The Washington Commanders will anchor a new $24.2 billion development along the banks of the Anacostia River in Washington, DC.

City officials unveiled a master plan Tuesday for the redevelopment of the Robert F. Kennedy Campus in the city’s Hill East neighborhood. Under the new plan, the 180-acre former RFK Stadium and its surrounding parking lots would be redeveloped.

Last year, the Commanders announced a deal to return to the district, investing $2.7 billion into a new 65,000-seat stadium. They will complete it by 2030.

The master plan calls for 5,000 to 6,500 new housing units around the stadium. About 30% of them would be affordable housing. It would also have office, hotel, and retail space. The city would keep about a third of the land for parks and open spaces, plus 6,000 garage parking spaces.

City leaders said the project would create 30,000 construction jobs, 2,000 permanent jobs, and $5.1 billion in tax revenue for the district over the next 30 years. It follows years of public comments and input about what to do with the RFK stadium site.

“We are taking another step forward in our promise to district residents and businesses—to plan not just for a world-class stadium, but for a community-centric 365-day campus that will drive growth for years to come,” said Mayor Muriel Bowser.

The city is soliciting feedback on the plan through mid-August. It plans to approve the final master plan in September 2026.

The Washington Commanders played at the RFK Campus until they left for a new stadium in Landover, MD, in 2004. The city continued to use the venue for other teams but closed it in 2019. The property of the stadium site is owned by the federal government. Congress approved transferring it to the district for 99 years in 2024, allowing a stadium to proceed.

Economic boost

The district has worked for years to bring the Commanders back. They promise a new economic anchor at a time the city’s economy is at a crossroads. The office-focused economy of the district stagnated during the COVID-19 pandemic and it has not recovered. Many federal government agencies based in DC never returned to the office.

President Donald Trump‘s purge of federal employees further stagnated the local housing market. It also sent more workers to private companies in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs where housing is cheaper. Government shutdowns only added more hassle.

Trump has brought his own plans to remake DC including repainting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a 250-foot arch near Arlington Cemetery, and renaming the Kennedy Center as well as a new White House ballroom.

The district still has significantly more expensive housing than its suburbs, by and large. It has a median listing price of $589,721. The Realtor.com® state-by-state report card gave the city a D+ this year.

The district has tried to promote housing development since then. Presumptive mayor Janeese Lewis George supported the deal, but had concerns about its benefits for the community.

Under the deal inked in 2024, the district government will use a $175 million revenue bond, funded by stadium activity, to build parking. Events DC, the city’s convention authority, would contribute $181 million for parking garages that it will own. The city also put about $202 million into work for infrastructure.

The district argues it will be subsidizing the stadium far less than other cities have in recent deals. The DC deal means the stadium and parking development is 24% financed from public sources. Deals in Jacksonville, Buffalo, Nashville, and New Orleans required a far larger share of public funding.

With its corner of Southeast Tennessee growing, Chattanooga has developed a new tool to encourage more housing, without making taxpayers foot the bill.

The city has secured the first set of new housing developments using a first-of-its-kind tool, which incentivizes the construction of below-market housing without direct subsidies. Chattanooga’s Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) program offers developers a property tax discount if they include affordable units in new housing developments.

The program is a new tool in the push to boost housing supply and keep housing costs down, said Hanneke van Deursen, Chattanooga’s director of housing finance.

The program was just honored as a winner of the Ivory Prize, a national housing innovation competition by the University of Utah‘s affiliate, Ivory Innovations.

“Chattanooga has demonstrated that cities don’t have to wait for federal dollars to produce affordable housing. They can unlock it through smarter local policy design,” said Chris Herbert, managing director of the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies and an Ivory Innovations advisory board member.

The Scenic City’s dilemma

Like many small cities, Chattanooga’s seen a lot of change this decade. The city’s population grew by 24,000 from 2010 to 2024, including 10,000 in the past five years, thanks in part to digital nomads seeking cheaper living after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Housing costs have grown across the metro of a half-million as a result. The Chattanooga metro’s median listing price grew from $215,000 in early 2017 to $400,000 now, Realtor.com® data shows.

The state-by-state housing affordability report card from Realtor.com gives Tennessee a C, lower than almost every state around it. The state’s housing issues emanate from Nashville, whose booming economic fortunes have now left many residents feeling like owning a home is out of reach.

Tennessee, though, allows its local governments relatively few levers to pull from a tax standpoint.

“COVID really just put us in the pressure cooker, where we saw rapid rent growth and we suddenly saw a need for more housing,” van Deursen said. “So the city was really caught on its heels to see how to respond to this suddenly difficult market, and without a robust set of policies to react.”

New tool for building

The PILOT program is a way to make new housing development more achievable by rewarding developers for creating affordable housing units. In exchange, they receive a 15-year property tax abatement tied to the affordability level of the housing they’ve provided.

Chattanooga has an interactive calculator for developers to predict the tax breaks they’d get from certain projects. Offering many units at 80% of the area’s median income, also known as “workforce” housing, conveys smaller benefits than more deeply affordable units. But deeply affordable housing also digs deeper below market-rate rents.

So, the developer has lower operating costs in the development in exchange for lower rents. That makes building more financially feasible, and it allows Chattanooga to grow its housing stock. The city isn’t stuck with a one-size tool that doesn’t adapt to the market conditions, van Deursen said.

Chattanooga approved its first 278-unit housing project downtown in October. When completed, it’ll have 42 units at 80% or 60% of the area’s median income. And the city still wins, because the property’s going to go from generating $9,000 in taxes a year to $363,000, even with the abatement.

“You usually need federal dollars to hit that kind of target,” van Deursen said.

The program is limited to rental housing projects of 10 or more units. But the city sees it as a strategy to lower the cost of housing overall. Especially in Chattanooga’s urban center, where home development was previously expensive.

In a state where housing affordability is a crucial question, the program is “a very innovative tool that any city with tax abatement authority can replicate,” Herbert said.

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