Next Chapter of DC, the Disappearing City
On June 30, a historically incompetent Mayoral administration released a forty-year blueprint for 180 acres of public land and started a 45-day clock. The DC Council must refuse to adopt it before the mayor this city actually elected takes office.
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June 30, 2026, during this final summer of Mayor Muriel Bowser in office, the DC Office of Planning released the draft RFK Campus Master Plan and opened a 45-day comment window that slams shut on August 14. The final document is scheduled to go to the DC Council for adoption in the fall of 2026. Groundbreaking is targeted for the summer of 2027.
Read those dates together and the strategy reveals itself. A retiring mayor intends to lock a generational land decision into law during the narrow window between now, and her successor’s swearing-in. The plan that was presented follows a trend of Bowser Era developments that trend towards almost complete population replacement and displacement.
Plainly: The RFK plan is the newest project in a removal process this mayor inherited and optimized.
D.C. has a legacy of being the first majority-Black major city in America, “Chocolate City”, having reached +70%. George Clinton sang affectionately about Chocolate City, across an album with the same namesake by Parliament. In 2011, for the first time in half a century, the Black share of the District fell below 50%. Today it hovers around 45 percent and keeps falling, despite a high number of non-native Black transplants constantly rotating in, much like other demographics. Between 2000 and 2013 alone, roughly 20,000 Black residents were pushed out, and DC posted the highest rate of gentrifying neighborhoods in the country. The Black population of the District dropped from about 538,000 in 1970 to 309,000 by 2010. That is not churn. That is a subtraction, sustained across decades, of a specific people from a specific place.
James Baldwin already told us what to call the polite version of this. Sitting with Kenneth Clark in 1963, watching the bulldozers roll through Black neighborhoods under the banner of progress, he said urban renewal “means Negro removal.” Southwest DC proved him right, and many of us watch in real-time as tens of thousands of residents were cleared in the name of a revitalized Wharf, most of them Black, most of them never able to return. We have seen it with every Black neighborhood, or former refugee camp that gets erased for condos built for incoming transplants, hitched with a small amount of “affordable” housing, as a decoration. Treated like a permission slip to move forward with general displacement.
At some point, “Urban renewal” became “revitalization/gentrification”, which has now become “master plan.” The names change and the tools evolve, but the output does not change. A community is perceived for profit, its land is reassigned to people who did not live there, and the reassignment is framed as a gift to the natives it removed. The cycle of awe, and the inevitable affects of displacement and apartheid policies choke the area into becoming a hotspot for frustrations of life in DC, a zone breeding resentments and division instead of unity in a city already built on the most extreme margins of wealth and poverty.
In a city like DC, the question is begged: Who wrote this? The real question is Are they Black as well? As if the author of a displacement strategy for profit is more important than the people who will be forced to leave.
While it does NOT have to be this way, RFK is has been positioned as the next site of an explosive displacement campaign Muriel Bowser has streamlined across her three terms as mayor. If you can only remember one sentence from this piece, remember that the plan’s own numbers describe the removal it claims to prevent.
Stripped from the language, here’s what the “plan” actually does: It launders public land into private hands. These 180 acres are federal parkland. In January 2025, Congress passed Public Law 118-274 and handed administrative control to the District “for redevelopment.” The District has now carved out a development boundary for a the Commanders and Josh Harris’s ownership group. It’s anchored by a roughly 65,000-seat domed stadium backed by at least $2.7 billion in private investment. Despite the extreme investment in the stadium, the public builds everything around it. The plan commits the District to delivering the horizontal infrastructure, the utilities, a public SportsPlex, and the parking garages(per the Council’s own 2025 authorization.) Public land, public infrastructure dollars, private stadium, private upside. It is right there in the document.
