Governor Cuomo insists building America's largest convention center in Queens will be a big boon for New York State and Queens. That remains to be seen, but it's already been good for one Heywood Sanders, an economics professor at the University of Texas in San Antonio. Sanders has been getting a lot of exposure since Cuomo announced his big plan to get a Malaysian company to build the mammoth convention center; soon after Cuomo's speech, Sanders told the Times, "The convention business is a disaster everywhere. Simply building more space gets you nothing more than a big empty building."
Sanders has made his latest convention center slam in the pages of the Daily News, where he points out that "City after city builds and expands a convention center. Yet they end up doing less business than they did 20 or 30 years ago." McCormick Place in Chicago, currently the largest convention center in the country, lost a million visitors from 2001 to 2010.
But look at it this way, counters Jack Friedman at the Queens Chamber of Commerce: the $4 billion convention center would be financed by Genting, the Malaysian company that did the recently-opened and incredibly depressing Aqueduct racino. "What difference does it make?" Friedman asks. "It’s not our money that we’re putting up. Genting is taking the risk." Yeah, who cares if Shelbyville Malaysia loses their shirts? While we're at it, why not double down and build TWO convention centers in Queens! Maybe then everyone will finally shut up about Brooklyn this and Brooklyn that.
