Commanders Stadium Deal’s Housing and Job Promises Are a Facade

Washington, DC, is on the verge of approving a $4.4 billion public funding deal to bring the Washington Commanders back to the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium site. It’s being pitched as a transformative investment in affordable housing and equity.

But it’s essentially another tax-subsidized stadium package with some familiar characteristics: a new stadium by 2030, limited job creation, affordable housing maybe by 2040, and minimal accountability.

The city shouldn’t tie its affordable housing fate to the success of a stadium endeavor. But failing that, it should get a fair deal where a new stadium isn’t the only guaranteed outcome.

When the Nationals Park bonds come off the books, the “ballpark fee” that financed that outlay of taxpayer funds could be redirected into housing bonds rather than to ill-conceived public financing for stadium infrastructure. The land being committed to the deal, 180 acres, could be used for community-led development, rather than a giveaway to billionaire team owners.

Even if city taxpayers ultimately do subsidize the Commanders’ stadium, that funding should come with legally enforceable affordability benchmarks on a clear, short timeline—not a vague, 15-year promise dressed up like a development commitment.

The proposed legislation locks in decades of tax breaks, infrastructure bonds, and zoning exemptions for the Commanders’ new stadium on the Anacostia waterfront. Tellingly, it doesn’t deliver the same certainty for timely delivery of affordable housing or any other public benefits.

The DC Council has already passed the bill on its first vote, with a final decision expected soon. In the meantime, lawmakers and residents must take a hard look at what is being codified into the final law and what is merely being promised in external statements.

The Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in Washington.

Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Before we delve into the Commanders’ deal, we should first recognize that publicly funded stadiums almost never deliver the jobs, tax revenue, or revitalization that their champions promise. Decades of empirical evidence support this fact.

Cities shell out billions in taxpayer funds through tax-exempt bonds and exemptions only to end up with underwhelming job creation, sluggish retail growth, and long-term maintenance and infrastructure costs they didn’t budget for.

Yet here we are again. The Commanders’ RFK plan is broadly following the same playbook: promise of “mixed-use” development and use of buzzwords such as “affordable housing” and “revitalization.”

In this case, the proposed bill sets up funding mechanisms for the Commanders so robust they could fund a small city over the same period—with affordable housing delivery outsourced to a term sheet not included in the legislation and broad promises made in interviews and public meetings.

The bill itself only speaks of housing in non-specific terms: “The District intends for the comprehensive redevelopment of the RFK Campus to create a vibrant, multi-use community and destination that will create new jobs, business opportunities, housing, community amenities, and neighborhood-serving retail.”

Only elsewhere, in a separate financial analysis, is the deal said to call for roughly 6,000 housing units, of which 30% must be affordable. That works out to a seemingly unenforceable promise to build 1,800 affordable housing units in exchange for $4.4 billion in tax expenditures.

Quick math shows that this amounts to about $2.4 million in taxpayer funds per affordable unit built—hardly an efficient use of resources for an affordable housing bill, unless those homes are adorned in gold leaf.

It doesn’t get much better if one assumes it’s a job-creation bill. The claimed number of positions created is 16,000, and 14,000 of those are construction jobs that will disappear once construction is complete. That leaves 2,000 permanent full-time and part-time jobs—a dubious return for a $4.4 billion outlay.

The proposed timeline also speaks volumes. The stadium supposedly will open in 2030. Housing might follow a decade later if everything goes according to plan. The legal obligations are all on the public side, but the public benefits are aspirational, deferred, and contingent on the stadium’s success.

Further, if the housing is never built, the Commanders will face no meaningful economic sanction. According to the term sheet and public statements from policymakers, the Commanders would just need to pay rent on undeveloped parcels when they fail to meet housing or mixed-use development milestones. That isn’t even a slap on the wrist; that’s just a carrying cost.

When the jobs are mostly limited to those required to build the stadium, housing is an afterthought, and only the team’s tax breaks are codified in law, the true nature of a bill is revealed. The city’s taxpayers are being shepherded toward underwriting luxury boxes today in exchange for a handshake commitment that housing may arrive a decade after the stadium opens.

Once the Nationals Park bonds are retired, the city plans to redirect the MLB stadium fee toward new borrowing for RFK infrastructure. Instead, that revenue could easily capitalize a housing bond package. Such a structure could develop thousands of units at a range of affordability points, delivered on public terms.

RFK is 180 acres of city-managed land being handed over to a franchise-controlled developer on favorable lease terms. Instead, DC could lease portions to community land trusts, co-ops, or mission-driven developers with affordability and equitability covenants baked in. That would ensure long-term affordability and neighborhood accountability, rather than speculative profit-taking and billionaire rent-seeking.

If the city insists on keeping the stadium deal alive, it should at least demand more than a rent penalty for failure to meet construction benchmarks.

The city council should attach legally enforceable housing delivery milestones with specific deadlines, such as demanding 25% of units be delivered before the stadium opens in 2030. Missed benchmarks should trigger automatic clawbacks, mandatory reinvestment, or public reversion of undeveloped land—not polite requests for rent checks.

Washington has better ways to attain affordable housing east of the Anacostia than going along with the development dreams of Washington Commanders ownership. And those methods wouldn’t require waiting until 2040.

Andrew Leahey is a tax and technology attorney, principal at Hunter Creek Consulting, and practice professor at Drexel Kline School of Law. Follow him on Mastodon at @andrew@esq.social

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