Stadiums - Greater Greater Washington

A potential DC United stadium deal could have DC give Akridge its aging police HQ on Indiana Avenue, in exchange for Akridge's Buzzard Point land and Akridge building a new police HQ on city land. (WBJ)

Every stadium deal has a subsidy

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 08:15:00 EDT

by Nick Casey

Matt Yglesias is skeptical that a DC United stadium deal would be good for DC. The team may pay for the stadium but the land and infrastructure would be free. All that for 17 games per year. (Slate)

A DC United stadium is likely to be truly urban (Jan 24, 2011)
Soccer stadium won't stimulate the economy (May 29, 2008)
"Excitement" not worth $1B stadium (Oct 14, 2008)
DC is better off without Redskins stadium or practice fields (Nov 4, 2011)
Some still carry torch for new NFL stadium, lots of parking (Jan 8, 2013)

United stadium looking likely

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 08:44:00 EDT

by Jereme Altendorf

City Administrator Allen Lew is confident there can be a deal for DC United to build a stadium on Pepco and Akridge land in Buzzard Point. (Post) ... The at-large candidates are supportive as well. (DCist)

And...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 08:34:00 EDT

by Jereme Altendorf

Anthony Brown met with federal officials to talk about funding the Red and Purple Lines. (BBJ) ... The Park Service may reduce late-night hours for restrooms and rangers on the National Mall. (WTOP) ... DC United is again looking at Maryland for a stadium.

Some still carry torch for new NFL stadium, lots of parking

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 15:07:00 EDT

A few DC officials haven't stopped trying to get the Landover NFL team back to the District. Even though one dedicated champion of wooing the team, Michael Brown, is off the DC Council, Tim Craig reports that Council Chairman Phil Mendelson is promoting the idea, along with Mayor Gray and dedicated sports fan Jack Evans.

Photo by _rockinfree on Flickr.

Evans, perhaps reacting to criticism that he'd pour public money into the stadium, insists that the city wouldn't spend any public money on a stadium. However, he says, the city might pay for new streets and parking lots.

It's good he wants to make the team pay for the stadium itself, and as Craig explains, that's likely going to make any deal not appealing to owner Dan Snyder. However, even paying for parking lots is a big expense, and a bad one. New York spent $39 million on parking lots at the new Yankee Stadium.

Plus, they ended up finding the lots going largely empty, thanks in part to a new Metro-North station at the ballpark. The garage operator ended up defaulting on the garage bonds because of low usage. Public spending on garages at any new stadium largely amounts to spending public money to encourage people not to use the Metro that we also already spend public money to operate.

Why do these apparently bad deals keep resurfacing? It's simple: some people think that having professional sports teams here is integral enough to our civic pride that it's worth large sums to get them, even if the deal doesn't pay off economically and wouldn't fly if it were a deal for just a generic private development.

A few months ago, I was on NewsTalk with Bruce DePuyt right after Jack Evans. We mainly talked about development without underground parking and Evans spoke to that issue as well in his segment. But they had an interesting exchange about sports stadiums, who've had no greater booster than Evans.

DePuyt asked Evans about plans for a soccer stadium at Buzzard Point, and what the District's subsidy might be. Evans asserted that it would pay off economically, but even if it doesn't, he said the District should pay to bring in professional sports simply because of "civic pride":

There's a civic pride that comes from this. When I was pushing the baseball stadium, I used say to people, we're we do it because we want a team. Start with that. Whether it's economically viable or not, who cares? We want a baseball team because Washington, DC was the only major city in America without one.
Do we economically analyze every museum we build? If we did, we wouldn't build any museums. It's a part of our culture.

I'd note that actually, most museums get their funds from private individuals, foundations, and the federal government. The District cut arts funding during the recession, and doesn't spend $611 million on a museum. On the other hand, it has contributed to help many local theaters and other prominent arts organizations buy and renovate their buildings over the years.

68 comments

"Excitement" not worth $1B stadium (Oct 14, 2008)
DC versus New York (Mar 6, 2008)
DC is better off without Redskins stadium or practice fields (Nov 4, 2011)
Gray administration holding up Reservation 13 for Redskins (Feb 16, 2012)
Can NYC build me a personal garage too? (Jan 2, 2008)

And...

