LOVERRO: Harris headed for stadium fights in two cities — D.C. and Philadelphia

Across the country, sports franchises and their owners are lobbying, pushing and demanding new stadiums and arenas. 

From Las Vegas to Chicago to Kansas City, Jacksonville and other cities, debates are taking place about who pays for these facilities, who benefits and who suffers.

Josh Harris will likely soon find himself at the epicenter of those battles, on two fronts — Washington and Philadelphia.

Harris, whose group purchased the Commanders last summer, hopes to have a new stadium built for his football team in one of three jurisdictions — the District, Maryland or Virginia. The District is believed to be the preferred location for the new stadium.

Harris received good news Wednesday when the House of Representatives passed a bill that would lease crumbling RFK Stadium, which sits on federal land, to the District at no cost for 99 years.

That should kick-start the lobbying that is already taking place about who should pay for such a stadium and how. It could get ugly, as there remains a deep divide between Mayor Muriel Bowser, who supports a new Commanders stadium in the city, and the D.C. Council, led by chairman Phil Mendelsohn, over those plans for the land.

The debate from the nearby RFK neighborhoods could get even uglier, as community leaders have let it be known they want the land to be used for recreational purposes and are opposed to any new stadium.

It may even get as bad as the battle Harris is embroiled in up Interstate 95 in Philadelphia, where he and his partners want to build a new arena for their Philadelphia 76ers NBA franchise in the center of the city near the Chinatown district.

The 76ers currently play at Wells Fargo Center in South Philadelphia and are tenants to Comcast Spectator, who own the building. Their lease ends in 2031. The 76ers want their own arena and the control that comes with it. 

While he is doing this, Harris and his Commanders ownership group are putting $75 million into upgrading one of the worst stadiums in the country that doesn’t even have a name anymore, as FedEx opted out of the last two years of their naming rights deal for the Landover football stadium, taking their remaining $15 million in naming rights fees with them.

Nobody in the stadium/arena game has a fuller dance card than Josh Harris.

He is further along in his quest for a new arena for the 76ers than he is for the Commanders — but actually is no less closer.

Harris’ 76ers ownership group is not seeking public funds for the $1.5 billion Center City arena in Philadelphia. Yet they have run into strong opposition from a number of well-organized community groups in South Philadelphia and Chinatown, who have argued it will destroy the neighborhood.

At a design review meeting in December, people lined up for hours to speak out against the arena. At the Eagles game against the Commanders at Lincoln Financial Field, a plane flew over the stadium with a banner trailing that read, “Josh Harris: Go Away. Xo. Philly Chinatown.”

Arena developers have argued the arena will create jobs and an estimated $1.5 billion in tax revenues for the city and the state. But they took a hit last week when a new analysis claimed the project — known as 76 Place at Market East — would also result in $1 billion in lost tax revenue from displaced businesses and disruption to the neighborhood economy.

A spokesman for Harris and his fellow developers called the study “fatally flawed.” What does that mean? You’ll die if you read the study?

The ironies of all this are that opposition to the new 76ers arena has used the impact that Capital One Arena had on downtown Washington as an example of how such a project can destroy a neighborhood, while here in the District, Capitol One is cited as critical to the revitalization of the city’s downtown area.

Now the building’s owner, Transparent Ted Leonsis, wants to abandon the neighborhood for a new arena for his Wizards and Capitals teams in Northern Virginia.

Leonsis’ plans to leave downtown D.C. will likely give Harris and his fellow owners leverage in their hopes to get a new stadium built at the RFK site, since Bowser and city officials will be feeling the pressure of the fallout if they lose the Wizards and the Capitals.

Harris will need all the leverage he can get. As witnessed by the fight taking place in Philadelphia, the sports arena/stadium business is often a messy and unpredictable battle.

Can he handle two battles like that at the same time?

• You can hear Thom Loverro on The Kevin Sheehan Show podcast.

Corrections: An earlier version of this column mislocated the proposed 76ers arena in Philadelphia’s Chinatown district, the project is just outside the neighborhood. The column also has been updated to reflect the project’s most recent estimated price, $1.5 billion, and corrects a reference to a December public meeting that was hosted by the planning commission, not the Philadelphia City Council.