Tag Archives: Olympics

What would a successful urban NFL stadium look like in DC?

I had started jotting down notes about a new stadium at RFK back in 2015 when Events DC hosted a series of planning meetings about the topic. Parts of this post have been sitting in my drafts folder since then.

And since 2015, a lot has changed. The local NFL team is now on its third name, and Virginia seems set on throwing money at the team to build a new stadium somewhere in the hinterlands of Loudoun or Prince William counties.

Legislators seem entranced by the idea of building a new city around the stadium, with a dome to host events year-round – Super Bowls, Final Fours, etc. Such promises of large-scale events are almost required in order to justify the multi-billion dollar price tag. Spending that much for a facility that only hosts a dozen events a year seems hardly worth it.

However, the only suitable parcels for such a large footprint are further and further from the center of the region. One of the potential locations (near the Jiffy Lube Live amphitheater) is so far from the core of DC that Baltimore’s NFL stadium is both closer and easier to access for a huge portion of the City. How attractive will a stadium that’s 30 miles from the city (and the bars and hotels and hospitality) be to a host committee picking venues for the Final Four or a Super Bowl?

Back in the District, Mayor Bowser expressed support for bringing the team back to RFK, but there doesn’t seem to be any appetite on the Council for matching Virginia’s offer.

And yet, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

There are lots of reasons to oppose any deal with the current team and owner. The team is bad and poorly run; the owner is (by all accounts) an awful person and unlikely to be a good partner in any city-building exercise; the financial incentives for NFL teams in general are extractive and lack strong ties to the community. All of this was true in 2015 and remains so today.

Then there are the externalities: stadium opponents will often cite large parking lots hosting tailgate parties as if those are requirements for building. Yet they do not need to be. And if we think beyond the narrow NFL vision for what a stadium should be, there are all sorts of opportunities.

It’s worth thinking through what it would take to get to ‘yes’ on a new football stadium in DC. Assume we had a different owner; one willing to fund a stadium privately. RFK has hosted sporting events since 1961; the site has lots of advantages. What would I need to see to get to ‘yes’ on a new stadium at RFK?

Minimal parking; no surface parking – Plan for fans to arrive via transit, potentially including infill Metro stations.
A civic center built to host multiple events
Connected to dense, urban development on the City side
Integrated into parkland on the river side

It’s not too hard to envision an urban stadium and waterfront park, both as a vision for the future of the RFK site and as a reference to past plans.

Planning Precedent

Before the District broke ground on D.C. Stadium in 1960, planners identified the need for a stadium in Washington to host large events, and at the intersection of East Capitol Street with the Anacostia River as early as the 1930s – often with the eye on hosting the Olympic Games.

1941 NCPC Plan for an East Capitol Mall.

A series of plans in the 1920s and 30s involved a massive expansion of DC’s monumental spaces. Very little of the plan was implemented, but one common element included a stadium and other athletic facilities (including a tennis arena, natatorium, and ballfields, with an eye toward hosting an Olympic Games) where East Capitol Street meets the Anacostia River.

east cap mall crop stadium — Cropped image of the 1941 plan; includes #71 stadium, #72 sport field, #73 natatorium, and #74 tennis stadium as well as a railroad station at the bottom of the image.

This version of the plan includes a new stadium located opposite of the existing DC Armory, as well as a large ‘sports field’ built into the hillside. The plan contains many similar elements to Berlin’s olympic park, including the massive Maifield located next to the Olympiastadion.

Aerial view of Berlin's Olympiastadion, along with the Maifield. Image from Bing Maps. — Aerial view of Berlin’s Olympiastadion, along with the Maifield. Image from Bing Maps.

The stadium was built for the 1936 Olympic Games in a park to the west of Berlin’s center city. The Maifield was built for holding annual May Day celebrations, as well as hosting large events. After World War II, the Maifield was the base of operations for the British soldiers occupying their sector of West Berlin.

Following reunification, there was a long debate in Berlin about what to do with the stadium built by the Nazis. Some favored demolishing it and replacing it with a new stadium, others argued it should be left to crumble as a ruin. The end result was a renovation, completed in 2004 in anticipation of hosting the 2006 World Cup.

