Photo by dbking on Flickr.

Mayor Fenty wants to bring the Redskins back to DC, calling it “a big mistake” to let the team move to Landover in 1997. Why does Fenty want them back? Civic pride. Fenty told the Post,

“If people were around D.C. when the Redskins won the Super Bowl and in the quote-unquote heyday of past years, there’s nothing like it in Washington, D.C. There’s nothing like the excitement and having a Super Bowl team, walking around after the Super Bowl. So we want all that to come back to the city. It was a big mistake letting them leave, but we’ll get them back.”

When it comes to stadiums, pride often goeth before a fall—economic fall. As the article points out, New York and Dallas are both building new stadiums at a cost of about $1 billion apiece. DC could do a lot to generate civic pride with $1 billion. We could throw the biggest state fair ever. We could lobby for voting rights in a campaign larger than any seen before. We could build a whole streetcar system. We could repave most of our sidewalks with gold.

And there’s one more advantage of buying civic pride directly instead of relying on a football team: you can get the “excitement” even without having to win a Super Bowl, something the Redskins haven’t done in 16 years.

Plus, football stadiums almost never help the surrounding neighborhood. As Marc Fisher pointed out in the context of the soccer stadium, while the Verizon Center hosts 220 events a year and the Nationals ballpark around 100, an NFL team only plays eight home games a year. The strong tradition of tailgating means that more people will drive to football than to baseball, even if the stadium is next to Metro instead of a mile’s walk down a suburban street.

Economists have found that stadiums never pay off for their host cities in bringing in concession revenue or more fan spending at nearby restaurants; if anything, nearby restaurants just cannibalize other restaurants elsewhere. The study I saw (I can’t find the link just now) found that the a stadium only actually benefits a city when it stimulates development in the surrounding area, and even then it still may fall short of spending the money directly on economic development.

Near the ballpark, in what was a blighted part of town, there is substantial development; some claim that’s because of the ballpark, others claim it would have happened anyway. But around RFK stadium, there’s no way it will generate development. The nearby neighborhood is doing just fine, and most of it is already built out and even historically protected; other parts, like the Reservation 13/Hill East development, are moving forward just fine on their own.

If anything, replacing the acres of parking with more mixed-use neighborhood and parks, perhaps like NCPC’s National Capital Framework Plan suggests, would do more for the city’s and surrounding neighborhood’s economic development than any football stadium.

Fenty:

“As Jack Evans has pointed out on the city council, [the land in Landover] could probably be used for a lot of other valuable things. We have a stadium site sitting here ready, willing and able to go. A new stadium could go on there. We could probably donate almost all of the land to the stadium and, I think, build a brand-new stadium that could accommodate a Super Bowl that has all of the new trappings of new stadiums. … We just want it to happen as fast as humanly possible.”

Memo to Mayor Fenty and Jack Evans: our land here could be used for a lot of other valuable things, too. Let’s just start using that land, and forget about blowing $1 billion just for the occasional possibility of a little excitement.