Its “affordability” is a demand quelling false flag, not a commitment. The plan promises 5,500 to 6,500 housing units with “at least 30 percent affordable.” That means up to 70 percent at market rate on public land, in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. The affordable theory is new era Reaganomics. The plan literally argues that adding luxury supply will ease demand and hold down rents nearby. Meanwhile, the plan’s own neighborhood analysis admits that RFK will raise property values in Kingman Park, Carver Langston, and east of the river, and that this will “increase the risk of displacement” for the cost-burdened Black households already there. The document confesses the harm on one page and calls itself the cure on the next. There is no community land trust, no permanent public ownership of the affordable stock, no resident equity, and no protection for residents. There is a percentage (one the 2025 Act wrote for this site alone, since inclusionary zoning doesn’t even apply to RFK) the Disposition of District Lands Act waved around as enforcement, and paper thin layers of hope. This whole thing to me solidifies Muriel Bowser’s legacy as DC’s Professor Umbridge, with the way this document presents, how she presents in the face of scrutiny on the topic, and largely characterizes her entire tenure as Mayor in DC.
The engagement was theater, and the residents know it. The District will tell you it heard from more than 1,700 participants and collected over 4,000 comments. Here is what that “listening” produced: residents said, repeatedly and on the record, please do not put a parking garage here. The plan schedules about 6,000 new garage spaces (8,000 counting surface lots on opening day) while branding itself “transit-first,” with no new Metro station. A Ward 7 resident spoke to 7News this week: “Nothing that we’ve asked for.” There is communication failure, then there’s this. This is intentional though, this is exactly what always happens. Bad-faith engagement has been Bowser and Mendleson’s favorite tools for a decade, to accelerate removal. They open meetings, and listen and learn, and then have the audacity to build the thing they were always going to build, except now they have deniability, with the claim that the community was “at the table.”
The plan opens with a Legacy Statement that “pays respect to the Chiefs and elders” of the Anacostan people of the Piscataway and Nacotchtanck tribes, whose land this is. Then, it grants them exactly nothing. No consultation as governing authority, no co-management, no return, no weight in any decision. Maybe there is undocumented back channel communication, but this should have been connotation in the document along-side the Land acknowledgement if so. A government that can find the words to honor the victims of one removal its country completed, while executing the next one is telling you exactly how unserious they are about taking care of natives. (Note: NPS is a joint lead on the federal environmental review, so formal tribal consultation is not optional, it is a legal obligation the EIS is required to fulfill.)
Cities have run this experiment for years, including DC, and the results have not changed much, because the method and form doesn’t make adjustments. Publicly subsidized stadiums do not deliver the promised returns, and the jobs they create are overwhelmingly low-wage, seasonal, event-day service work. We are being asked to hand over the most valuable undeveloped public land in the city for 2000 funky ass jobs and a facility used a few dozen days a year. But yeah, let’s just call this economic justice anyways.
Here is what makes this urgent rather than merely wrong.
Bowser is retiring. In the June 16 Democratic primary, Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George won the mayoralty outright in a beat down we haven’t seen like this before. Janeese gained 53 percent to Kenyan McDuffie’s 36. She takes office in January 2027. She is a democratic socialist who campaigned on affordability as her central promise, who authored a social housing model of publicly owned, permanently affordable, mixed-income homes. She introduced Green New Deal legislation to build and maintain that housing through a public agency, and has spent her career siding with tenants against displacement.
To me, the situation reads like this: the voters of D.C. chose, decisively, a different theory of what public land is for, and the outgoing administration’s response is to try to pour the concrete before she has a chance to develop something meaningful and beautiful at the site of RFK, something we can all be proud of.
After years of watching and engaging, I have no illusion that Bowser reconsiders. This is her legacy project, through hell and high water she will try and push it through the door on her way out. I also have no illusion that Chair Mendelson, whom should retire, suddenly discovers a conscience about corporate land theft deals. I personally do not believe it’s worth spending time appealing to their common sense or morals here. It should go to the body that has to vote, and to the residents who can make that vote politically radioactive.