The renovation includes an underground parking garage directly linked to the VIP seating areas via a large below-grade atrium. The renovation managed to add premium seating areas while completely preserving the exterior. There are a modest number of surface parking areas, but they are either well landscaped or paved in a manner that allows for other uses. Nearby transit lines include both the U2 U-Bahn line as well as the S5 S-Bahn, complete with a large multi-platform station to accomodate big crowds.

Built: 1936
Renovated: 2004
Capacity: 74,475
On-site parking: 815 spaces

The stadium isn’t without its challenges. The main tenant is Bundesliga club Hertha BSC, which wants to build a dedicated soccer stadium (without the running track) and a smaller total capacity.

Events DC’s master plan for RFK abides by the terms of the lease on the land for ‘recreational purposes,’ and actually ends up with a vision for a waterfront park (with or without a stadium) and various sports and recreation venues not dissimilar from the Olympic Park ambition.

RFK Stadium and the challenge of multi-use venues

As mentioned above, the dilemma for any modern NFL stadium is the relative paucity of events compared to the cost of the edifice. Building a multi-use facility is the obvious solution, but the history of such venues in the US is murky. RFK is the original concrete donut, built to host football and baseball – admirably adaptable, a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none kind of design.

These multi-purpose stadiums were once common; now almost all have been demolished – usually requiring separate baseball and football venues as replacements.

At some level, a stadium is a stadium. The basic design parameters for a football field haven’t changed that much over the decades. There are plenty of college football stadiums approaching (if not exceeding) a century of service. They’ve been renovated and added to over the years, upgraded to meet modern standards and the increasing professionalization of college football. Yet the institutional context means teams won’t ever move to a different city in order to get a better deal. Similarly, it’s not an accident that the NFL’s longest tenured team in a single stadium (albeit one substantially altered over the years) is the league’s only community-owned franchise – the Green Bay Packers.

The modern challenge is building a stadium capable of hosting more events than just NFL gamedays in order to justify its own existence, yet doing so without draining the public coffers.

The latest set of domed NFL stadiums (SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis) all make use of ETFE roofing to provide an indoor venue that doesn’t ‘feel’ indoors – and arguably feels more open than the previous generation of retractable roof designs (in Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Indianapolis). But for all of them, the roof is a critical element to enable additional events that justify the stadium’s existence and expense.

However, successfully hosting those kinds of events also relies on a central location in the region. Many of the domed NFL stadia are ‘downtown’ or immediately adjacent. Others are centrally located within the region. Only Phoenix is truly on the fringe (yet still just 12 miles from downtown as the crow flies).

As part of a regional plan, it’s much easier to justify that level of investment and land use intensity at a place like RFK than it is in Gainesville (31 miles from the Capitol Dome) or Ashburn (25 miles). If it were just a football stadium, hosting a dozen events a year, surrounded by surface parking lots, then a location on the fringe is preferable.

It’s a shame that the institutional context doesn’t allow for the kind of long-standing reinvestment and evolution, building off of the planning history for the RFK site. It’s also a shame that there’s not an obvious partnership between the primary user of a stadium and both the surrounding grounds as well as the neighboring community. But that’s not the world we have.

But it can be fun to dream.

Weekend Reading – The Group Stage

Soccer in the Circle, from M.V. Jantzen

The World Cup is underway.

England in Roo-ins: The cup means large gatherings of fans and sweet commercials (even the older ones).

Infrastructure: Jarrett Walker takes a look at some of the transit improvements for South Africa, building off the notion that large scale events like the World Cup can provide a kind of focus for infrastructure investments and other benefits that will last well after the conclusion of the games. Infrastructurist looks at the stadiums.

Last week’s screening on the Mall of PBS’ documentary of Daniel Burnham focused a great deal on his role in the creation of the White City at the 1893 Columbian Exposition – another special event that focused a great deal of infrastructure investment – highlights two issues: the temporary and often fleeting nature of these kinds of events, as well as the ability to focus investments in one area. Chicago focused on a park, Vancouver’s investments in one region – South Africa’s investments are spread across an entire country.