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 08:29:00 EDT

Help the DC Streetcar pick a tagline. (DCist) ... HPRB gets a new chair. (City Paper) ... Fairfax Connector will start its 495 HOT lanes bus service next month. (WTOP) ... Pepco is talking to DC officials about a new DC United Stadium at Buzzard Point. (Post)

Fairfax to restore Connector, make room for WMATA (Apr 19, 2010)
Moran: I know we can't lay more asphalt, but DC should (Aug 25, 2009)
Successful speed cameras require fair speed limits (May 21, 2012)
Bowser doesn't support higher speed limits (Nov 7, 2012)
Lower speed limits, wider lanes won't fix the GW Parkway (Jul 2, 2008)

Every building doesn't need to be the same

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 10:28:00 EDT

Bruce DePuyt and I talked Tuesday about the Babe's project, a planned 55-65-unit apartment building one block from Tenleytown Metro which will not have underground parking and whose residents will not be able to get resident parking stickers.

A lot of people are nervous about this proposal, but it really should be a no-brainer. The Office of Planning report said that there are 560 parking spaces available for rent nearby. In just the garage at Cityline at Tenley (the building with the Container Store), there are 110-120 spaces going unused each night, and 50 during the day.

That means that even if almost everyone brought a car and just rented a space, everything would be fine. There's a strange legacy assumption that everyone who parks would need to either park in their own building or on the street, but there are actually a lot of garages in Tenleytown.

Plus, Douglas Development is explicitly planning to market the building to people who don't want to have cars. The Container Store at Cityline only sells containers. That doesn't make it a bad store because it doesn't also sell furniture or clothing. If you want containers, go there. If not, shop somewhere else. Likewise, there's nothing wrong with having a building for people mostly without cars, and other buildings and houses and neighborhoods can serve people with different needs.

Bruce was worried that someone with a car would want to buy a unit from an initial owner (actually, it's an apartment building, not condos, but I forgot to mention that on the segment). Regardless, I pointed out that some apartments in some buildings have decks, or more bathrooms, and others don't. People choose where to live based on the available amenities, and not every apartment, condo or house has to serve every need for every person.

This is a simple economic concept, but it seems to escape many people, like Councilmember Jack Evans (ward 2), who was on the show before me. Bruce asked Evans about the proposal. Evans made the odd argument that a building designed for people to ride transit one block from the Tenleytown Metro is a bad idea because there isn't a Metro station in his own neighborhood of Georgetown.

Evans said,

I think it's a major mistake to do that in the District of Columbia. The reason being that the Metro system, the bus system does not work well enough to get people around in the city. I live in Georgetown. There is no Metro. For me to get around I'm taking buses, transferring, it takes me a long time to get anywhere.

This thinking reflects one of the most common cognitive errors we see in policy debates. People extrapolate their own experiences to everyone else. If I need to drive, everyone must. If I need a certain size apartment, everyone must. Therefore, the government must force the market to build those things.

We don't all need the same type of housing. Some people do need, or want, large suburban houses with big yards and 4 bedrooms and 2-car garages. We have a lot of those. Other people would rather save money and time and buy or rent a small unit without parking if it lets them live near the Metro.

Our zoning need not force everything into a single mold. That's what 1960s planners tried to do, and we know it was a failure. With the agreement to withhold residential parking permits to residents of this building, there's no way it can negatively effect anyone else. That means there's no reason to forbid Douglas from constructing the apartments they think the market demands.

25 comments

Parking-free, mixed-use building is right for Tenleytown (Jan 11, 2012)
Support accessory dwellings in Montgomery today (Sep 11, 2012)
Legalize two-family houses in Montgomery County (Jul 31, 2012)
TDM strategies help reduce car dependence (Dec 4, 2008)
Smartphone app tries to help people share parking (Sep 29, 2011)

Brooklyn Islanders

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 08:31:00 EDT

The New York Islanders hockey team will move from Long Island to Brooklyn and play in the new Barclays Center. Is it because urban places are ascendant, or just because Nassau County wouldn't pay for a new arena? (NYT, Steve S.)

