Until this year, the Wanderers Grounds was a little-used chunk of lumpy grass taking up space in the city’s core. Now, the sound of thousands of screaming fans can be heard from many blocks away every time Wanderers FC plays a match. It’s a beautiful thing.

The Wanderers, Halifax’s new professional soccer team, put their stadium in a place where it brings life to the downtown — and amazingly, they did all this with no public money. These are great reasons to root for the team.

Their business strategy also offer lessons on how to build a great city.

The way the Wanderers built this stadium is the polar opposite of how most are built today. Usually, a government coughs up hundreds of millions of dollars in grants or tax deals. The costs are justified by over-optimistic, best-case-scenario predictions of economic benefits, which rarely come anywhere close to being true. The Brookings Institute finds that “no recent facility appears to have earned anything approaching a reasonable return on investment.”

The Wanderers, in contrast, are starting small. They’re using low-cost shipping containers and movable bleachers, allowing them to pay for the stadium on their own. All they need from the city is to maintain the field, but even then, the team pays rent every time they use it.

The stadium is also rightsized for Halifax. Its 6,000 seats sell out nearly every game. As its popularity grows, they can add bleachers to fit roughly 12,000 people, which the team’s president, Derek Martin, thinks is about the right scale for Halifax.

One day it may make sense to build a permanent facility. If that time comes, the city can have an informed debate about whether our government should chip in. We won’t need to trust the club’s projections on fan numbers or economic impact. We will know first-hand the team’s popularity, financial viability and its impact on street life and city pride.

In this way, the Wanderers are demonstrating a model for how governments should make all investments.

Today, cities make huge expensive investments on a few big ideas, like the Halifax Convention Centre or the proposed CFL stadium.

Perhaps they will be successful and will pay for themselves. Perhaps they will be dead weight on the city’s budget, preventing us from investing in the basic services we need. It’s impossible to know the future.

Many today think we should estimate the likeliest outcome and bet all our money on that. Others think we should hope for the best and call it being “visionary.” The trouble with both approaches is that while it’s OK for companies to make big bets and fail, it’s absolutely not OK for a city to fail. Someone needs to pave the roads, or nothing can succeed.

The Wanderers are taking a far more responsible approach. Don’t try to predict the future. Don’t gamble. Instead, make small bets, demonstrate what works and what doesn’t, and reinvest in success.

Consider the Spring Garden Rd. streetscaping project. The plans are smart and beautiful. But while some projects like this attract tens of millions in new business investment, others fail utterly. A streetscaping project in West Palm Beach Florida attracted $350 million in private investment. On Rue Saint Laurent in Montreal, however, business vacancies actually went up in the years after a similar renovation.

If something like that happens, it may be decades before we throw that much money at Spring Garden again. It’s a cycle of big gambles and neglect.

If we applied the Wanderers’ approach to Spring Garden, we would spend a small amount every year, and continuously test configurations of flower boxes, benches, traffic patterns and more and see what attracts the most street life. If we want to expand the sidewalk by removing parking, we could try that for a year using temporary wooden platforms like the one there now and test how this affects businesses.

If any of these ideas don’t work, we would lose thousands of dollars, not millions. Meanwhile, over the years, we could slowly reinvest in making the ideas that succeed permanent. In this way, we need not try to predict what will work. We can know with confidence.

Halifax is taking the Wanderers’ approach with transit. The city is slowly building a network of relatively low-cost bus lanes. Someday, the best-performing routes may justify investing in something more expensive like a tram.

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If we don’t waste our money on megaprojects, we can continuously make small investments in streetscaping, transit, parks and more in all our communities. Every neighbourhood would become a little better every single year. There’d be low risk of massive failure and far more opportunities for success. We could replace being visionary with being mature.

Thousands of screaming fans at the Wanderers Grounds show us how impactful incremental investment can be. Let’s take that idea to build a strong Halifax.

Tristan Cleveland is a Halifax-based city planner and a former columnist for StarMetro.

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