Washington, DC’s subsidization of the renovation of RFK Stadium — the once and future home of the Washington Commanders — “is a BFD,” Mayor Muriel Bowser said, verging on an expletive to convey her enthusiasm for the proposal, to which the DC Council assented on August 1 by a vote of 9 to 3. Another, final vote to approve the stadium will occur in September.
“Big” is, indeed, an apt adjective for the affaire d’RFK. The public funds to be spent — $1.7 billion in direct subsidies and $2.7 billion in indirect subsidies — are prodigious. The scope of the development plan transcends the mere renovation of an old sports venue. The stadium campus is set to include (besides the stadium) multiple parking structures, bars and restaurants, retail stores, an $89 million indoor sportsplex, a planned grocery store, a pharmacy, daycare facilities, a hotel, 6,000 or more housing units, and a “30-acre stretch of riverfront community commons.” An extension of Washington’s metro system also may be undertaken. In Bowser’s phrase: “180 acres of vacant land, activated.” In short, the deal amounts to a wholesale bid to transform a languishing portion of eastern Washington DC into a vital and bustling hub. An ambitious central-planning gambit, if not a hubristic one.
As I sat in the Council chamber on the Tuesday before the vote, waiting to testify against the subsidy package, the bigness of the moment struck me in a different sense. I was the 350th witness on a list of 503, and the hearing sprawled over 13 hours. But the hopes of the stadium-subsidy advocates were similarly expansive. In their minds, a stadium deal will yield prosperity, upward mobility, the stimulation of local business, civic pride, community engagement, youth development, affordable housing, and much else. All good things to be wished for will result from RFK’s revival; all good things will materialize together, in unity. As I recall, nobody supporting subsidies noted either the other uses to which that land could be put or the benefits likely to flow therefrom.
I heard roughly 10 hours of testimony. In the ample time for reflection afforded me, two facts became vibrantly apparent: Mayor Bowser and the DC Council have become fixated on the sort of flashy infrastructure project that has tantalized politicians dating back to Vespasian and Pericles and the pharaohs of Egypt, and they have managed to disperse perks among various of the District’s interest groups in order to obtain the needed political backing. Great municipal works require the enthusiasm of many constituencies which DC elected officials — not to mention the Commanders organization itself — have masterfully cultivated.
First, as always, is the cultivation of votes. Commanders fans, of course, wish to see their team play once again within the District. But, as was made clear during Tuesday’s hearing, many have credulously internalized the notion that a new RFK Stadium will uniquely invigorate economic activity. “The stadium redevelopment represents far more than the return of a major sports franchise or a new entertainment venue,” one witness declared, capturing the starry-eyed optimism of the proposal’s advocates. “Its capacity to shift the trajectory of underserved families…cannot be overemphasized.” Local business representatives also testified in favor of subsidization, anticipating the chance for business partnerships with the Commanders.
This confidence, although perhaps bolstered by a methodologically discredited report commissioned by Bowser, finds no grounding in the corpus of economic research on the topic. The “literature contains near-universal consensus evidence that sports venues do not generate large positive effects on local economies,” academics John Charles Bradbury, Dennis Coates, and Brad R. Humphreys report. The trio further notes that “the consensus…of economic studies” find that “the benefits of hosting professional sports franchises are not sufficient to justify large public subsidies.” Instead of spawning economic activity, new stadiums merely redistribute it. As put in a 2016 Brookings study, “any economic activity generated while attending a game, will largely if not entirely be offset by reduced spending on other local leisure activities.” Stadiums are not invested with any special magical facility for economic development, particularly when contrasted with other business enterprises that could occupy the same land. Indeed, a city report from the Office of the Budget Director indicates that higher tax revenues would flow from the businesses that would occupy a mixed-use development (sans stadium) on the RFK site than from a redevelopment of the stadium itself. Nonetheless, promises of bread, circuses, and coliseums seem once again to have proven themselves politically potent.
The proposed subsidy deal is profligate in its gift-giving to interest groups. For one, the District’s unions are assured that organized labor will man the construction sites of the stadium and its parking lots. Even that, however, has failed to satisfy all DC lawmakers. Some lawmakers — and several witnesses who testified Tuesday on behalf of labor interests — found this unsatisfactory, seeking to secure union-contract guarantees for the businesses that will operate across the developed stadium district. Nonetheless, the Commanders agreed to so-called “labor peace agreements” for many workers in the forthcoming development, securing the assent of several unions — among them the AFL-CIO — shortly before Friday’s vote.
Of course, privileging organized labor disadvantages free labor. One witness at the hearing, a CPA, noted this explicitly. By restricting contracts to unionized firms, he argued, the government “would be excluding [non-unionized] DC companies and DC residents from doing work on this project, which is a great opportunity [for them].” Moreover, in his judgment, the District will find it lacks a sufficient number of union workers to meet the forthcoming demand (just 10 percent of construction workers are union members), necessitating the hiring of out-of-towners.
Washington, DC’s political proclivities being what they are, the interest groups that local officials and the Commanders thought necessary to placate were ideological as well as economic. One witness touted “retail space for local needs with opportunity for grocery stores and small minority-owned businesses.” According to another, “Food equity is key.”
For council members and activists, another ideologically salient condition was the 1,800 affordable housing units — a full third of the anticipated new housing. The gentleman seated beside me at the dais during my testimony, a criminal-justice advocate, urged the Council to “set aside” housing units specifically for ex-convicts. This demand was not met. Even so, the Commanders, seeking to cinch the deal, pledged “to hire justice-involved individuals” — or, in the verbiage of my dais-mate, “our justice-impacted neighbors” — “for 15 percent of available construction and permanent jobs.”
Then there were the environmentalists. Myriad witnesses called on the Council to enforce a net-zero mandate on the stadium campus. And although the green activists failed to secure that whole kit and caboodle they sought, they did not depart empty-handed. “The Club will build and operate the Stadium to a LEED O+M Platinum standard and commits to achieving a minimum of LEED O+M Gold for the mixed-use development across all its projects constructed on the RFK Campus,” the Commanders said the day after the hearing. The team also committed to investigate further clean-energy technologies. What costs this will impose upon the development area and upon the businesses that will operate within it remains to be seen.
To market its subsidization of a private business owned by a billionaire whose net worth exceeds $10 billion, the DC government and the Commanders shrouded the cronyism afoot in promises of an economic revolution. With the deal, everyone will receive just what he wants — everyone, that is, besides the taxpayers whose hard-earned money will fund a quixotic project with scant chance of success. As I said in my testimony, “There is nothing I would like better than for these benefits to materialize, and for these neighborhoods to be revitalized, but I fear that they are nothing more than a mirage.”
Mayor Bowser was not mistaken that the RFK Stadium project is a “BFD.” But big is not always beautiful.