Long Islanders crave alternatives to suburbia (Jan 25, 2008)
Brooklyn puts retail in municipal building (Oct 31, 2007)
Weekend reading: "Taking my talents to South Beach" (Jul 18, 2010)
DDOT suggests cutting 395 to Mass Ave (Jun 26, 2008)
Cuts spur new New York subway map (May 30, 2010)

Yankee stadium parking is a bust

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 08:30:00 EDT

A few years after New York replaced Bronx parks with garages for the Yankees, the garage company has defaulted on the debt. Most fans take transit, and the garages only averaged 43% full. (Mobilizing the Region)

Railgate to the Metrodome

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 08:28:00 EDT

Are football stadiums incompatible with urbanism? Not in Minneapolis, where Vikings fans who take the light rail or bike "railgate" before games. Food trucks assemble by the station to feed the fans. (StarTribune)

Near Southeast rebirth started before the Nats came along

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 11:39:00 EDT

by David Cranor

With the Nationals boasting the best record in the Major League, and the Near Southeast neighborhood coming alive, journalists and smart-growth bloggers alike are again claiming the stadium begot the neighborhood's transformation. But the neighborhood's development history tells us the situation is more complex.

Photo by tramod on Flickr.

The media hammered the storyline of the stadium as neighborhood savior back when the recession brought development to a halt. But now the trope is popping up as fast as cranes on the DC skyline. Even Jim Graham said "it's clear that if that stadium hadn't been built, you wouldn't have all this development."

Exaggerations like that are just plain wrong. The transformation of Near Southeast began years earlier. New federal and District policies opened land for development, the District's political leadership changed, and the Green Line was completed, connecting Navy Yard to Maryland suburbs. When the stadium site was announced in 2004, neighborhood development was well underway.

Near SE planning started long before Nats

As neighborhood blog JDLand has meticulously documented, the neighborhood's transformation began in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The District cleared blighted property and the Federal government decided to make the vacant land it owned available for development. In 1996, the District demolished the Ellen Wilson housing project under a Hope VI grant.

Two years later, the last of the Capper high-rises and the old Washington Star building were both closed, and parts of Capper demolished in 2000. In that same year, Congress passed the Southeast Federal Center Public-Private Development Act of 2000, allowing the GSA to begin negotiations with private developers to develop 55 acres of the Southeast Federal Center.

Over the same time period, the national and local government were making deals. In the late '90s, the Navy awarded a contract to build five new buildings in the Navy Yard as part of the NAVSEA Headquarters Project, the Marines inked a deal to build the Marine Bachelor Enlisted Quarters on the Capper footprint, and Federal and District agencies that controlled land along the Anacostia signed an agreement to develop the ambitious Anacostia Waterfront Initiative.

After a long delay, the GSA finalized deals to bring a new Department of Transportation Headquarters and the massive Yards mixed-use development to the Southeast Federal Center. Around that time, HUD awarded DC a $35 million grant to build more than 1500 new housing units at the Arthur Capper and Carrollsburg project sites, filling most of the area between M Street and the Southeast Freeway from 2nd to 7th Street.

In 2003, the District released the South Capitol Gateway and Corridor Improvement Study, which called for fundamentally redesigning South Capitol Street as a neighborhood boulevard and replacing the Douglass Bridge; and the Council approved funding for Capitol Hill Tower—a combined Courtyard by Marriott hotel and 344-unit apartment that would open in 2006. Finally, in early 2004, planning began on Canal Park.

Cranes were up when the Nats came to town

Prior to the announcement of the baseball stadium, construction was well under way. In 2002, two large office buildings on M Street opened and 4,100 NAVSEA employees started work at the Navy Yard. In 2003 the Federal Gateway building opened and the next year the Marine Barracks.

Maritime Plaza opened its two office buildings in 2001 and 2003. And developers and officials were negotiating or planning other projects, like the WASA site, Half Street, 20M, Florida Rock and Diamond Teague Park, during this time as well.

It was only after all of this had occurred, that District selected the area for the baseball stadium and even later, in a very close vote, that they financed the stadium. It would be another 14 months before the Council passed the lease agreement that would make construction of the baseball stadium possible. In fact, the vast majority of projects—by value, acre or number—in the area had their start before the stadium site was finalized.

