leaps to the front of the pack.
Welcome to San Francisco in the late 1990s. While they're hardly identical scenarios, the questions facing the city by the bay nearly a decade ago have echoes for the debate gripping Auckland.
The Giants baseball franchise, which moved to San Francisco from New York in 1958, was in danger of being sold to Florida. Such is the commercial nature of American sport that team loyalties are as only as deep as the pockets of the owners and the host city.
But in 1993, local investors led by businessman Peter Magowan rallied at the 11th hour to clinch a deal that kept the Giants in the west.
Part of the deal demanded a new ballpark, to replace the fading glories of windswept Candlestick Park. The search for a new home was on.
"It was a site a week for a while there," recalls San Francisco Chronicle journalist C.W. Nevius. As a former sports reporter who had moved to the paper's city desk, he wrote a series called the Ballpark Chronicles, charting the progress towards a new stadium.
"It was going to be in the train yards, it was going to be in south San Francisco. And at first the space by the waterfront was thought to be too small."
The 5ha they were looking at was in an area known as China Basin, about 3km from the bottom of the city's main drag, Market St.
"It was an appalling abandoned piece of concrete," says Nevius. "It was in an area of San Francisco that was down and out, there were homeless people there, warehouses; it was not a quality address."
And that was what clinched the deal.
"There would have been more debate if the area hadn't been quite so rundown," Nevius believes.
Instead of protesting, San Franciscans embraced the chance to give a ramshackle bit of land a major makeover, much as Aucklanders rallied behind the Viaduct Harbour refit.
Where the locals did put their foot down was over paying for the stadium. Four times, the Giants' owners went to the people with referendums seeking money from the city's coffers. Each time they were rebuffed. The attitude of ratepayers, says Nevius, was that it wasn't up to them to pay for a stadium that would make millions for the wealthy owners of a professional sports team.
"As the owners said at the time, in baseball it's three strikes and you're out. Four strikes and you're really out."
To the city's immense relief, the owners decided to build the first privately financed ballpark in nearly 40 years. It cost US$357 million ($536 million at today's rates).
Naming rights, season tickets, selling of charter seats and what's described as an "ambitious" financing plan, including a US$170 million bank loan, were used to pay for the 41,606-seat stadium.
The albatross now hanging around this waterfront stadium's neck is the US$20 million in debt the Giants have to repay annually for the next 30 years.
The money in American professional baseball far exceeds that in New Zealand's professional rugby, but the San Francisco solution raises interesting questions about how much the NZ Rugby Union as "owner" of the All Blacks - the team Auckland's "national" stadium is ultimately being built for - should contribute.
The way San Francisco's waterfront stadium was financed makes for imperfect comparisons, but Aucklanders can still look at the US project and ask the big questions: How did it work out? Did it get built on time? And what impact has it had on the downtown and surrounding waterfront areas?
Shana Daum, public affairs manager for the Giants, says that - like Auckland's project - the ballpark had a very definite completion date, opening day of the 2000 baseball season.
"Delays amount to extra costs and the date was committed, so there were incentives built into the contracts to get it built on time."
Roughly two years were spent drawing up plans and navigating the approval process, and construction began on December 11, 1997. It took 28 months, and subcontractors were working round the clock for the last few weeks, but it opened as planned on April 11, 2000.
"The question," says Nevius, "was will it have an effect on revitalising this downtown area, and the answer is it has. It's become a centre, it's become a destination."
And, adds Daum, a magnet. The University of California San Francisco has opened a 17ha campus nearby, condominiums and apartments have gone up and big retailers such as Borders and Starbucks have bought into the area.
"We see ourselves as one of the two anchors at either end of the Embarcadero [the bay-side strip], with the Golden Gate Bridge as the other."
The similarity to Auckland can't be missed. A bridge at one end, a sports stadium at the other, and a historic ferry building in the middle.
Lester McKee, a New Zealander who has lived in San Francisco for six years, says a public hungry for amenities has been delighted by the development.
"That part of the city has really taken off. There's great restaurants, loft-style apartments and a good buzz."
As with Auckland, one of the big concerns was parking. There wasn't any. Not enough for 40,000 people, anyway. Fans had to be talked out of their cars, and if there's one place that would compete with New Zealand's love of cars it's California.
Nevius says it's been surprisingly successful. Bay Area Rapid Transit trains run to just six blocks away. Buses, trams and ferries service the area.
"We're the most public transit-accessible ballpark in the country," says Daum.
The park's success has been aided by the Giants' successes. In their first year there, they were surprise winners in their major league division, although they then lost the division series to the New York Mets.
In 2001, star batter Barry Bonds set a record for home runs in a year, blasting the two that gave him the record at his home stadium.
McKee says he's taken the train to a couple of games, and it's added to the experience.
"The trains are full of fan wearing their caps. You're in the energy straight away and as you walk down the Embarcadero you're talking to hordes of people."
Says Nevius: "It's like that scene in Oliver. People keep popping out and come together as you get nearer the park. You see people with the same hats and jackets and your group becomes 10 or 20 and you feel like you're part of something."
That walking to the ground is part of the rejuvenation success. People stop into a shop or bar on the way and spend money.
It could be argued that Auckland is already getting that through the Viaduct and Britomart plans. But an event destination draws different crowds from the tourists and day-trippers at the Viaduct and the apartment dwellers and office workers in Britomart.
The ballpark is not used only for baseball; it's a tourist destination and a venue. For that reason the downtown location was crucial, says Daum.
"We wanted people to come down after work for night games and for families to be able to make a whole day of it for day games."
Bands from the Rolling Stones to Green Day have played concerts at the stadium, motocross races have roared round it, the Cirque du Soleil has put up its tents outside, and last weekend snow was trucked in to build a ski-jump for a ski show.
The San Francisco stadium was designed to continue the feel of old-time ballparks, such as Chicago's Wrigley Field and Boston's Fenway Park. But Nevius says this is secondary in explaining the park's popularity.
"Human beings' ability to appreciate bodies of water can never be under-estimated," he says. "There have been a lot of ballparks built around the country on the old-style model and some new designs, but over and over [the new stadium] is named as one of the most beautiful in the US. That's not really the design. That's the location."
Meanwhile, news reports suggest the Oakland Athletics baseball team are about to move to a new stadium down the road in Freemont. They want to built a 36,000-seater, plus hotels, apartments and shops. When do they think they can finish this mammoth project? 2011.
