Arenas don’t revitalize neighborhoods. People do

A widely accepted story in the District is that the construction of the MCI Center was instrumental in revitalizing Chinatown. With the arena’s arrival in 1997, vacant lots and dilapidated buildings gave way to chef’s tasting menus, fast food chains, and restaurants that I struggle to classify except by reference to one of the genre’s best-known renditions: Clyde’s. Mom-and-pop restaurants and Chinese grocery stores, like the Da Hua Market—which closed, became a Vapiano, and is now a fast-casual bubble-tea-and-dumplings spot—might have been lost in the scramble, but such was the cost of progress, and of boosting the District’s economy.

In 2017, Monumental Sports’ then-president of ventures, David Touhey, echoed that sentiment: “I recognize that there are less Chinese restaurants…But the restaurants that come into the area are what the people are desiring, and that’s why they get the high traffic.” Mayor Muriel Bowser has recounted this telling of Chinatown’s last 30 years. In a recent op-ed for the Washington Post, Bowser wrote, “We’ve seen that arenas are great for cities. That’s why we’ve invested so much over the years to support this one.” She describes the relationship between the arena and the neighborhood as “mutually beneficial.”

Revitalization…or displacement and substitution?

The idea that arenas are good for cities is not a complicated one. When an arena moves in, all sorts of new businesses ostensibly spring up to capture the traffic before and after events. The competition for real estate is apt to bring big names who can afford to pay the steep rent, whether that’s José Andrés ventures for big spenders or McDonald’s, with mass-market appeal. Jobs are created, tax receipts from the neighborhood increase, and everyone marvels at new, shiny buildings.

And, Chinatown before the arena did have its troubles. The 1968 riots destroyed most of the District’s commercial strips, and many residents fled to the suburbs in the decades following. The construction of the old convention center in the early 1980s, although it was redirected from the heart of Chinatown to a site a few blocks away, displaced many residents who were eventually moved to the high-rise Wah Luck House. By the 1990s, Chinese businesses and residents were obviously in retreat.

It’s common for politicians, business interests, and even the public to call this trajectory “revitalization.” But when economists have investigated whether or not arenas promote local economic growth, study after study has shown that their effect is minimal at best. A survey from the Chicago Booth School of Business found that 83% of economists surveyed agreed with the statement, “Providing state and local subsidies to build stadiums for professional sports teams is likely to cost the relevant taxpayers more than any local economic benefits that are generated”—an amazing degree of consensus in a profession otherwise replete with disagreement.

Economists also argue that stadiums don’t increase the productive capacity of the city, they merely redirect how consumers spend their money: The $200 you spent having dinner at Jaleo and seeing the Caps was $200 you didn’t spend having dinner at Maketto and seeing a show at Rock and Roll Hotel (RIP). But new stadiums don’t just redirect spending from one neighborhood to another, they also change spending within the neighborhoods where they’re located. Several of the neighborhood-serving establishments that hung on through the 1990s were lost in the 2000s as rents climbed in the arena’s wake. The Da Hua Market, the East Asian grocery store that became a Vapiano, is representative of the change in consumers, and their preferences. Other casualties include a gallery run by Chinese-American artist Tie-Sheng Dai, Tai Shan restaurant (now a vacant lot), Tea Garden, at least one barber shop (since moved to 6th Street), and the last Chinese-run clinic, which reportedly left sometime after 2006.

You might be tempted, like the former Monumental executive, to write off these changes as necessary to progress and revitalization. But what Chinatown lost was not simply quaint teahouses. Its neighborhood-serving businesses anchored nearby residents, provided convenient services, and might well have formed the basis for an economic upswing. I am not merely being sentimental when I lament the loss of Chinatown’s “neighborhoodness.” A feeling of attachment to a place is what encourages people to invest in a neighborhood and make it their own. Writing in the era of “slum clearance,” Jane Jacobs argued that:

Unslumming hinges, paradoxically, on the retention of a very considerable part of a slum population within a slum. It hinges on whether a considerable number of the residents and businessmen of a slum find it both desirable and practical to make and carry out their own plans right there, or whether they must virtually all move elsewhere.

In other words, a neighborhood that’s fallen on hard times could, theoretically, improve on its own if people in the neighborhood decide to stay even as their incomes increase. When people in a neighborhood decide to stay and invest in it as their own fortunes grow and evolve, that looks closer to a more genuine revitalization, in which the people who live in the neighborhood have participated in, and are beneficiaries to, its improvement.

One component of getting people to stay in this fashion is neighborhood-serving retail and businesses. As Jacobs writes,

[P]eople who stay in an unslumming slum, and improve their lot within the neighborhood, often profess an intense attachment to their street neighborhood…. They seem to think that their neighborhood is unique and irreplaceable in all the world, and remarkably valuable in spite of its shortcomings. In this they are correct, for the multitude of relationships and public characters that make up an animated city street neighborhood are always unique, intricate, and have the value of the unreproducible original.

The arrival of the arena undermined the possibility that the Chinese-American population then living in Chinatown might grow an attachment to the neighborhood. The loss of neighborhood staples may not have happened because of the arena and its attendant businesses, but certainly occurred alongside the proliferation of them. The exodus of Chinese-American residents from the neighborhood since 1997 has no single cause: The lure of the suburbs and urban-renewal jostling were certainly obstacles to residents who remained. Still, the shift in Chinatown’s retail mix now means that the 300 or so remaining Chinese-American residents in the neighborhood, down from a peak of 3,000 in the 1970s, now organize carpools or take a bus to grocery stores and clinics in the suburbs.

What might have been? We don’t know

I cannot say for sure that Chinatown would have revitalized all on its own, or whether some alternative arena development plan, one that centered Chinese-American residents, could have better served the neighborhood. But I think that the arena has made Chinatown more fragile than the popular narrative of its revitalization belies. The neighborhood’s fate depends, disproportionately, on one variable. The majority of the current businesses in Chinatown came there on the promise of traffic from the arena, and some are willing to turn tail at the mere hint of its instability. (Again, Clyde’s.)

The threat of the teams moving out of the District prompted Bowser and the DC Council to find, virtually overnight, $500 million in taxpayer funds to renovate the arena, a contribution to a private enterprise that, now that Virginia officials have rejected Ted Leonsis’ plans for Potomac Yard, has risen to $520 million in the mayor’s proposed FY25 budget. Funnily, the mayor herself claimed, in February, “There is no replacement for the energy and history of a city, no sprawling development that can replace it, no building — no matter how new or shiny — that can replicate it.”

Chinatown’s past 30 years suggest that a “declining” neighborhood with people in it may be on par with a “revitalized” neighborhood whose economic fate is wedded to a single gamble.