Opinionist: Pondering a Stadium
On Sundays, DCist publishes opinion pieces about life in D.C. The views expressed below are solely those of the author.
On Friday night, MLB and District officials announced they had reached an agreement on the lease for the new stadium, leaving a City Council vote on December 20 as the last obstacle between the design and the construction of a new home for the Washington Nationals. Come that long-awaited day, it will have been a full year since the cliffhanger of a vote last December that gave tacit approval to the agreement bringing baseball back to the District.
In those 365 days, there has been plenty of debate and disagreement over the merits of building a new stadium for the Nats, and more importantly, using public funds to do so. I've often sided with the anti-stadium crowd, though have remained sympathetic to using a new stadium as a means to spur development in an otherwise bleak and industrial part of town. Yesterday, I headed down to the area from which the stadium would rise, hoping for a bit of insight as to what the new stadium might mean for the District.
Framed by M Street to the north, South Capitol Street to the west, and with First Street curving around the site's southern and eastern fringe, the area was desolate, seedy, and lacking the slightest sense of personality. While slowly driving along the streets that will enclose the stadium, I couldn't help but feel sympathetic towards the people just waiting for the chance to bulldoze the area clean, to turn it into a blank slate from which houses, businesses, and parks would be envisioned, engineered, and erected.
But as I drove away, my mind couldn't help but wander from imagining how a state-of-the-art stadium and surrounding developments would improve the area, settling instead on what the stadium has meant for the city's politics and, more importantly, the city's pride. District officials at all levels have cooked the books on how much the stadium would cost, how much private-financing would go towards off-setting public funding, and what the stadium would offer by way of economic impact. In short, D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams and his cohorts have resorted to undermining residents' faith in the transparency of their democracy for a few hundred million dollars worth of bricks and mortar that, to boot, those same residents are forced to pay for. Is it a good trade-off? I don't think so. Maybe worse, though, is how easily Williams rolled over and played dead as MLB picked the city's pockets for concessions. The Nationals may inspire pride, but the way they came back to the District can only provoke shame.
Do I think the stadium will be built? God knows. With the way MLB has behaved towards the city and with an election year fast approaching, I wouldn't put it beyond a majority of the members of the City Council to vote the entire deal down. Then again, I can see the votes fall in line, the cheers erupt from Williams's camp, and the construction begin in earnest next March. And come 2008, a new, glittering Southeast will replace the dreary one I drove through and quickly out of yesterday.
It may be attractive on the surface, but below that, the new stadium and the development around it will be no better than what it replaced.