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For ten years, Mayor Muriel Bowser has worked on her passion project: bringing the Washington Commanders “back home” to the District of Columbia to a new stadium that would rise up phoenix-like from the old one due east of the U.S. Capitol.
Long-suffering Commanders fans have wandered in the wilderness for decades, waiting for someone, anyone, to turn around the fortunes of a franchise that once won three Super Bowls but then turned into a national embarrassment. Losing seasons piled up courtesy of a team owner scarred by sexual harassment accusations, financial improprieties, and a clueless attachment to the team’s insulting former name.
So deep was fans’ disgust with owner Dan Snyder, a wealthy Marylander, that fans rarely speak his name out loud unless it’s accompanied by a short expletive of Germanic origin. Forced out of the National Football League, he paid a multimillion-dollar fine for his numerous transgressions, and fled to Britain.
Bowser, a native Washingtonian, understands all of this in her bones. First elected in 2015 and now in her third term, she knows that bringing the team back from Maryland will appeal to her constituents’ civic pride and stoke public support for a new stadium in the nation’s capital. What owner would want to stay in the team’s suburban outpost when he could demolish the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium—a rusting 1960s-era clamshell on the banks of the Anacostia River—and erect a new state-of-the-art stadium/entertainment district on the site?
Josh Harris, another wealthy son of the DMV, materialized two years ago with $6 billion and change, to gain admission to the rarified spaces inhabited by NFL owners. For the D.C. faithful, the private equity titan’s purchase fired up the wayback machine and the mid-’80s and ’90s glory days of the Hogs, the Fun Bunch, and Doug Williams, the first African American quarterback to win a Super Bowl, and today a Commanders senior adviser. Last season, with a rookie superstar quarterback, Jayden Daniels, and a new coaching staff, the Commanders made it to the NFC title game in January. More memorable than the loss to the Philadelphia Eagles was the team’s first winning season since 1991.
As the District of Columbia remains legally subservient to the federal government, the mayor needed to convince the federal government to turn the site over to the city. Her decade of persistence paid off. At the end of 2024, Congress handed Bowser a 99-year lease for the National Park Service–controlled parcels.
Bowser and Harris, the Commanders managing partner, now talk about the proposed stadium and entertainment district deal with the easy familiarity of people believing themselves well on their way to getting what they want. “Now that the legislation has passed the Congress,” Bowser told an Economic Club of Washington audience in May, “we’re no longer limited to only a football stadium but housing, an entertainment district, parks and recreation, and wonderful connections to the Anacostia River.”
If and when a new stadium gets built—though it may be more “when” than “if”—Bowser can say she made it so. “She’s selling it as legacy,” says Neil deMause, a sports economics journalist who edits Field of Schemes, a site that analyzes public subsidies for professional sports facilities. “It’s just selling it as a gift to fans. Some of that [legacy-building] is at work with Josh Harris as well, since he is from the area originally.”
The not yet signed, sealed, and delivered deal, however, is coming under fresh scrutiny for a simple reason: Washington needs a much better deal.
Ten years is a long time for a mayor of a large American city to have been thinking about what this major policy decision should look like. It’s long enough to have found out what the city’s residents actually want, not just what fans or the billionaire owners want. It’s also long enough to come up with a “highest and best use” for the nearly 200 acres the site encompasses, and it’s more than long enough to decide if the site could anchor something other than a stadium—like 15,000 homes in a new neighborhood, homes that a modestly paid worker could afford, complemented by retail necessities like a supermarket and other food-centered options. |
