Opinion
This week alone we’ve reported on a $3.7 billion stadium being built for the Commanders on public land in Ward 7, an arena ownership group that threatened to leave the city and was rewarded with public money for staying, and a ballot fight over whether rent can be frozen for two years while landlords insist any cap at all discourages construction. Three stories. One question underneath all of them: who is the city actually built for?
The answer, if you just follow the money instead of the press releases, is not complicated. Public risk gets absorbed so that private ownership can collect the upside. That is true of a stadium deal, an arena naming-rights contract, and a rental market where the tenant bears the shortfall every time supply doesn’t meet the argument landlords make about it. The people who show up to Council hearings about all three are, overwhelmingly, the people asking to keep less of what’s already theirs.
None of this is inevitable, and none of it requires a revolution to contest — it requires people who show up to the same hearings the lobbyists do, and who treat a rent cap or a stadium subsidy as a fight worth having rather than a headline to read past. We intend to keep covering these fights as what they are: not separate local stories, but one recurring argument about who a city serves. Show up to the next one.
This is an editorial. It argues a position and reflects the view of The Communard, not a neutral news report.