Reading past the headline
And knowing a good deal from a bad one
There are lots of bad headlines in the world these days. I don’t mean headlines that depress you with their horrors (though there are plenty of those), but rather poorly-written ones that do not accurately describe the reality of the story. You can chalk some of that up to the decimated editorial staff at newspapers, some of the first people to go when cuts are made. But that’s not a good excuse. Many people don’t read past the headline, which is why it’s vital that the headline be accurate.
As you may have heard, Washington D.C. has cut a deal to bring the Washington Commanders back to the District. That is, if you’ve read the largely uncritical press coverage of the announcement made between the mayor and team brass on Monday, an effective piece of PR that generated lots of headlines that made the deal sound done. It is far from so. It requires majority sign-off from the D.C. Council, but positioning it this way makes them seem like the party-pooping bad guys if they don’t approve. Which is clever, but also a shame, considering what’s really being asked and — crucially — when.
For years, Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has been trying to move the Washington NFL team back to its former home at the RFK Stadium site, along the west bank of the Anacostia River. She has been pretty vocally adamant that she sees this as a legacy-cementing project, something that will ensure she is loved by Washingtonians for generations to come, and possibly a stepladder to help her pursue more grand ambitions (she was mentioned, albeit briefly, as a potential running-mate for Joe Biden back in 2020). The Washington Post called the still-preliminary deal “a significant victory for Bowser” in its coverage.
The top line items involved in this plan — a 65,000-seat stadium, plus hotels, housing, retail, a recreational sports facility, and 8,000 parking spots; the city fronting $1.1 billion in improvements and infrastructure, with the team covering $2.7 billion in construction — may sound reasonable enough. But the details of this project have yet to be presented, and there is precious little time to do so before the self-imposed July 15 deadline, while the city is already revamping its budget based on other recent developments (much more on that below). The last time the city rushed a sports-related project through, without doing its due diligence, we ended up with the utterly disastrous sports betting bill, something I covered extensively for years.
Needless to say, the devil in those details will be rather important.
In the meantime, the components of this stadium proposal that do not involve the stadium and its parking lots — parks, retail, a recreational sports complex, and much-needed housing — are all good. They are also, for the most part, all pieces of plans that have been in place for years, plans that were painstakingly revamped and tweaked and finalized after years of push and pull from the local community. I know, because I covered the entire saga, from January of 2017 on:
The initial short-term future for the site, factoring in community input from the prior year
The implementation of those plans as the old stadium closed
Updates and expansions of the planned community fields, phase one of the project
Groundbreaking, in August 2018, on those fields
The community groups gathering in opposition to a football stadium
The fields finally opening, while the rest of the project stalled, contingent on who controlled the land
In the middle of all of that, I also wrote a deeply reported piece that was essentially the culmination of several years of reporting on the topic. The upshot: Both the local D.C. Councilmember, as well as the surrounding community, did not want an NFL stadium, and those who study the economics and feasibility of such projects agreed that it was a terrible idea to jam one back into the RFK site.
Several things have changed in the intervening years. The first is that the city now has control over the site, ceded from the National Park Service, which allows it more flexibility in terms of building housing and commercial properties, where it was previously zoned exclusively for recreation. This is pretty universally regarded as a positive thing.
The second change has been the team’s nickname and ownership. While the name seemed to be Bowser’s only objection to bringing the team back, replacing the universally-loathed Dan Snyder with the anodyne Josh Harris certainly hasn’t hurt. But that doesn’t change the dynamics of the deal itself in any material way, as far as the city’s end of things.
The third change has been the most significant, and it takes what is already a bad idea that the local residents do not want and makes pushing it forward now a dereliction of duty for a city leader. That is, of course, the dire state of economic affairs the District is suddenly facing. If you don’t live here (and even if you do), it’s worth breaking these down individually to help understand just how little the city can afford to be tossing $1.1 billion at this project, and to scrutinize the often all-too-easily-swallowed claims that sports stadiums drive economic development.
