The saga of RFK Stadium, explained

If you stood atop the U.S. Capitol and looked west, you’d get an inspiring view of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial aligned behind it. But if you turned around and looked east, you’d see the Supreme Court, and further down East Capitol Street … a hulking football stadium that sits rusted and abandoned, surrounded by seas of unused parking. 

But that may soon be changing. In late December, Congress approved a bill transferring control of the site of the former Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Stadium to D.C., which will allow the city to use the sprawling campus for housing, retail, parks, and yes, a new stadium for the Washington Commanders. Whether or not the stadium comes to pass remains to be seen, but either way, the transfer of the parcel — one of the biggest in the city’s history — will offer the city a rare opportunity to create a whole new neighborhood along the banks of the Anacostia River.

What’s the history of the RFK stadium site?

The 190-acre campus stands between 19th Street to the west and the Anacostia River to the east, stretching roughly from behind the D.C. Jail to the south all the way to Oklahoma Avenue and Benning Road NE to the north. 

It was purchased by the federal government in 1957 for the express purposes of a new multi-use stadium, which opened in 1961 as D.C. Stadium (creative, huh?) and played host to the Washington Senators and Washington Redskins. (It was renamed after the slain senator in 1969.) The Senators ultimately left in 1971, while the Redskins — which won three Super Bowls during their time in D.C. — departed in 1996 for new digs in Landover, Md. to what we now know as Northwest Stadium. 

The stadium also played host to D.C. United, the Washington Nationals upon their return to the city, international soccer matches, a heavyweight title fight, a mass wedding involving some 40,000 people (seriously), and numerous music festivals – including a Tibetan Memorial Festival where lightning struck the venue, injuring concertgoers. The stadium’s ample parking lots have also been put to use over the years, including for a brief foray into Le Mans car racing and a dance music festival that could literally be heard around the region. 

The aging stadium was largely put out of use starting in 2017 when D.C. United moved to a new stadium in Buzzard Point. 

Why hasn’t D.C. done anything with the site since the stadium fell out of use?

The entire campus is federal land under the control of the National Park Service, and while the feds did eventually turn the stadium itself over to the city’s control, the 50-year lease inked in 1988 mandated that the entire site only be used for a stadium, recreation, and entertainment. In 2006, the National Capital Planning Commission conducted a redevelopment study on the RFK site, recommending that it be transformed into a large waterfront park, recreation areas, and housing and retail. Still, that study was mostly put on a shelf to gather dust.

In 2017, Mayor Muriel Bowser formally asked for control of the site to be turned over to the city, both so it could upgrade or replace the stadium and move towards other uses across the 190 acres. Congress didn’t act on her request, but D.C. did start slowly repurposing some of the acres of unused parking, and in 2019 opened The Fields, three new turf fields and a playground on a 27-acre portion of the site. 

Under the existing lease, D.C. could have offered up the site to the Commanders for a new stadium (former team owner Dan Snyder even commissioned renderings of what that stadium could look like, including... a weird moat), but there couldn’t have been much else built around it. That would go against the growing trend of football stadiums — which aren’t used many times a year — being surrounded by new entertainment districts, which can be used to draw more people in.  

What happened in Congress with the RFK site?

After years of quiet prodding and negotiations involving D.C. officials (and lobbying from the Commanders ownership and the NFL leadership), in late 2024 a must-pass federal spending bill was unveiled — and it included a provision that would transfer control over 174 acres of the RFK site to D.C., as well as allow the city to use the land for a new stadium, parks, and commercial and residential buildings. The land’s ownership would remain with the federal government, with D.C. leasing it for 99 years. 

While it would seem logical enough for Congress to allow D.C. to redevelop a site of no real federal import or significance, getting to that point took overcoming some significant hurdles. That included opposition from Maryland lawmakers who feared it would give D.C. a competitive advantage in the fight over a new Commanders stadium, criticisms from some senators that D.C. shouldn’t be able to get the land for free, a fight over honoring the team’s old logo, and the somewhat unexpected alliance between some Republican leaders and D.C. officials on moving this forward. 

That included Rep. James Comer, the Kentucky Republican who has been sharply critical of the D.C. Council’s leftward bend and some city policies but became a chief proponent of handing the RFK site over to D.C. 

“Congress is doing its job to oversee the nation’s capital,” Comer tweeted when the RFK provision was included in the federal spending bill. “Without Congressional action, this RFK site & land would remain vacant, leaving ongoing maintenance costs & liabilities to burden the American taxpayer. Now is the time to get the federal government out of the way.”

Still, the spending bill got caught up in a right-wing revolt fueled in part by misinformation spread by Elon Musk, but in something of a last-minute surprise, it was approved by the Senate as one of its last actions of 2024.

So this sounds like a big deal.

It is. Beyond the political alliances and machinations it took to make this happen, transferring RFK over to D.C. control and allowing the city to use it for broad redevelopment purposes is, well, huge. 

“As a city, we have worked for years toward the opportunity to transform a vacant, blighted sea of asphalt in the heart of D.C. and to put the RFK campus back to productive use,” said Bowser in a statement. “And the potential is great — for housing and jobs; for sports, recreation, and an entertainment district; for green space, better connections to the river, and monumental views of our Nation’s Capital. The future of the RFK campus will benefit residents and visitors alike, and our vision for the renaissance and development of more than 170 acres of waterfront space will benefit the entire region.”