Ryan Avent’s post on infrastructure investments in mature cities versus growing ones also gets at the comparison between Chicago in 1893 and Vancouver in 2010.

Representative Space: Mammoth takes a look at soccer as a representation of urban space – a diagram of the strategies for using space. Very interesting.

Framing the Issue: Cap’n Transit disagrees with the idea of framing bus operating improvements in New York as a ‘surface subway.’ This is an important tension – selling a project to various stakeholders is vitally important if you ever want to actually get something done, but overselling the benefits of some projects can dangerous.

Home Ownership and NIMBYism: Ryan Avent dissects a recent paper from the Federal Reserve on home ownership and ‘investment’ in the community, both literally and figuratively.

It’s clearly right that homeowners take an active interest in local policy in an effort to protect and enhance local services and the value of their homes. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that homeowners are generating societal benefits…

It’s also not clear that homeowners are necessarily maximizing the value of their properties. Homeownership, as I’ve mentioned before, is an undiversified, highly-leveraged, immobile, illiquid financial bet. Having made such a bet, homeowners become very risk averse. We can imagine situations in which new developments are likely to benefit local homeowners and increase the value of their properties, but have benefits uncertain enough that there is a small but real probability of a negative effect on local property values. Highly risk-averse homeowners may opt to oppose the project, despite the good chance that they’d benefit from it.

Balancing individual and collective interests is one of the key tensions in any urban environment. That tension also illuminates the problems of pushing home ownership as the be-all and end-all for one’s living situation.

Politically Correct: Bike lanes?

Couch Criticism: Architecture critics take on forts made of couch cushions.

Olympic Investments

CC image from marcmo

Several weeks ago, Colorado released an ambitious high speed rail plan. The $21 billion plan would feature two trunk lines: one running north-south connecting the cities along the Front Range, and the other running east-west along the I-70 corridor connecting Denver International to the state’s mountain ski resorts. Colorado’s ski resorts along I-70 are a crucial economic engine for the state, but the interstate is jammed on the weekends. Mountain geography provides an ideal choke point for successful rail transit, as there simply is no room for I-70 to expand, and adding capacity on alternate routes would only induce more demand.

At the Transport Politic, Yonah Freemark notes that such a large investment might make sense for Colorado, but isn’t a national priority. These ideas sneak forward in the absence of a national high speed rail plan.

Enter the Olympic Games. David Williams at the Colorado Independent sees the prospect of the 2022 Winter Olympics as the catalyst to encourage some long-range transportation vision for the state.

Denver was awarded the 1976 Winter Olympics, only to later reject via referendum the funding to pay for the required infrastructure, forcing the IOC to award the ’76 Games to recent host Innsbruck. Thanks to this slight, it’s not certain the IOC would ever award the Games to Denver again – to say nothing of the recent feud between US officials and the IOC.

Nevertheless, at least the prospect of winning the Games has Colorado thinking big and long term. Vancouver stands to benefit from multiple infrastructure investments in the run-up to the 2010 Games, and perhaps Colorado can do the same – even if their corridors are not a national priority.

Olympic transformations

The 2010 Winter Olympics kick off today in Vancouver, British Columbia. Design Observer has an excellent interview with Vancouver’s planning director Brent Toderian. These kinds of major sporting events can be a huge opportunity to re-shape areas and integrate larger planning projects into the public support for the games. Salt Lake City’s first light rail line was built in advance of their hosting of the 2002 Winter Olympics, and that starter line has since proved popular enough to warrant massive expansion, even in a fiscally and socially conservative state.

Vancouver’s Olympic Village. Images from City of Vancouver.

Vancouver has seized the opportunity to shape the city through their host duties. Those include the Olympic Village, the Olympic Streetcar pilot program (mentioned previously here), and the rapid transit expansion of the Canada Line. Toderian discusses the physical transformations possible with the focus from events such as the Olympics:

NB: From an urban planning perspective, what impact do you think the games will have on the city?

