People who say that the United States can’t build anything anymore must not be sports fans. Barely a year goes by without the debut of a sparkling new stadium or arena, often in the very cities where it’s most difficult to build almost anything else. A $2.3 billion baseball stadium in the Bronx. A 70,000-seat football stadium in the middle of Los Angeles County. A basketball arena on the San Francisco waterfront.
The latest example, announced last month by the mayor of Washington, D.C., is a $3.8 billion plan to build a stadium for the local football team, the Washington Commanders, on 180 acres of public land just two miles from the Capitol.
Washington is not an easy place to build housing, but no one should doubt the capital city’s capacity to build a stadium. The city opened a basketball arena in 1997, a baseball stadium in 2008 and a soccer stadium in 2018. In Washington, as in other American cities, homes for sports teams are the only kinds of homes that still get built.
The obvious reason is that sports are popular. Especially the N.F.L. When the Commanders win, Washington wakes up in a better mood. It doesn’t require a political science degree to understand why the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, is eager to persuade the team to return to Washington after a few decades in the Maryland suburbs. She wants to be popular, too.
But Ms. Bowser’s unseemly, almost desperate eagerness to shovel money into the maw of the team’s billionaire owner is also driven by a bleaker reality. Cities build stadiums in part because it’s so hard to build almost anything else. Municipal leaders fixate on big-ticket projects because it takes so much money and time to obtain the necessary permission to do anything that only the big things are worth attempting.
The Commanders stadium, like a growing number of stadium projects in other cities, is being sold as the centerpiece of a broader development. The city says it will eventually include up to 6,000 housing units, some of them subsidized for lower-income families. The unspoken part is that it would be much harder for anyone to build housing on that land without a stadium attached.
An accumulation of reasonable concerns about development has produced an unreasonable system. There are no standard rules; no automatic approvals. Washington has 164 different kinds of zoning districts, and even so, many building projects are treated as exceptions. Anyone who wishes to build must run the gantlet.
Stadiums do pass through this process. Local opposition in San Francisco prevented the construction of an arena at the team’s preferred location. The Chicago Bears have spent the past four years pursuing two separate stadium plans, hoping that at least one will be approved. The D.C. plan still requires approval by the City Council.
Team owners make enough money from stadiums to justify the effort. It’s the smaller projects with slimmer margins that die on the drawing board. In Northwest D.C., there’s a parking lot developers have tried and failed to build on for 25 years.
Because the system makes it hard to build anything other than luxury projects, cities are increasingly for rich people. And make no mistake: Stadiums are playgrounds for the wealthy, thinly disguised as public spaces. Teams once feared that showing games on television would suppress ticket sales. They have learned to sell in-person viewing as a luxury experience. Fans of the Los Angeles Rams who want to buy season tickets at the team’s new stadium must first purchase a “seat license” that can cost as much as $100,000. The tickets are not included — just the right to buy tickets.
Washington plans to provide more than $1 billion in cash and subsidies for its stadium project, a number city officials have sought to justify by calling it an investment. Kevin Donahue, D.C.’s city administrator, told The Wall Street Journal that the proposed stadium “is not a luxury but a fundamental necessity to grow our city again.”
If this is at all true, is it only in the sad sense that the city needs to give money to a football team in order to muster public support for housing.
The stadium itself is the very definition of a luxury project. Building a stadium would employ workers; building apartment buildings and stores and offices on the site reserved for the stadium would employ more of them. People spend money at stadiums, but those people overwhelmingly are local residents who otherwise would spend that money in the same community.
Football stadiums, in particular, are rarely used. The Commanders’ current home hosts about 10 games and a similar number of other events, like concerts, each year. That’s it. Really. An economy is money in motion; a stadium is a big cement bowl where most days, nothing happens.
Academic studies have repeatedly concluded that public spending on stadiums is a bad investment. Indeed, one of the leading authorities on the subject has memorably described that conclusion as one of the rare subjects on which economists have approached unanimity.
Better investments would yield bigger returns. One can only imagine a world in which the mayors of American cities were equally motivated by the economic benefits of public transit. But it’s much less expensive, much easier and much more fun to build a gussied-up grandstand than to invest in faster commutes or high-quality public education. The $3.8 billion price for the Commanders stadium is a lot of money, but it is a small fraction of what it would cost to build a neighborhood on the same land.
Our stadiums are monuments to the poverty of our civic ambitions and our inability to summon the collective will to use the land we have for the things we need. They are distractions from our inability to build anything else.
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Binyamin Appelbaum is the lead writer on economics and business for The Times editorial board. He is based in Washington. @BCAppelbaum • Facebook
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