Nashville's big bet on the dying convention business

The Music City Center. Like LP Field and Sommet before it, it's the newest Big Project Nashville Can't Live Without.

For more than a decade, business leaders have salivated at the thought of the proposed downtown convention center, a 15-acre Demonbreun widescraper to complement SoBro's mix of high-rises and honky-tonks. Now, after 10 years of studies and commissions and commissioned studies about the studies, the table, it seems, is set. Nashville will get its pretty bouquet for $650 million—a figure that will approach $1 billion when you add in a city-owned hotel.

There's just one problem: Convention centers are a bad business. And they're only getting worse.

The decline began halfway between the completion of Fulton's Folly and the Titans' first snap, and continues now during the Great Recession. Not that anyone's noticed.

From Anchorage to Albuquerque, Waco to West Palm Beach, the motto has been build, build and build some more. Space is up, while attendance declines.

But if you listened to the center's cheerleaders, you'd think we were still living in the Golden Age. If we could somehow find a way to build it, they say, 3,000 jobs and a $700 million windfall won't be far behind.

It's a plan that's long on talk and short on proof. The only guarantees: It will take a long time, cost a lot of money and do a lot of good for contractors. But it may also end up being the greatest blunder in Nashville history.

Diving in the Kiddie Pool
What the city's saying: If you've ever spent an afternoon in a honky-tonk, you've seen the name-tagged conventioneers, those affable out-of-towners plowing their way through Bud Lights and twirling the keys to the rented Ford Focus parked outside. Their kind is common to downtowns nationwide. But Nashville's share is low.

The problem: Our convention center is too small. At only 144,000 square feet, Mayor Karl Dean says Nashville's center can only compete for 20 percent of the available business. According to Tradeshow Week, the industry's scripture, our center ranks 161st in size nationally, behind hot-spots like Rapid City, S.D., and barely edging King of Prussia, Pa. It's a fact that Butch Spyridon, the 17-year president of the Convention & Visitor's Bureau, sees as a travesty.

"There are very few cities that have the leisure and meeting appeal," he says. "The industry just outgrew us."

To be fair, the industry had a head start. When the Nashville Convention Center, the city's first, came online in 1987, it was already outdated, running at capacity within years of opening.

And it's only gotten worse since, with an almost biblical flooding of the market. More than 160 new centers have been built along with 200 new expansions, including Opryland's 145,000-square-foot exhibition hall addition in 1996.

St. Louis, Charlotte, Louisville and Indianapolis—cities that, in the past, couldn't compete with Nashville—now sport bigger complexes. John Deere, the National Rural Co-Op, even the National Association of Music Merchants all left for greener pastures. At last count, the number of events Nashville has lost to those who can offer bigger and better stands at 270.

Enter the Music City Center. At 1.2 million square feet, it's an instant upgrade into the upper levels of the convention business.

Although it won't open until 2012, proponents insist the returns are already solid—the Southern Baptist Convention is on board for 2013, and Mayor Karl Dean insists the women's NCAA Final Four, scheduled for the following year, would've never committed had we not expanded.

Just as important: People will stop grouping us with all those crappier cities.

"We're better, we have more to offer," says Spyridon. "We like it when we compete with Orlando, Chicago, New Orleans and Atlanta. We fit into that category."

What's the city smoking? Exciting as that may sound, Spyridon's idea—that Nashville is a $1 billion-dollar rubber-stamp away from competing with the crown jewels of the industry—may be enough to qualify him for involuntary commitment.

The Music City Center may be three times bigger and a whole lot prettier. But to say our new 375,000-square-foot exhibit hall will be enough to compete with the big boys is an affront to simple math.

Chicago will still be seven times larger. Las Vegas will still have us by a magnitude of five. And we'll still be less than half the size of centers in Houston, Cleveland and Rosemont, Ill. (On the bright side: We'll finally have bragging rights over Gatlinburg.)

"Nashville is not, nor will it ever be, in the top tier," says Heywood Sanders, urban studies professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

To those in the industry, he's known as Dr. No. Twenty years of research has made him the leading independent authority on convention centers and given him a bearish outlook. His 2005 Brookings Institute paper "Space Available" is the Talmud for meeting industry skeptics.

Every day Sanders fields calls from across the country. When reached by phone, he's just hung up with a reporter in Cleveland and minutes away from talking to another in San Diego. And that's the problem—everyone's building.

Up until the 1990s, four major cities dominated the convention game—Chicago, New York, Atlanta and New Orleans. Then came two emergent powers, Las Vegas and Orlando. Then came the flood.