BT: We’re going to have significant physical legacies of the Olympics, not the least of which is Athletes Village. And on top of that we have our new Canada Line subway that connects the airport to downtown, and a number of athletic facilities, either new or upgraded, that will be sport legacies for the city. But there’s also physical infrastructure and what we call “look-of-the-city” legacies that will make Vancouver more livable. In fact, we’ve spent over 6 million dollars on public art pieces scattered across the city, integrated into the urban realm, that will make the city more attractive long after the Olympics are over. So from a physical city-builder’s perspective, the legacies will be powerful. From a policymaker’s perspective, we have a legacy of new attitudes and standards and policies that have fundamentally changed business as usual for Vancouver. Almost everything we learned in the development of Athletes Village has been translated into new approaches in our citywide zoning, citywide policies and guidelines, or just new attitudes.

When you’re doing a place like Athletes Village, and you very much want it to be a model, our perspective is: What good is a model of it doesn’t change business as usual, if it doesn’t make everything that comes after it better? So in our case, even before the Athletes Village was completed, it was substantially influencing the regional discussion on city building. Many of the exemptions we built into the development approvals have now been built into our citywide zoning bylaw — even before the Olympic buildings were open. Our learnings on passive design have been translated into a passive design toolkit. Our urban agriculture learnings have been translated into urban agriculture guidelines. Our learnings about district energy — we did our first neighborhood energy utility using sewer heat recovery to heat and cool the Athletes Village — has already raised our bar with other major projects. We’ve emphasized that these new projects have to be even better than Athletes Village, and that’s being translated into a new district energy policy for the city. So you see the point of the power of a model. Unfortunately, too many cities do model developments, but years after nothing’s really changed. That’s something we very much wanted to prevent here.

NB: A lot of people think of these big events — Olympics, World Cups — as being a spur for development and physical infrastructure creation, but it seems like you’re taking it further and using it almost as a lab for urban policy.

BT: You have to remember that the second most important moment in Vancouver’s city building history was Expo ‘86. That event changed the way we do things as city builders and really sparked what is now called the Vancouver model. I say the second most important moment because the first most important moment was the refusal to put freeways in Vancouver, particularly through our downtown. But Expo ‘86 was a turning point. It gave the city a huge amount of confidence and started an era of city building that has really defined the Vancouver model. So we’re well aware that this is our second great event, that the Olympics, like Expo ’86, will be transformative not only in our attitudes, but in the way we do business.

We set out from day one to make sure that we were positioned for that transformation. The fun of this challenge is that Vancouver is the most populous urban destination ever to host the Winter Olympics. Our population is about 600,000, in a region of about 2.1 million. And even for most Summer Olympics, the event areas for the Olympics are often on the urban outskirts. Much of the activity of the Vancouver Winter Olympics is in the middle of our most urban environment. So it’s a huge operational challenge to accommodate an Olympics and the huge influx of people.

All too often, the legacies of these games quickly fade into memory rather than physical transformation. Both Athens and Beijing have been saddled with seldom-used venues. Even more frugal Olympic implementations, such as the 1996 Atlanta Games, lack the kind of physical legacy. Perhaps most disappointing was the lack of emphasis on transportation and infrastructure in Chicago’s failed bid for the 2016 Olympics.

However, as Salt Lake City has shown (and Vancouver is positioned to show), these kinds of events can galvanize the kinds of civic investments that will pay dividends for the city long after the last event concludes.

Jarrett Walker at HumanTransit.org is also planning a series of urbanist posts on Vancouver and the Olympics:

What’s special about Vancouver? It’s a new dense city, in North America.

Vancouver is the closest North America has come to building a substantial high-density city — not just employment but residential — pretty much from scratch, entirely since World War II. I noted in an earlier post that low-car North American cities are usually old cities, because they rely on a development pattern that just didn’t happen after the advent of the car. In 1945 Vancouver was nothing much: a hard-working port for natural resource exports, with just a few buildings even ten stories high. But look at it now.

Now, if they can only get some snow. We’ve got lots of extra here in DC.

City Block

a work in progress…