More than just real estate deals

Political leadership played a important part in revitalization as well. The election of Anthony Williams as Mayor in 1998 ended the Barry era, and instilled confidence in the business community that investment in DC was safe. The Williams administration spearheaded the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative and worked hard to create an development-friendly environment.

The Federal Government assisted in 1997 with the DC First Time Home Buyer Tax Credit and again in 2001 when Congress dissolved the Financial Control Board. As Garance Franke-Ruta wrote in a recent piece in the Atlantic, "[t]he tax credit had a dramatic impact in encouraging moderate and middle-income people to put down roots in DC, especially younger, college-educated white people, and invest their sweat equity in fixing up rundown housing stock."

So strong was the change, that in 2002 the Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate (AFIRE) named Washington, DC the top city in the US and the world for real estate investment, only a decade after being known as the "Murder Capital of the World."

Better transit brought more people, more investment

Another major catalyst was the completion of WMATA's Green Line. Until 1999, Navy Yard was the ~~end~~ penultimate station on a stub line that only served a handful of stations, all in central DC. That year, it was extended south of the river and into Prince George's County in 2001 making the area more easily accessible, particularly to suburban workers.

A study of neighborhoods along the Green Line from Navy Yard to Petworth showed that during the 2000s, the area added more young people, more multi-family units, and more jobs than either the Rosslyn-Balston corridor or the Northwest DC Red Line Corridor. The baseball stadium can't be viewed as the catalyst for the whole corridor, but the Metro line can be.

While development deals and transit improvements played large parts, Near Southeast also benefited from more general forces at work. As the new millennium began, Washington was experiencing a regional boom. Several areas went through a massive redevelopment from 1997-2007 including Gallery Place, Near SE, U Street, Barracks Row, Columbia Heights, and Rosslyn-Ballston. The pattern of development in those areas, over that time period, looks very similar.

At the same time, DC and its neighborhoods benefited from a general return to cities. Not only has DC's population been growing since the 2000 census, but "28 of the nation's biggest metropolitan counties grew faster from April 2010 to July 2011 than the rest of the nation as a whole."

Sites adjacent to the stadium still empty

If Councilmember Graham's assertion that "we wouldn't have all this development" were true, we'd expect to see development start closer to the stadium after it was built and radiate away from there over time. But mapping out the development, what we see is that almost every lot next to the stadium remains undeveloped.

Development sites in Near Southeast. Blue=pre-stadium, orange=during stadium finalization, purple=after stadium; shaded=under construction or completed; solid=cleared or planned only

The area east of the Metro station seems to be the core of the transformation, with later work building off of that. Only one property that abuts the stadium, the Camden South Capitol condos, has been developed in the 8 years since the stadium site was announced. You have to look across M Street to find any other post-stadium development, and those 5 properties are as linked to the pre-stadium development as they are to the stadium itself.

No stadium can be just as good

Thanks to New York's failed bid for this summer's Olympics, we also have a recent answer to the question of what happens when a stadium isn't built. The answer is development.

When New York City lost the 2012 Olympics to London, the city revamped its proposed stadium site to create Hudson Yards. This development has so much potential, the New York Times wrote "the Olympic bid's defeat may have been one of the best things to happen for the city's growth in recent memory."

There is no doubt that Nats stadium, by pumping $1 billion into the neighborhood and using eminent domain to consolidate property, may have sped up the Near Southeast revitalization. In time, it may even prove to bring additional development of the area.

But the evidence so far is that, at best, it hasn't been a drag on the process that was already in place. Near Southeast was a neighborhood on its way when the Nationals were still playing in Montreal.

62 comments

A DC United stadium is likely to be truly urban (Jan 24, 2011)
New Partners: The Yards and public-private partnerships (Feb 7, 2008)
Then and Now: Capitol Quarter (Sep 1, 2009)
Could Southwest become DC's second downtown? (Oct 1, 2010)
Southeast has as many neighborhoods as Northwest (Apr 2, 2010)

Arenas hurt cities?

