The Chicago Bears may finally, actually — for real this time — be moving forward with plans to uproot the team from its longtime home along the lakefront and set sail for the suburbs.
In an open letter released hours before the team's first game of the 2025 NFL season Monday night versus the Minnesota Vikings, Chicago Bears President Kevin Warren said that after evaluating sites within city limits, "none were viable."
The Arlington Heights site, where the Bears purchased 326 acres for $197.2M in 2023, is the only one within Cook County that provides "property tax certainty and a fair contribution toward essential infrastructure," Warren said.
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"Moving outside of the city of Chicago is not a decision we reached easily," Warren said. "This project does not represent us leaving, it represents us expanding."
In evaluating options for the new stadium, Warren said the focus has been on finding a site that requires zero money from the state for its construction. That's a marked departure from its lakefront stadium proposal in 2024, where the team was asking for more than $2B in public money.
The team still plans to build a stadium with a fixed roof and a corresponding mixed-use development, but it wasn't clear how design plans could change in the new location. Warren said 2025 is the target year to finalize stadium plans so the team can officially bid to host a Super Bowl as soon as 2031.
Previously, the team hoped to have construction started on a lakefront stadium in summer 2025, with an expected completion date in 2028.
Warren forecasted that the development will create more than 56,000 construction jobs and 9,000 permanent jobs, as well as $10B in economic impact attributed to statewide construction and $256M in annual statewide new business and tourism impact.
Sports teams generally don’t have an overwhelming financial effect on their surrounding areas, according to some economic analysis.
Michael Leeds, a professor of economics at Temple University, told Bisnow in July that he did a “back of the envelope” calculation and found that the economic activity from Chicago sports teams accounted for a fraction of 1% of the city’s total economic output.
"The psychological hole created by the disappearance of all the teams in Chicago would be great," Leeds said at the time. "The financial hole would be barely noticeable."
Warren said while the team doesn't yet have all the answers as to how the stadium will come together, it is optimistic about working with Arlington Heights officials to get the approvals it needs to build the new structure.
"For more than 50 years, Soldier Field has been our home," Warren wrote. "But so too were Wrigley Field, Memorial Stadium, and Staley Field. We hope Arlington Heights will soon join that list."
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