Football Stadiums Belong in the Suburbs

There is absolutely no good reason I can think of to try to tempt the Washington Redskins to move to some kind of new stadium located inside the District of Columbia. I love football, I love DC, and I love urbanism. But the NFL season only has 16 games. Eight of those games are on the road. That means you’re talking about a facility that’s going to be without an audience on over 95 percent of possible days. That means the facility can’t possibly be anchoring a neighborhood. On the overwhelming majority of occasions you’re talking about a giant empty space.

A baseball stadium or a basketball/hockey arena are used frequently enough to be perfectly viable elements of an urban neighborhood. Nevertheless, the tendency is for governments to subsidize their construction to a degree that goes far beyond what can be justified. But a football stadium just doesn’t work, it’s a hugely inefficient use of land, and thus ought to be exactly where FedEx Field currently is—a pretty peripheral area in the suburbs. Urban land should be used intensively, and the only way for a football stadium to be an intensive land use is to be one of those combo football/baseball stadiums that have fallen out of fashion and nobody wants to use.

The ideal thing for DC to do with the space currently occupied by RFK Stadium and RFK-affiliated parking lots is to put up lots of buildings where people can live and shop and some kind of park for them to enjoy. It’s land near a metro station and would make a nice fairly dense mixed use community that brought some extra amenities to the surrounding neighborhood.