Mayor Muriel Bowser’s new $3.8 billion blueprint to transform the RFK Stadium campus is facing intense community opposition.
Residents who would soon live next to the new home of the Washington Commanders are deeply concerned over potential traffic impacts, community displacement and pollution. After months of community meetings, that mounting frustration spilled into the Wilson Building on Wednesday.
D.C. Council members heard from dozens of residents and community advocates during a hearing on the finalized master plan for the 180-acre site, which Bowser sent to the legislature last week. With a final vote expected later this year, residents made clear that they expect lawmakers to step in and alter the plan before it crosses the finish line.
The proposal anchors a 65,000-seat stadium for the Commanders alongside up to 6,500 homes, commercial space and new parks. But residents living in the immediate shadow of the site in Ward 7 and the historic Kingman Park neighborhood said they fear the plan’s massive footprint and game-day logistics will overwhelm their communities.
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“It is unclear to me why the city can invest so much time and effort into creating these structures — for a lot of people who probably don’t live here — and we get stuck with the aftereffects, which are not assets to our neighborhood,” Sarah Miller, a Ward 7 resident who lives just blocks from the site, said at the council meeting.
That anxiety was echoed from the dais.
“I do not want to find ourselves in a situation 30 years from now asking ourselves, ‘Did we get this right?’” Ward 7 council member Wendell Felder said to open the hearing. “Did we create the conditions that will help prevent displacement, or did we unintentionally contribute to it?”
Here are the dominant concerns driving the pushback.
The Parking Garage Behemoth
No single element of the master plan drew more unified outrage than “Garage G2” — a massive parking structure planned for the north side of the stadium, slated to directly face Kingman Park.
Ebony Payne, the advisory neighborhood commissioner representing Kingman Park, noted that even though the Commanders scaled back plans for three parking garages in response to resident concerns after their first draft this summer, they are now proposing combining two of those garages into a single, nine-story monolith.
“Kingman Park is still slated to be in the receiving end of the largest parking garage ever built in D.C. history, with 3,600 parking spaces at nine stories high,” Payne said. “That will be as long as the Washington Monument if it was turned on its side.”
Project officials — including Brian Hanlon, D.C. Department of Buildings director and RFK project executive — defended the design and garage locations during Wednesday’s hearing. While some residents have pushed for the structures to be placed underground to minimize their visual and physical impact, subsurface parking is logistically prohibitive and drastically more expensive given the site’s high water table and proximity to underground Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority tunnels, Hanlon said.
Transit Gaps and Traffic Congestion
Tied directly to the parking footprint is the fear of gridlock around the campus. Ward 6 council member Charles Allen hammered this point during the hearing, noting the plans would result in the stadium operating with five times the number of structured garage parking spaces as Nationals Park.
“Anybody who tells you this is a transit-first stadium, just do not buy what they are selling,” Allen said.
The city has leaned on a proposed “Gold Line” rapid bus route along H Street and expansions to the existing Stadium-Armory Metro station, but residents argue the plan lacks the heavy public transit infrastructure required for a venue of this magnitude.
WMATA officials previously ruled out building a new infill Metrorail station due to cost and engineering constraints. Several community members on Wednesday argued that the decision should be reevaluated. Brian Alcorn, chair of ANC 7D, warned that relying on existing road networks will paralyze the surrounding area and pleaded for the eventual inclusion of a new Metro station.
Recalling the gridlock that frequently plagues Northwest Stadium in Landover on game days, Alcorn and other neighbors pleaded with the council not to create those miserable traffic circumstances in the District.
Fears of Gentrification and Displacement
Longtime Ward 7 residents said the promise of the stadium campus and its amenities cannot be separated from the immediate threat of being priced out.
The Commanders have said they considered these concerns. At a council hearing earlier this week focused on the team’s $50 million community benefits package and stadium subsidy, Kirtan Mehta, the Commanders’ chief external affairs officer, said the franchise is “building not just a football stadium, but a neighborhood.”
During Wednesday’s hearing, Felder pointed to a $60 million community reinvestment fund established in addition to the team’s contributions, designed specifically to focus on displacement prevention like rental assistance and property tax relief for long-term homeowners.
But for neighbors like Laura Richards, the proposed neighborhood threatens to displace marginalized residents already living there. Richards called on the council to take concrete legislative action before breaking ground — such as an outright ban on the use of eminent domain in the surrounding census tracts.
“Now is the time to address what happens to those circumference neighborhoods,” Richards said. “Instead of waiting 30 years and saying, ‘Oh, what did we do wrong?’ You can stop it now.”
Climate Goals and Green Energy
Environmental advocates urged the council to use its leverage to strengthen the project’s climate requirements, emphasizing concerns that the plan leaves the door open for fossil fuel combustion on the site.
Maurice Hall, a Ward 7 resident whose family has lived in the area for 50 years, urged the council to amend the master plan to explicitly prohibit combustion on the campus and commit to cleaner alternatives like solar or geothermal power.
“D.C. residents have contributed over a billion dollars to this project. If fossil fuels are allowed to burn on the site, we will have paid to poison our communities, including our parks, homes and schools,” Hall said.
The Pickleball Lobby
While megagarages and traffic congestion dominated the hearing, highly specific recreational demands also surfaced — most notably, the push for more pickleball.
Lana Duran, a local realtor and pickleball organizer, testified that the four courts currently allocated in the master plan fall drastically short of community demand as the sport increases in popularity. She was joined by several others in asking the council to mandate that the site include 24 dedicated pickleball courts in the final layout to host youth programs, leagues and tournaments.
Office of Planning Director Anita Cozart defended the pickleball plan as “commensurate with the very diverse array of recreational options that people articulated as priorities,” adding the design remains “flexible.”
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