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 08:39:00 EDT

by Thaddeus Bell

A new study finds that cities don't benefit from public investment in basketball arenas. Previous studies have found similar results from football and baseball stadiums. (ThinkProgress)

Soccer stadium won't stimulate the economy (May 29, 2008)
DC United eyeing Buzzard Point, Florida Market (Jan 19, 2011)
Live chat: Brett Abrams, Tuesday at 2 pm (Apr 6, 2009)
A DC United stadium is likely to be truly urban (Jan 24, 2011)
How to create a successful urban stadium (Feb 18, 2009)

DCU inches toward stadium

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 08:21:00 EDT

Now that DC United has new investors, a new stadium at Buzzard Point seems more likely. Could it help develop the area much like the Verizon Center helped develop its neighborhood? (Post)

A DC United stadium is likely to be truly urban (Jan 24, 2011)
DC United eyeing Buzzard Point, Florida Market (Jan 19, 2011)
How to create a successful urban stadium (Feb 18, 2009)
"Excitement" not worth $1B stadium (Oct 14, 2008)
DC is better off without Redskins stadium or practice fields (Nov 4, 2011)

Evans withdraws ticket plan, blasts criticism

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 09:26:00 EDT

Thanks to the many of you who sent letters yesterday, Jack Evans decided not to propose his budget amendment to allocate free sports tickets among councilmembers. Evans is also, not surprisingly, displeased that I compared his attitude over tickets to malfeasance from Harry Thomas Jr, Kwame Brown, and Harriette Walters.

Photo by afagen on Flickr.

Primarily, he argues that it was inappropriate to criticize him because he was just proposing to tweak a law that gives the council free tickets, not create a new one.

While it's indeed important to get the legal details as precise as possible in our articles, it's also still wrong for councilmembers to get free tickets. Any law that clarifies who gets which tickets only cements the dangerous attitude that members are entitled to free goodies by virtue of their positions.

As Evans noted, the law already requires half of DC's free tickets at the Verizon Center and ballpark to go to the DC Council, and the other half to the mayor. Evans' amendment would not create a new ticket requirement, but would have spelled out exactly how many tickets go to each member, as well as the parking passes.

Evans is right that my original intro paragraph was imprecise. I wrote that he "wants to enshrine into DC law the current practice that politicians get free sports tickets." He notes that this is already enshrined.

It is indeed important to try to get details right. I should have been more accurate. I was thrown off slightly by the Post headline that said, "D.C. politicians' free tickets could be written into law," but that's not a reason not to get things right as much as possible.

However, this also isn't the point. There is a big difference between a law that says the council gets some tickets, and a law that explicitly divvies them up among members. It also means something to take steps to further codify details of such a scheme into the law. This sends an even stronger message that these tickets are for councilmembers, their guests, or people they choose to reward. It sends the message that these are perks to which members are entitled.

Let's say 3 people come across a lost wallet on the street, and start quarreling over who saw it first and who should get the money. Is the proper response to try to help them agree on a division, or to tell them to mail it back to the person whose driver's license is in the wallet?

What Jack clearly doesn't understand is that most residents view the entire ticket giveaway as dirty. Try to move the piles of dirt around, and you just get dirtier.

Evans is the District's biggest cheerleader for huge public land and money deals for sports teams. He also benefits personally from these deals. As a result of the baseball deal, he now gets free tickets. If he succeeds in wooing the Redskins to the District, he will likely get them too. And so will his colleagues. How can we trust that they're acting in the public's best interest?

Having free parking passes (a current practice that Evans' bill would explicitly continue) also distorts our council's view. DC has made enormous efforts to make the ballpark accessible by transit, and to encourage most baseball fans to use those options. If councilmembers get free parking which most of the public doesn't get, will they recognize the value of funding better transit service?

Small perks can make a huge difference in someone's psychological outlook. Evans has been very clear that he doesn't see a problem with free tickets and parking passes, or having substantial outside income from lobbbying activities, or as he said on the WAMU Politics Hour last Friday, with the District's campaign finance laws. Most residents I've spoken with absolutely do think these are problems, and feel that the Council's ethical compass as a whole is seriously miscalibrated.