This transfer ranks as one of the biggest in the city’s history; at just over 185 acres, only St. Elizabeths East, transferred to D.C. in 1987, might be bigger. And these types of transfers of large federal parcels can offer the city significant opportunities to build housing, retail, entertainment, and parks. The former Walter Reed military hospital complex along Georgia Avenue NW, for one, has become a brand new 66-acre multi-use neighborhood. And how about the 27-acre multi-use development known as The Wharf in Southwest? That also involved congressionally approved land transfers.

And then there’s the potential for a new football stadium, duh.

OK, let’s talk about a new stadium for the Commanders. Is this really going to happen?

Nothing is final until agreements are signed, but even under former team owner Dan Snyder, it seemed clear that the Commanders wanted to return to D.C. 

Coming back to RFK offers the team a chance at yesteryear’s glory, and in a more favorable location to boot. (Even non-D.C. residents seem to agree on that.) Team owner Josh Harris clearly seemed interested in keeping RFK on the table; during the negotiations over the transfer of the site to D.C., he promised Maryland officials that he would ink a redevelopment deal for Northwest Stadium in Landover should the team leave it.   

A more cynical view of things is that the Commanders merely want D.C. in the mix so that it has more options across the region it can play against each other to get the best deal. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia have all made the pitch that they’re the best location for a new Commanders stadium, raising the chances that the team could seek out the most favorable public financing deal before making a final decision. 

Either way, final word is likely to come sooner rather than later. Harris has said that 2030 could be a reasonable target date for a new stadium to open, so negotiations are certainly already happening. Bowser herself has reportedly already had discussions with the team over returning to RFK.

Of course, just because a billionaire owner and elected official want something doesn’t mean it will actually happen. (See Leonsis, Ted and Youngkin, Glenn.) The devil will be in the details.

So who would end up paying for a new stadium?

That, of course, is the multi-billion dollar question — and one that could well determine whether a new Commanders stadium at RFK could ever come to pass.

There’s no set price tag on a new stadium yet, but conservative estimates still put it at around $1 billion — with some costing far more than that. D.C. has been coy about saying how exactly it could help pay for a new stadium, but at a bare minimum Bowser has said the city would likely cover the costs of preparing the site for the actual construction of a new stadium. (It did the same with Audi Field in Southwest, investing $150 million in the project, or roughly half the stadium's cost.) 

It’s highly unlikely that D.C. would pay for the entirety of the stadium, the way it did Nationals Park, which cost almost $700 million. It would be fiscally challenging for the city (because it’s already borrowing close to its legal capacity for all sorts of other public projects), not to mention politically difficult — especially since members of the council have said that while they may be OK with a new stadium at the RFK site, they don’t want the taxpayer to be on the hook for it. Oh, and the city just saved the Capital One Arena with a $515 million public investment, so it’s possible that the council’s desire to help another billionaire team owner may be waning.

The obvious wild card here is what would happen with the land around the stadium. Speaking earlier this year on how a new stadium could be paid for, D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson noted that developing the land around it is a possibility. “If the Commanders… get development rights around it and put up stuff to make money to help pay for building the stadium, I see that as a possibility,” he said. 

Public opinion is often split on whether public funds should be used for professional sports facilities, and that’s also been the case in D.C. According to a Washington Post poll conducted in April, 47% of D.C. residents are in favor of some type of public financing — and 46% are opposed. Support for public financing has grown since 2022, but the question doesn’t define what type or how much — and those answers could be critical to determining how much political support any stadium gets from the council.

What’s next with all of this?

Now that Congress has signed off on the transfer (which has to happen within the first six months of 2025), talks over the fate of a new stadium and the surrounding land will likely ramp up.

Whatever Bowser and Commanders owner Josh Harris agree to will still have to go through the D.C. Council, which has now grown used to debating the merits (or lack thereof) of paying for new stadiums for professional sports teams. They did for the Nationals, D.C. United, for a training facility for the Wizards and arena for the Mystics, and most recently for the Wizards and Capitals.

And you can expect many of the same arguments from years past. Stadium boosters will point to Nationals Park and Audi Field as examples of how those types of facilities can lead to the wholesale transformation of neighborhoods. Critics will argue that those stadiums could have been paid for by the teams playing in them, and that neighborhood transformation and revitalization can happen without publicly financed stadiums. All of this, it should be noted, will also be happening as D.C. ramps up for its next mayoral election in 2026.

The left-leaning Fair Budget Coalition has already signaled that it will fight a stadium at RFK.

“Voters across D.C. see RFK as an opportunity to meet the housing and community needs of D.C. residents, rather than a hulking stadium used just a few days a year,” said Niciah Mujahid, the coalition's executive director, in a statement. “D.C. just gave over $500 million to a billionaire for Capital One Arena, at a time budgets for schools and affordable housing have been cut, and they don’t want to repeat that at RFK.”

On a more basic level, though, the existing RFK stadium is likely to be demolished soon enough. The city has slowly been chipping away at it over the years (including selling off seats from the old stadium), but the aging structure may soon come down to make way for whatever comes next.