With the A’s set to depart in 2025, the city of Oakland will sell half of the Oakland Coliseum site to private developers, the African American Sports & Entertainment Group, for a minimum of $105 million.
The sale comes after a decade-long fight with A’s owner John Fisher to keep the team in town, which ended last fall when the team announced it will relocate to Las Vegas. The A’s, who will play in Sacramento for three seasons while a stadium is being built in Nevada, are still trying to complete their purchase of the remaining 50% of the Coliseum site.
The AASEG is still in negotiations with the team for that portion.
“All of us are born and raised in East Oakland … so, we want to accelerate development to help revitalize the community,” Ray Bobbitt, the founder of AASEG, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “We know that the Coliseum has a great opportunity to be revitalized.”
The AASEG is a group of largely black developers and investors in the Oakland area. According to the AASEG’s website, it wants to bring new pro sports teams to the stadium district, including an NFL expansion team that would be the first franchise to have African Americans as majority owners. It also aims to have retail and housing developed around Oakland Arena as part of the $5 billion megaproject.
The city will use the money to fill some potential budget shortfalls for the next two fiscal years. It had planned to make cuts to the fire and police departments as well as lay off dozens of city workers to fill a budget deficit of $177 million.
The city had been exploring options on what to do with the stadium complex that includes both the Coliseum and Oakland Arena, which has been without a sports tenant since the Golden State Warriors moved back to San Francisco in 2019. The Raiders, who previously left Oakland for Los Angeles from 1982 through 1994, departed the East Bay for a second time when they moved to Las Vegas in 2020.
The Coliseum opened in 1966, and it followed the trend of “cookie-cutter” multipurpose stadiums that had developed across the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington D.C., Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh and Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. Eleven of these venues were designed to house both MLB and NFL teams as ways for cities to save costs on building two separate stadiums.
The Coliseum was widely criticized for its relative lack of charm, wide foul territory and sewage problems from an aging plumbing system. Perhaps its most infamous blight is “Mount Davis,” derisively named after the late Raiders owner Al Davis, who added 10,000 seats to the upper deck in the stadium’s 1996 renovation. “Mount Davis” ended up enclosing the upper reaches of the stadium, blocking out the view of the city’s famed hills and making the stadium more cavernous for baseball than it already was.
The Coliseum is the only “cookie-cutter” venue still standing as the others were fully or at least partially demolished after their primary tenants left for sport-specific stadiums with greater premium seating and other modern amenities.
