Ballpark renaissance striking out in D.C.

But half a decade after the city’s leaders plunked down hundreds of millions of tax dollars to bring baseball back to the nation’s capital, many Washingtonians are still waiting for their dividends.

“What did it bring here besides the stadium?” said Victor Williams, who lives in the neighborhood near Nationals Park.

The $611 million stadium — nearly all of it paid out of public coffers — was packaged as the best way to build up the long-moribund neighborhoods around the Navy Yard and the Anacostia River.

“This ballpark really is about … the rebirth of the Anacostia waterfront,” then-mayor Anthony Williams said at the 2006 groundbreaking.

But the collapse of the economy and the team’s futility have conspired to keep people and businesses from the area. Half Street SW is still advertising about 75,000 square feet of space and is, as one resident described it, “a giant bowl of mud.”

It didn’t help that one of the neighborhood’s top developers was Monument Realty, whose main financier, Lehman Brothers, shut down in the recession.

Attendance at Nationals games was projected to average nearly 30,000, meaning suburbanites would help pay for the stadium with every ticket, hot dog and beer. But the Nats reached that milestone only in 2005, the club’s first year in the District — in Robert F. Kennedy stadium. This year, in the Nats’ third year in their new park, fewer than 21,000 are coming to each game.

That means D.C. businesses are shouldering the biggest burden in paying the stadium off. From fiscal 2005 to the end of this fiscal year, more than $269 million in baseball-related revenues will have come into the city’s coffers, records show. Barely a quarter of those revenues will have come from stadium sales taxes or stadium rent; the rest will have come from two citywide taxes on businesses.

Still, the ballpark is producing cash. The city finance office projects that baseball will have netted more than $135 million by the end of fiscal 2010.

“For all the anti-baseball people out there, we are balancing the budget on the profits of the stadium,” said Councilman Jack Evans, D-Ward 2.

Stephanie Hession, a real estate economist from CoStar Group, said the ballpark is a victim of poor timing: The shovels were breaking ground just as the economy was heading south.

“It has nothing to do with D.C.,” Hession said. “It has everything to do with overall trends.”

Nationwide, baseball attendance is down by about 400 customers a game, according to Baseball-Reference.com.

The vacancy rate for offices near the ballpark is more than 13 percent, Hession said. That’s a slight improvement from last year. And she said a recent study showed the area’s population more than doubling from last year.

The citywide vacancy rate has been about 15 percent.

“The submarket is emerging,” Hession said. “It takes time to develop into a viable area.”

In the meantime, the economic slump has made landlords and real estate agents desperate.

“They’re throwing in the kitchen sink to get folks to move there,” Capitol Hill staffer Alex Johnson told The Washington Examiner about his apartment near the ballpark.

Councilman David Catania, I-At Large, was an ardent foe of the stadium deal. He said, though, that the city has to make the best of it.

“As it turns out, we’ve paid a huge cost, and we’re still waiting for the benefits,” Catania said. “In the long run, it’ll pay off.”

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