DC4RD Press Update
Contact: DC4REALITY@GMAIL.COM
SEP 16, 2025
The Political Price for “Egregious” RFK Stadium Deal As “Extreme Levels of Income Inequality” Persists in DC; Social Housing Needed to Rightsize Stadium Deal
As a new DCFPI report shows, “Extreme Levels of Income Inequality Persist” in the city, just as the D.C. Council is on the precipice of greenlighting the largest land giveaway in city history: 80 acres at the RFK campus — 20 acres for a billionaire's luxury football stadium, and 60 more acres to Josh Harris for high-end condos, hotels, and commercial development. All this land gifted for a few dollars a year for up to 99 years.
“The land rent break is so egregious in magnitude,” economist Geoffrey Propheter wrote on social media, “that if I didn't know it was proposed by a mayor for a stadium, I would have assumed the sublessee had incriminating evidence on the lessor and was using it for a shakedown.”
It’s “the biggest public sports subsidy in U.S. history by a mile,” according to Neil deMause, a journalist who tracks stadium deals across the country for Field of Schemes. deMause puts D.C.’s total subsidy at over $6.5 billion.
This level of corporate welfare is being excused in part by Council Chairman, Phil Mendelson, who points to the affordable housing Josh Harris promises to build including for households making 60% of the area median income or about $100,000 a year in annual income (The Area Median Income, which has rapidly increased annually for the past decade, is now at $163,900 for a family of four).
SOCIAL HOUSING TO MAKE RFK DEAL BETTER
Local housing advocates have said the status quo AMI housing as proposed in the RFK deal is not affordable and have pointed to including social housing as a way to make this RFK much much better:
“Integrating social housing at RFK could transform a lopsided stadium deal into an engine of equity and economic resilience—helping to cover infrastructure and debt costs without pushing the burden onto working families.”
As the retiring Washington Post columnist Colbert I. King warned in 2019, D.C. government plays an “active role in development, selling or leasing publicly owned land, changing zoning laws, closing alleys and providing developers with inducements to construct new or refurbish old buildings … with resultant racial and class tensions.”
The reverbating political price for RFK may likely be as high as the actual cost of the stadium to the city year over year.
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Citations:
- DCFPI Report:
https://www.dcfpi.org/all/inequality-remained-extreme-in-2024-as-dc-backslid-on-poverty/ - Peter Tucker Substack:
https://petetucker.substack.com/p/why-are-dc-dems-handing-billions - Save DC Public Land Alerts:
https://savedcpublicland.org/the1617project/alerts/