21 comments

Free sports tickets show DC politicians' sense of entitlement (Jun 5, 2012)
Evans still doesn't understand parking limits (Aug 25, 2011)
The DC Council should abolish Constituent Service Funds (Nov 29, 2011)
Three quick fixes to DC Council credibility (Mar 2, 2011)
Have DC Councilmembers ever tried to park downtown on a Saturday? (Dec 17, 2008)

Soccer proposal gets numbers

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 08:11:00 EDT

A soccer stadium at Buzzard Point would cost $157 million but bring in substantial economic benefits, argues a report from a group promoting sports in DC. They promise a better deal than the baseball stadium. (Post)

Don't drive the lane

Thu, 24 May 2012 08:47:00 EDT

The Barclays Center in Brooklyn, the new home for the Nets, only has 500 parking spots near the arena. The team is pleading with people to not drive there for games and instead take transit. (NY Mag)

Bringing crowds to a game in style, minus the traffic (Aug 24, 2011)
Brooklyn puts retail in municipal building (Oct 31, 2007)
The Triboro RX (Jun 30, 2007)
"Emergency no parking" permits now online (Feb 25, 2010)

Nats Park neighborhood on the upswing

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 08:28:00 EDT

As the Nationals are poised to contend this year, the Navy Yard neighborhood around the ballpark is starting to show results. The stadium also has not been a drain on city finances, with a special business tax bringing in more than expected and the team drawing 85% of its fans from outside DC. (Post)

Residents unimpressed by non-answers on Redskins "plan"

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 13:45:00 EDT

Last night, Mayor Gray, Jack Evans, and Michael Brown met with a skeptical audience, mostly residents from wards 6 and 7, about reported plans to put a Redskins practice facility on the Reservation 13/Hill East land.

Image by Brian Flahaven on Twitter.

Readers who attended the meeting report that the officials seemed to genuinely expect that the crowd would just cheer for anything that helped the Redskins, regardless of policy merit or economic justification.

Tim Krepp:

The mayor, and Jack Evans, and Michael Brown kept repeating "we'd like to bring the Redskins back" and waited for the applause. To say it fell flat was is an understatement. I was frankly shocked at how bad these politicians were at politics. It was a chance for them to sell their plan, or at least reassure a nervous and frustrated audience, and they spent the time lecturing us.

Joe:

Tim is absolutely right, all four of them were absolutely tone deaf last night. They've clearly already decided what they want. It'll be up to those of us in Wards 6 and 7 to fight like hell to stop it. I'm glad there were so many people out there and that we're, if not in front of this, at least ready to deal with it.

MLD:

It seems to me the point of the meeting was that the CMs were hoping to get a lot of people agreeing with them and cheering on the general idea of the training facility. Instead they found that there was a pretty solid opposition to the training facility from people at the meeting.

ETD:

Its clear that all the officials are drooling at anything football related. Even if it means the destruction of city services, residential, city income, affordable housing, and health care services for residents. They did say that the training facility could have a medical facility for the study of concussion-related sports injuries.

Gray and the councilmembers emphasized that there wasn't a specific plan, but it seemed to depend on how you define "plan." They seem to have done a lot of thinking about this issue, and have made up their minds, but for political reasons wanted to downplay any talk that this is a done deal.

ETD:

[Gray] stressed that there are no concrete plans, and nothing to show. But they were willing to talk about its concussion health center, job creation, and its possibility of a catalyst for development. The neighborhood thought there was going to be some specific details, but he didn't bring anything. If anything, the point of the meeting should, and did try to at times, focus on why the city hasn't chosen a developer yet for the master plan. Hopefully it did get them to move forward on picking one of the two developers for the smaller parcels of land to be developed.

Joe:

They were willing to talk specifics when they wanted, but mostly spent trying to distract the audience [by talking about the Eastern Branch Boys & Girls club] or pleading ignorance, like not knowing how the area is zoned. They also made no economic argument whatsoever for doing so. Gray, Evans and Alexander didn't even try, and Brown vaguely alluded to creating year-round jobs, but there was no discussion of the fact that although a training facility might create a few jobs, it wouldn't create nearly as many as a mixed-use development!