In the latest continuing resolution to keep the federal government open and funded, Congress inexplicably insisted that D.C., in addition to federal agencies, return to its 2024 funding levels. This, despite the fact that D.C. had already passed a balanced budget, and D.C. residents had already paid their taxes into said budget. What that meant practically was the city suddenly facing a $1.1 billion shortfall, unable to spend their own already preallocated money on crucial services, causing an immediate hiring freeze and eventually layoffs.
The Senate then immediately passed a separate bill to undo this particular piece of fiscal nonsense, but it has sat untouched by the House of Representatives since then. It will need to pass the House and be signed by the president in order to reverse the damage. Until and unless that happens, the District is already short on cash.
D.C. has already just recently committed $515 million into the $800 million Capital One Arena renovation, which will keep the Wizards and Capitals in D.C. for at least another generation. As far as sports stadium deals go, these are the most palatable types — investment in a multi-use, downtown arena that is home to roughly 220 events a year, including everything from the annual horse show, to Georgetown Basketball, to major concerts. But even if this wasn’t the worst investment, it’s an investment nonetheless.
Broader developments also suggest this year will not be business as usual for D.C. tourism, a major driver of tax dollars, especially for Events DC, which manages the convention center and is funded through hotel and other tourism taxes. International travel to the U.S. was down double-digits from last year in March, and with legitimate safety concerns stemming from foreign travelers being detained upon entering the country, not to mention general negative sentiment due to broader political tension, there is reason to believe that number could continue to drop. That’s bad for the country as a whole, but especially for the seventh-most visited city by foreign tourists, which saw more than 1.6 million of them in 2023.
Compounding all of this — and stemming largely from a lot of it — Moody’s downgraded the city’s credit rating last week, from Aaa to Aa1. This will make borrowing money — as the District would have to do one way or another to fund the stadium — more expensive.
All of this adds up to make this a terrible time to propose such a deal. Especially when you consider that such deals absolutely do not drive redevelopment, despite the repeated insistence of public officials to the contrary.
When I moved to Washington at the end of 2011, I was immediately struck by two things: Why was there no development along the waterfront just south of the 14th Street bridge I commuted over from Virginia, and why was there no decent, mid-sized music venue? The answer to both came together, when The Anthem went into the massive redevelopment at The Wharf, once the recession ended.
Those who would have you believe stadiums drive redevelopment will point to Nationals Park and the Navy Yard area, which is now bustling with restaurants, hotels, and luxury apartments. What they’ll neglect to mention is what I saw when I got off the metro on my way to my interview with the Washington Nationals just after Thanksgiving in 2011: One, single apartment building, a couple small eateries, and a bunch of holes in the ground, projects stalled out three-and-a-half years after the stadium had opened. Like The Wharf (which, of course, has no sports arena), the thing holding redevelopment back was the larger economic conditions following the housing crash and recession of the late aughts. Once the country rebounded, and lending and construction got cheaper, up went all the buildings. The main stretch along Half Street, between the Metro entrance and the center field gates, wasn’t even announced until 2016.
Another fun fact about Nats Park that has been memory-holed by some: It is often reported to have cost $670 million (of all public money) to build, but the actual cost ballooned to $783.9 million, or 17% more than its initial projection. These projects have a funny way of doing that, with the city often on the hook for the cost overruns. The Buffalo Bills’ current stadium project has gone from $560 million over budget up to $2.1 billion — with team ownership thankfully on the hook for that 36% difference. While the Commanders say they will likewise cover any cost overruns on the stadium, infrastructure costs are what they are, and with prices skyrocketing due to global financial instability, color me skeptical that the price we see today will necessarily be the price we’d see when all is said and done.
We haven’t even gotten to the big point, here, which is that an NFL stadium is about the single worst way you can use prime property like the RFK site. Or, in the words of “Field of Schemes” author Neil deMause, from that 2019 WTOP article, “in terms of economic development, there’s almost nothing worse that you can do with a plot of land than devote it to an NFL stadium.”
