The Texas Rangers’ old baseball stadium in Arlington will soon be home to about 30,000 square feet of co-working space. Co-working company Spark will operate the space in Choctaw Stadium, which hosted the Rangers until 2019. The stadium has been redeveloped since the baseball team moved out, and it now also houses the headquarters of Six Flags and the Arlington Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Baltimore-based Spark will operate co-working space across two levels of the stadium, including 61 private offices and amenities like a podcasting studio, a nursing room, and balconies with great views of the repurposed infield. It’ll be Spark’s 4th co-working space since launching its flagship in Baltimore in 2016. The re-use of the Rangers’ old ballfield is a creative one, and it’s part of the ongoing multi-billion-dollar plan to develop the area around Arlington’s Entertainment District and sports stadiums.
Co-working operators like Spark have proliferated in recent years, and there’s no sign of them slowing down. The co-working and flex space market has grown at an average annual rate of 23 percent since 2010, according to Mordor Intelligence, a market intelligence firm. The shift to remote and hybrid work has been an enormous boon for co-working space, as it has become an established market in the office sector. Spark’s co-working space in the former baseball stadium may be just a novel idea, but it’s one more example that the co-working market in the U.S. looks poised to keep growing.