ancient cities

and St. Louis acquired a site on the northern end
of the downtown core, long mapped for slum
clearance, for the development of its new Cervantes
Convention Center, which opened in 1976.
From the 1970s, convention center construction
was often linked to larger local efforts to implement
tourism and visitor-based economic development
efforts. Cities like Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleveland,
Milwaukee, and St. Louis often paired convention
facilities with new hotels, downtown retail malls,
festival marketplaces, aquariums, stadiums, and
entertainment districts. These projects, many built
with federal government grant funds, sought to
both bolster downtown core areas and spur new
tourist-oriented private investment through the creation
of tourist zones.
The convention center development boom has
expanded in recent years, propelled by a combination
of political, economic, and fiscal forces. One
national count found 193 major exhibit halls in
1986 with a total of 32.5 million square feet of
exhibit hall space. At the top of the list stood
Chicago’s McCormick Place, expanded to a total
of 1.87 million square feet. By 1996, the number
of major halls stood at 254 with a total of 49.1
million square feet of space.
Convention center exhibit space in the United
States reached 66.8 million square feet in 2006—a
106 percent increase from 1986—at 313 centers.
The growth reflects two parallel trends. The largest
centers have consistently expanded, with the
argument that ever-growing events demand more
space. Chicago’s latest McCormick Place expansion
would bring it to 2.7 million square feet in
2007 at a cost of $850 million while New York
City is undertaking a massive expansion of its
Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, and the Las
Vegas Convention Center, with 2 million square
feet of space, is being expanded and revamped.
Small and medium-sized communities have also
sought to gain the purported economic benefits of
convention visitors by developing new or expanded
facilities. Communities such as Hartford,
Connecticut; Springfield, Massachusetts; Virginia
Beach, Virginia; Raleigh, North Carolina; Columbia,
South Carolina; Shreveport, Louisiana; McAllen,
Texas; Schaumburg, Illinois; Fort Wayne, Indiana;
Erie, Pennsylvania; St. Charles, Missouri; Branson,
Missouri; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Omaha, Nebraska;
Spokane, Washington; Tacoma, Washington; and
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Anchorage, Alaska, have all built new convention
facilities.
The contemporary convention center development
reflects a substantive change in the politics
and finance of public investment. Most of the convention
venues built during the 1950s, 1960s, and
1970s were funded by city governments using general
obligation bonds. New convention centers
have commonly been financed with debt backed by
taxes on visitors and tourists, such as hotel, rental
car, and restaurant meal taxes. The Washington
Convention Center, in the nation’s capital, was
developed in 2003 by the Washington Convention
Center Authority and financed by dedicated taxes
on hotel rooms and restaurant meals in the District
of Columbia. Revenues from taxes on all local
hotel rooms, car rentals, and visitor attractions
now provide places like Las Vegas, Orlando, New
Orleans, and Boston with substantial streams of
funding for regular investment in additional center
expansions and improvement.
The boom in convention center development has
also been sustained by the notion of a consistently
expanding convention and tradeshow market. This
image of growing demand has sustained the argument
that communities must expand their convention
facilities or lose out to competitors. In a 1994
study of a potential expansion of San Francisco’s
Moscone Center, Economics Research Associates
examined the performance of the Tradeshow Week
200—the 200 largest conventions and trade
shows—in terms of exhibit space used each year.
The firm found that these events showed consistent
and strong growth over the years and forecast that
large events would continue to grow for the foreseeable
future, requiring ever more space.
The actual attendance of the 200 major convention
and tradeshow events has not grown in accord
with the historical observations of the consulting
firms, or in line with the growth in convention centers
and exhibit space. Average event attendance
did grow by some 20 percent from 1985 to 1994,
but there was no consistent growth during the
1990s, and convention attendance was dampened
by the recession of 2000 and the terrorist events of
September 11, 2001. Average attendance at major
events fell to 20,753 in 2002 with some recovery to
21,670 for 2005—equal to the 1995 average.
The development of major convention centers
in new markets such as Las Vegas and Orlando