What to do when your stadium plan includes two ginormous ugly parking garages, and you don’t want anyone to notice this fact before approving $6.6 billion in subsidies for it? If you’re Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris, you simply direct your rendering artists to make the garages translucent:
What caught fans’ eye was that the parking deck nearest to the Anacostia River — but poking into the stadium view — looked translucent in the concept sketches (see below), masking its real-world impact.
[National Capital Planning Commission] Commissioners requested fuller renderings of that. “I have rarely, if ever, seen a beautiful parking facility,” said NCPC chair Will Scharf.
We spend so much time LOLing at the dumbness of vaportecture renderings here that it’s easy to forget that they serve a purpose: to show the planned project in the best possible light so those with the checkbooks will ooh and aah over it. And often that light is literal, as with the Commanders stadium, which in the above images glows with a spooky inner luminescence while the rest of D.C. is cast into darkness, except for the Capitol dome and Washington Monument, which are a blazing white but also don’t appear to be drawn to scale anyway, given that in reality the Capitol is over half as tall as the monument, as well as significantly closer. The boldest choice, though, is certainly that translucent parking garage, which indeed makes the stadium look better but also raises immediate questions like “Why do the garages look so short if they’re actually going to be two-thirds the height of the stadium?’ and “What translucent construction material will they use?” and “Will the garage be limited to translucent fans driving translucent cars?”
The National Capital Planning Commission still signed off on the Commanders stadium designs, but only because the garages are being developed separately and will be submitted to the commission at a later date. At least one commissioner, Tammy Stidham, a National Park Service lands and planning director, was puzzled by this, asking: “Help me understand why we’re not seeing the development of those [garages] with the stadium package. They don’t have independent utility. They would not be there if you were not building a stadium.”
In fact, the garages wouldn’t be there if Harris weren’t building a huge mixed-use development around a stadium — without that, he could just leave open-air lots like RFK Stadium used on the site, but then he would be missing out on the billions in tax and land breaks that he’s set to receive for the rest of the development. So the garages are pretty key, and “make them shorter and more spread out” doesn’t work if the rest of the land is to be used for other Harris-enriching activities. One local resident suggested instead scaling back on parking and increasing the capacity of the local Metro station or adding a new one, neither of which are bad ideas but both of which would add tremendous public costs to what’s already set to be the biggest public cost ever for a privately used sports stadium. Many, many questions that should be answered before the money is signed off on … well, at least before the stadiums are approved … hrm. Before the sun burns out, is that too much to ask?
Partnering with the Romulan Star Empire for a cloaking device; is there any low to which these guys won’t stoop?
Improving capacity of the Metro station to the extent that people can’t move through it quickly may be a good idea but its actual capacity can’t be increased that much because it’s going to just be served by the train lines that go through it. Similarly, adding a new station wouldn’t make the trains be able to carry more people.
In order to significantly increase capacity you’d need to upgrade the entire line, which would be a huge and expensive undertaking. Or build a new line that connects directly to the commuter rail / amtrak lines. Also, with the large sprawl of where Commies fans live, train service really doesn’t make a lot of sense for many of them and they’re also just going to pay basically whatever you can charge for parking.
There was really nothing wrong with the existing site. You can get there from DC on transit and it has a ton of parking.
Clearly the Commanders need skinnier fans!
And I think the problem with the existing site is that Josh Harris wanted to make a pile of money by building on the current parking. So he needs to move the cars somewhere, hence, deluxe car apartments in the sky.
They’re not going to build a new line when they just killed the streetcar that would’ve helped shift people from Union Station.
That’s too bad. Did they consider a monorail?
I’m guessing that the most expedient approach would be to build out a lot of infrastructure to accommodate shuttle buses – dedicated lanes, drop offs, etc. As well as Uber/Lyft. In my experience, that was an afterthought in the design of FedEx Field.
But they’ll build parking garages regardless. They could charge $100 or more (perhaps a lot more) for spots in that garage and easily sell it out every game. The sort of people who sit in the suites and club level are not going to take a bus or train where they might have to interact with the middle classes and they don’t want to have to walk far from their car.
And I presume there will be a heliport and, probably, some language in the deal that requires DC to fund a spaceport and/or transdimensional portal, should that technology ever be developed.