Mayor Muriel Bowser submitted the finalized master plan for the RFK Campus to the D.C. Council on Thursday, moving the District’s 180-acre riverfront redevelopment one step closer to reality after more than a year of public engagement. The plan divides the Anacostia River site into six districts and calls for up to 6,500 residential units, at least 30% of them affordable, alongside more than 1,200 hotel rooms, roughly 287,000 square feet of retail, and about 76 acres of parks and open space. The Council will hold a hearing this week, with a formal adoption vote expected before the end of the year.
What’s actually in the final plan
The Washington Commanders will develop the Stadium, Plaza and Riverfront districts, anchored by a new 70,000-seat stadium carrying a total price tag of nearly $3.8 billion, split between $1.1 billion in public funding for site preparation and parking infrastructure and $2.7 billion from the team itself. The District government will oversee the remaining three districts, Kingman Park, the Recreation District and Anacostia Commons, which are intended to function as genuine neighborhoods rather than stadium-adjacent afterthoughts. The final draft adds several new details beyond June’s public comment version: a new transit plaza, guidance directing retail parking underground, and the formal addition of the D.C. Armory into the master plan’s boundaries for future redevelopment evaluation. Projections tied to the plan estimate roughly 30,000 construction jobs, 2,000 permanent jobs, $24.2 billion in total economic output, and $5.1 billion in tax revenue for the District.
Transit planning produced one of the project’s more contentious outcomes. WMATA General Manager Randy Clarke and city officials ultimately ruled out building a new Metrorail station to serve the campus, citing cost, engineering and timeline constraints, disappointing residents who had pushed for one. Instead, the plan calls for expanding the mezzanine and entrance at the existing Stadium-Armory Metro station, increasing service on game days, and launching a new Gold Line bus rapid transit route along the H Street and Benning Road NE corridor connecting to Union Station, replacing streetcar service that was recently terminated on H Street. Two standalone parking garages are planned north and south of the stadium, providing roughly 6,000 garage spaces and 2,000 surface lot spaces, though officials have stressed the illustrative eight-story garage renderings aren’t final designs. “We’ve been working throughout the development of this master plan with WMATA and the District Department of Transportation… having lots of ways for people to get to one place is really important,” said Office of Planning Director Anita Cozart.
How this compares to San Francisco’s Candlestick
RFK’s plan is worth setting directly against FivePoint’s Candlestick Point redevelopment in San Francisco, another former NFL stadium site now being rebuilt as mixed-use, because the two projects differ in almost exactly the ways that matter for understanding how stadium-adjacent megaprojects actually get financed and structured.
The most fundamental difference is what each project is building around. RFK’s redevelopment is anchored by an active, new stadium that will continue hosting NFL games and other events indefinitely, with $1.1 billion in direct public funding tied specifically to that stadium’s site preparation and parking. Candlestick Park’s stadium, by contrast, was demolished back in 2015; FivePoint’s 270-acre, 7,200-home development there has no sports anchor at all, and its roughly $130 million in confirmed Phase 1 infrastructure costs are funded primarily through FivePoint’s own capital, reimbursed over time through future property tax revenue, plus a modest $20 million federal highway grant, a structure with a far smaller direct public capital outlay than RFK’s stadium-linked funding…