Unless, That Is, You Count All the New Stuff

I'm not sure how much I should burden the blog with purely local commentary, but The Washington City Paper's Jason Cherkis once stepped to blogosphere-fave and sometimes-colleague Murray Waas in a really untoward manner, so I suppose it's worth pointing out that his coverage of local issues has its problems, too. For example, he says "The neighborhood surrounding the ballpark hasn’t changed all that much. It’s still mechanic shops and liquor stores."

I was really against the DC stadium giveaway and in retrospect I'm still against it, but as Avent says it's inconceivable to me that someone who had actually been to the neighborhood would say that. There's all this new stuff there and more under construction. It's true that they don't seem to have used a laser to surgically remove each and every mechanic shop and liquor store from the area, but that's good -- it's positive-sum development where lots of new stuff has gone up where, previously, there was nothing.

Comments

Let me cast one vote in favor of local commentary!

Posted by Dan F. | April 7, 2008 5:20 PM

Well let me say one thing in defense of the City Paper: It runs "News of the Weird".

That is all.

Posted by sglover | April 7, 2008 5:24 PM

Misinformation in the war against publically funded stadiums is no vice

Posted by Jack | April 7, 2008 5:29 PM

What's wrong with mechanic shops? Or liquor stores for that matter?

Posted by MikeJ | April 7, 2008 5:30 PM

>it's positive-sum development where lots of new stuff has gone up where, previously, there was nothing.

Would not that new stuff have been built elsewhere? Are you suggesting that the building of a stadium suddenly increased the consumption/spending of people who are apt to attend baseball games? What about other parts of the city/area that will not get the development dollars that are being put into the area around the stadium? And what about the [presumably] wealthy landowners not benefiting from the development near the stadium--do they really deserve the de facto welfare that the new stadium represents?

Posted by Christopher Monnier | April 7, 2008 5:40 PM

As someone who passes through that area to go to the Navy Yard a few times a week, he is a wanker who probably hasn't been there since they closed his favorite strip joint.

Posted by calipygian | April 7, 2008 6:33 PM

christopher "Would not that new stuff have been built elsewhere?" yes, but probably in VA or MD. "Are you suggesting that the building of a stadium suddenly increased the consumption/spending of people who are apt to attend baseball games?" Let me modify you question a bit and add the words in the District after consumption.

DC is a unique situation, and I think the Verizon Center illustrates it quite well. In DC, sports arenas draw people who otherwise would have spent their money in another jurisdiction (MD or VA) all together.

Posted by nathaniel | April 7, 2008 7:33 PM

The point is that the mechanics and liquor stores are incontrovertible proof that the wealthy in luxury skyboxes will have their gazes assaulted by a view of (ew) working class people.

Posted by Jon H | April 7, 2008 8:33 PM

"Would not that new stuff have been built elsewhere?"

That's sort of beside the point: southeast DC is in greater need of development than any other part of the city.

Posted by DC | April 7, 2008 8:46 PM

It used to be the home of the biggest lesbian bar in town and the site of a few gay bars too. It was never a lively neighborhood. There certainly has been a huge amount of development along M St. that is just frightening. As someone that used to work in Waterside Mall and basically hadn't been back around there since 2000. I took a drive out there in the fall to see the stadium construction and my word. It's nuts. There was always a plan to develop inside Navy Yard, but I am shocked how much delvelopment has happened outside of there.

Posted by Bubba | April 7, 2008 9:48 PM

I just want to point out that the commercial development that has gone on down there was planned and in the works long before the stadium. It was all connected to the Navy Yard. The Navy did a massive environemntal cleanup inside the Yard and had some developers build some new buildings in there and then they relocated a lot of military workers over there. And then the office space followed and a couple big residential towers too. Then the stadium.

Posted by Bubba | April 7, 2008 9:52 PM

Bubba, there was a wave of development after NAVSEA relocated to the Navy Yard, but that pretty much ended in 2001. USDOT came in 2003. Plans for ballpark were announced in Sept. 2004. No residential development arrived until one building in 2006. The real explosive development started last year. So, while there were ideas of someday having the neighborhood become a new destination, the ballpark's arrival accelerated all the activity considerably. [I'm the proprietor of the site with the before-and-after photos Matt linked to.]

Posted by JD | April 7, 2008 10:02 PM

(oops, USDOT came in 2007--site picked in 2001, developer announced in 2003, construction started in late 2004)

Posted by JD | April 7, 2008 10:08 PM

In human terms, the biggest change in the area's probably the destruction of the Capper Dwellings.

Posted by KH | April 7, 2008 11:39 PM

In human terms, the biggest change in the area's probably the destruction of the Capper Dwellings.

Posted by KH | April 7, 2008 11:40 PM

Much of what is going on, like others have said, began way before the stadium. Saying that, the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative Framework Plan, Reservation 13, and the Stadium were all part of plan begun during Mayor Williams administration to basically make the waterfront from 14th Street to at least the Whitney Young Memorial Bridge (East Capitol Street) usable space.

The neighborhood has changed. Most of those liquor stores, bars, XXX shops, and mechanic shops (even a glass blowing studio and a B&B) were bought out by the developers of the buildings or by eminent domain for the stadium proper. They have torn down pretty much all of the public housing along M (closer to 8th street) and new apartments and offices are definitely being built. M Street is very definitely a different place than it was.

Posted by ET | April 8, 2008 9:13 AM

The City Paper sucks. Other alternative weeklies blow it out of the water--the Village Voice, the Bay Guardian in San Francisco, and above all the Stranger in Seattle, the absolute gold standard for this type of thing IMHO. City Paper's articles are a bunch of sniffy, sour humorless nonsense, like they were written by hipster Marty Peretzes, and the articles are all totally irrelevant. (There's a high school baseball player with a bad attitude! There were these white guys from Kentucky who moved into a house in Shaw and got harassed by a crazy black guy! People can buy cigars and pipes from gas stations even though they are probably going to use those things to smoke pot! These are all recent cover stories.) Plus every single movie gets dumped on (even Raging Bull when it came out for a festival recently) and they don't even show movie times. And I love how they go out of their way to dump on the Post--did you know that like 12 times in the last 30 years the Post has run an article about how hot it is in August? Well, the City Paper spent God knows how much time researching that for you. Now that the Onion is at newsstands I can get better information about what's going on around town and also read enjoyable articles instead of the deathly crap City Paper has. I really hate that thing.

Posted by spokeytown | April 8, 2008 9:24 AM

DC got rolled by MLB in the specifics of the stadium deal, but I've never quite understood the blanket opposition to public arena and stadium projects in some progressive quarters.

City governments should absolutely invest in public projects that divert consumer spending and investment dollars from the suburbs to the inner city. In DC, where the suburbs are all in different states, this is an even higher priority. If you think there are more useful and effective methods to achieve this goal than building sports venues, that's great... let's hear about them.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | April 8, 2008 9:52 AM