Northwest Stadium, the team’s current home in Landover, Maryland, unequivocally sucks. But its massive parking lots, which a stadium that size needs, at least allow for tailgating, something very much in doubt under the proposed RFK plan. Any new stadium site would necessarily have much less room for one of the major components that makes attending an NFL game actually worth it. It’s why, unlike arenas and ballparks, NFL stadiums are far better situated along a highway and transit line in the suburbs, with land to spare.
Football stadiums require major ingress-egress, which that neighborhood does not have, with quiet, two-lane streets to the west, and a single bridge connecting it to the highway across the river to the east. It demands massive parking structures, but this plan intends to split the baby, building 8,000 spaces worth of garages. These will sit empty and unused 330 days a year, while the remaining attendees of games or other events will flood the neighborhood with cars, trying to park, as they did back when other sports teams played there. And that neighborhood has only grown more dense in the intervening years.
They will also take up space that could fit thousands more housing units — as many as 10,000 by one estimate.
It’s true that D.C. needs more jobs in the wake of federal workforce cuts. And a new stadium project will bring a set number of temporary construction jobs, but be very, very wary of any permanent job claims. The team is not planning to move its front offices into D.C., which means the several hundred staff will not suddenly be paying D.C. taxes, nor spending their lunch dollars here. Any stadium jobs will be part-time, gameday jobs. These shouldn’t be sneezed at, but they are not full employment, and they pale even in comparison to the same positions at Capital One Arena (220 events) or Nats Park (up to 90 events). With a very limited set of events that warrant using such a large venue, the stadium will only provide a couple dozen days of gameday operations work.
Any of the other retail jobs would arrive anyway with the new construction in a prime, waterfront parcel, as we’ve seen in other neighborhoods around the city, so tying them to the idea of a football stadium is inane.
Oh, right — and the Commanders will reportedly be given the rights to develop the land for $1/year. What, you think they’re kicking in their billions out of goodwill?
(Video: A view of the outside of the stadium as of summer 2022.)
Stadium deals are rarely perfect, and usually aren’t great for the public. Often, they come down to making the least bad decision. But the RFK redevelopment is its own project without the need of an NFL team, and injecting them into the mix makes it an objectively worse deal.
This is ultimately all about playing off of nostalgia for personal gain. It forwards overly simplistic and outdated analysis about the underlying economics, built on math that has repeatedly been proven to be faulty. It’s a backward-looking strategy at a time that demands a novel vision for our city. And, at the end of the day, it’s a handout to a billionaire — the all-but-free development rights as much as the cash itself — who doesn’t need or deserve one just because he’s not Dan Snyder.
Back when I was a sports reporter in town, it felt like I was the only one of my peers who didn’t grow up here and didn’t have an active rooting interest in the local teams. I’d like to think that it helped me take a more arms-length approach to issues like stadium deals, as my personal fandom wasn’t wrapped up in them. I’ve spent plenty of time since wrestling through the pros and cons of a stadium deal for my own favorite team — owned by Snyder’s heir to the worst owner in American professional sports throne, no less. When it comes to the RFK site, I have no emotions swaying my analysis.
Perhaps that’s why Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen has seen all of this with much of the same lucidity over the years. He grew up in Alabama, far away from any Burgundy and Gold fandom. His ward, where I used to live, backs up right to the RFK site, and will be the most directly impacted by what happens there, along with Ward 7.
“It’s just not a good use of our land and our resources and I think it’s a really wasted opportunity for what our city truly needs,” Allen told me more than six years ago, though the words ring truer than ever today. “We’re in an affordable housing crisis in our city, and here we have an opportunity to extend our neighborhoods down to the Anacostia River with new housing.”
The city has what it has always wanted — control over a crucial, waterfront site. It has the opportunity to build everything else in the plan that the community actually wants and needs, especially more housing. It can do all of that — and, in fact, more of it, with the extra space — without a new NFL stadium. Other neighborhoods have shown that no such anchor is necessary. That will preclude the need for largely unused parking lots, and allow the city to save that much needed money for future projects, like a revamped Stadium-Armory metro station, and everything else it may well need the money for in the near term. It will leave the city a better, more liveable place for generations to come.
Now there’s a headline-making legacy a mayor should be excited to embrace.