To the Council of the District of Columbia:
Do not adopt the RFK Campus Master Plan during the fall 2026 session. A forty-year, one-way land decision made by an administration the voters have already replaced, is spitting in the face of residents. Carry the plan into 2027 and let the incoming Lewis George administration reassess it against the affordability and public-ownership champion that just won at the ballot box. If this plan is as good as it’s authors claim, it will survive a democratic pause. If it can only pass by beating the clock on a rushed timeline, then we know exactly what they are after, and the only ones who stand to lose anything are district residents.
Concretely, we are asking the Council to:
1. Publicly commit to hold the master plan’s adoption vote until after January 2027, so the administration DC actually elected can review and revise it.
2. Extend and reopen the comment period. 45 days over a July-August timeline, for a 80+ page document that governs 180 acres for two generations, can’t actually be seriously in benefit to the people it affects.
3. Refuse to adopt any plan that does not include permanent public ownership of the affordable units (a community land trust or social-housing structure), an enforceable Community Benefits Agreement negotiated by residents, and binding anti-displacement guarantees for the surrounding neighborhoods the plan admits it will destabilize.
4. Honor the tribal-consultation obligation as governing authority not as a decorative paragraph. There is a legal obligation, this shouldn’t even be mentioned.
What you can do before August 14
The comment record is the only formal leverage residents have before adoption. Use all of it:
- Submit written comments through the form at OurRFK.dc.gov or by email to OP.RFKMasterPlan@dc.gov. Say plainly: do not adopt the master plan as is; hold it for the incoming administration.
- Testify in person on August 1, 10 a.m.–2 p.m., at St. Coletta of Greater Washington, 1901 Independence Avenue SE.
- Show up at the pop-ups and put your objection on the record where staff have to hear it: July 11 (RFK Farmers & Flea Market), July 15 and August 8 (Benning Library), July 18 (H Street Farmers Market).
- Call your Councilmember and the Chair’s office. The vote is where this is won or lost. Make holding it the safe political choice and ramming it through the dangerous one.
Washington is a city that remembers itself by the neighborhoods it has already lost — Southwest before the bulldozers, the old U Street, the Shaw that raised people who can no longer afford to be buried there, Sursum Corda, Berry Farm, etc. Every one of those removals was legal called progress. In most cases it was just displacement. We can wait an autumn season for a better plan and a more competent leader before building a project with so much positive or destructive potential in a city already devastated decade by decade by policy decisions.
Make them wait.
Sources
- Draft plan, comment window, hearing and pop-up schedule: Mayor’s Office release, June 30, 2026 (mayor.dc.gov); OurRFK.dc.gov; comment portal at publicinput.com/rfkmasterplan (deadline Aug. 14, 2026, 10 p.m.).
- Stadium scale, $2.7B private investment, 5,500–6,500 units / 30% affordable, six districts, fall 2026 Council adoption, summer 2027 groundbreaking: WJLA/7News and WTOP coverage, June 30, 2026; MoCo Show, June 30, 2026.
- Land transfer via Public Law 118-274 (D.C. RFK Memorial Stadium Campus Revitalization Act, Jan. 2025): DC Office of Planning (planning.dc.gov).
- Community reaction (“Nothing that we’ve asked for”; parking-garage objection): WJLA/7News, June 30, 2026.
- DC Black population 71% (1970) → below 50% (2011) → ~45% (2026); ~20,000 Black residents displaced 2000–2013; 538,000 (1970) → 309,000 (2010): D.C. Policy Center, “Goodbye to Chocolate City”; The 51st, “Is D.C. still Chocolate City?” (Feb. 2026); DCist; Urban Institute, “Our Changing City.”
- Mayoral primary result (Lewis George 53%, McDuffie 36%, conceded; sworn in Jan. 2027); Mendelson unopposed for Chair: The 51st and NOTUS election coverage, June 2026; Wikipedia, “Janeese Lewis George.”
- Baldwin, “urban renewal means Negro removal”: conversation with Kenneth Clark, 1963.