Take A Look Inside The New Chase Center, Home Of The Golden State Warriors (Video)

The Golden State Warriors got themselves a new home, and the new Chase Center in San Francisco looks really cool. And fancy.

Chase Center is a $1.4 billion arena the Warriors self-financed. It offers 18,000 seats, luxurious suites, and outdoor plaza with restaurants and shops, two office towers for Uber, a public park, and a 44,000-person wait list for season tickets. According to experts, it’s the best in American sports.

Rick Welts, President and Chief Operating Officer for the Golden State Warriors, says building the arena was a “perfect storm” of events. San Francisco doesn’t spend public money on sports stadiums, and the Warriors built it on their own expense.

“That’s just not the philosophy in San Francisco, so knowing we’re gonna build in San Francisco, we knew that would be the case,” he said.

“It’s very hard to do in San Francisco,” Welts added. “We’re a very small city. Seven miles by seven miles — there’s not a lot of 10 1/2-acre opportunities in San Francisco. We got very lucky to actually find this.”

Spending a billion to build Chase Center means the Warriors will have to take the money back. San Francisco offers the perfect opportunity for that.

“You have a city that’s really exploded on the global scene as one of the great cities of the world, driven a lot by what happens there from a business standpoint, which is part of why it’s so vibrant right now and so economically healthy right now,” Welts explained. “I don’t think there’s ever been a time like this in the Bay Area.”

Building their own arena with their own money is a compliment.

“Part of what we did — and I think you see it more and more with sports teams building arenas and stadiums — was we had to kinda fill that gap,” Welts said. “In our league, the ballpark has been around $300 million in taxpayer money to do these projects. So that’s a good part of the reason we created the office buildings, doing the hotel, doing all the retail, not only are they going to enhance the environment, but they’re going to help fill the gap of what would have been public financing for our budget.”

“We have like a perfect storm. We have this roaring economy, we have the companies that are changing the world are part of our backyard, we have a championship-caliber team, and we have a great city, great global city that never in its history has had one of these [arenas],” Welts said.

“So I wouldn’t recommend anybody else trying to recreate that formula because I think it’d be impossible.”