Pratt: Cross Bayou Point development is once-in-a-generation opportunity
Eighteen months ago, when Gateway Development Consortium announced plans to redevelop a 100-year-old brownfield site anchored by a scrap yard into a billion-dollar waterfront neighborhood, we were met with skepticism.
After all, the city and Downtown Development Authority had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on studies over decades. The voters, in 1996, approved $5 million directing the city to purchase the land for partnership with a real estate developer. Yet today Cross Bayou sits mostly vacant, overgrown and dirty; a stain on our collective civic pride.
Eighteen months later, GDC has partnered with Saber Fund Advisors and the United Soccer League to finally redevelop Cross Bayou. We are asking the city to finish assembling an 88-acre brownfield site and donate it to a public/private partnership. We are also asking the city to approve a Tax Incremental Financing District to fund $132 million in public infrastructure.
We are not asking for any new taxes or bond money. GDC has already invested $5 million in pre-development and, together with Saber, will spend another $10 million before a shovel is placed in the ground.
Elliot Stonecipher, in a recent blog, asked “who would want to invest a billion dollars in Shreveport?” That’s a great question.
Why would Saber, one of the largest mixed-use developers in the country, choose Shreveport vs East Oakland, East Harlem or South Florida? Why would the USL, the fastest-growing soccer league in the country and a global soccer brand, want to bring this professional sport to Shreveport?
The answer is simple: It’s a once-in-a-generational opportunity to build a landmark waterfront project in the center of the Ark-La-Tex into a beautiful city with gaming, unique culture and cuisine in a socio-economic region with over a million people.
GDC/Saber is offering the city an opportunity to invest land, valued at $4 million, with us; but in reality when the liabilities associated with remediation are accounted for, the land has no value.
In exchange for this unused land, the taxpayers will receive $208 million in new tax revenue and 14,000 permanent and temporary jobs over the next 30 years as well as hundreds of new office workers downtown.
GDC/Saber will develop several thousand new residences for millennials, urban professionals and seniors who wish to spend their golden years hanging with the young folks.
Additionally, we will build a new multi-use sports and entertainment outdoor stadium with professional soccer as an anchor. This new waterfront facility will be used 365 days a year for concerts, high school and local university athletics, bringing tens of thousands of citizens and tourists into downtown.
We acknowledge the existing Central Business District, which has languished for decades, must be revitalized along with Cross Bayou. The Downtown Development Authority’s approach of “incremental development, one building at at time” simply has not worked.
When have you seen a crane decorating our downtown skyline? Downtown is as dead at noon as it is at nine at night.
The chances of success for these two districts are intrinsically linked. This is why GDC’s world-class team of firms and professionals will work with the city and the parish to develop a strategy to revitalize the CBD. GDC/Saber is prepared to invest private dollars in this effort.
Who wants to invest $1 billion into downtown Shreveport? We do. Let’s make a deal.
Paul Pratt is a partner in Gateway Development Consortium (GDC). GDC was founded in 2018. GDC has assembled national and local partners with decades of experience in Public Private Partnerships and is developing the billion-dollar downtown waterfront Opportunity Zone project, Cross Bayou Point. For more information, visit www.crossbayoupointproject.com