RG:

Redeveloping Reservation 13 is clearly a difficult task. I get that. But the Stadium-Armory Metro station has been open nearly 40 years! And there has been a master plan for the site for nearly a decade. Think of what Arlington would have done with a similar parcel of land by now.
Brian Flahaven was the star of the show. You could tell towards the end that Gray and Evans were frustrated at having been so thoroughly schooled in the game of retail politics by a mere ANC Commissioner. (Brown and Alexander were too clueless to realize they had been schooled.)
As for Alexander: What a joke. I wrote a check for Tom Brown immediately after the meeting.

Residents spent a lot of time and effort building consensus for a master plan for the area. They weren't happy to hear that Gray is basically stopping it from moving forward in the general hope they can work out something with the Redskins.

In response to questions, the officials refused to give any timeline when they would have more detail, or when they would just let the original plan move forward, or give neighbors any closure at all.

MLD:

They presented their idea, which is basically to ditch the Reservation 13 plan agreed upon years ago so they can keep pursuing this pie-in-the-sky idea of bringing the Redskins training camp to the area. And it seems like nobody at the meeting wanted the training camp except the councilmembers. They have talked to the team. They have not created a formal plan.

ETD:

From my understanding in 2008, there were four developers bidding on the master plan project. DC didn't pick any of them and let it sit. DC then decided to scale down the project to two parcels of land. Two developers are ready to go; DC just needs to pick a developer to start.

RG:

Jack Evans clearly doesn't get it. He kept trying to make the it an issue of Redskins fans versus non-Redskins fans. I like the Redskins as much as the next guy. But that's not the point Jack! The point is that when your constituents walk to the Metro, they walk through vibrant neighborhoods on streets lined with shops and services. When I walk to the Metro, I walk up a one-way street (19th) that is a freeway for Maryland commuters and past a vast and dilapidated surface parking lot for DC government employees, most of whom are Maryland residents.

Finally, Mike Debonis revealed that this meeting had been rescheduled (from the coming week) because Jack Evans couldn't make the meeting. Tommy Wells, whose ward borders this site and previously included it, was speaking at his alma mater, the University of Alabama School of Social Work.

Why can't Mayor Gray, who represents the entire city, attend a meeting to talk about a plan he's promoting without the help of a councilmember from a different ward?

51 comments

Gray administration holding up Reservation 13 for Redskins (Feb 16, 2012)
DC is better off without Redskins stadium or practice fields (Nov 4, 2011)
"Excitement" not worth $1B stadium (Oct 14, 2008)
On the calendar: Hear from at-large candidates, learn to write for blogs, talk Reservation 13 with Mayor Gray (Mar 13, 2012)
DC officials tweet, but with varying enthusiasm (Jun 24, 2011)

United will need to unite land

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 08:31:00 EDT

A 2010 plan for a new DC United stadium on Buzzard Point could require land from 4 different property owners. The team would likely finance the stadium itself, but DC might cover infrastructure improvements. (Post)

DC United eyeing Buzzard Point, Florida Market (Jan 19, 2011)
A DC United stadium is likely to be truly urban (Jan 24, 2011)
H Street United? (Apr 9, 2009)
DC United and the University of Maryland: a perfect match (Nov 16, 2011)
DC is better off without Redskins stadium or practice fields (Nov 4, 2011)

Mixed-use, not sports practices

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 08:37:00 EDT

What do you like about DC? The neighborhoods? The monuments and museums? Probably not sports practice fields. So why is Mayor Gray so intent on bringing them in? David discusses this in his lastest Post op-ed.

Gray administration holding up Reservation 13 for Redskins (Feb 16, 2012)
DC is better off without Redskins stadium or practice fields (Nov 4, 2011)
Pepco Benning Road site is perfect for the NFL or FBI (Feb 22, 2012)
Should urbanists be nervous about Vince Gray? Part 2: Getting things done (Jul 22, 2010)
Would Gray maintain or reverse DC's momentum? (Jun 21, 2010)

Gray dreams of Redskins practice fields

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 08:39:00 EDT

Administration officials review a few more details of their hopes to devote half of Reservation 13 to a Redskins training facility. Tommy Wells and neighborhood leaders are absolutely opposed. (Post)