Is DC more transient than NYC or SF? Most major cities are transient now, especially if you're looking at the population that is buying suites and club level seats (i.e. the people teams want coming to games).
I was about to post the same thing. Washington is not so transient. Not everyone in DC is a senator or a member of the house. The Federal Government has always been the big employer, and most people are under Civil Service. Yes, kids grow up, go away to college like I did, and land someplace else, but kids in many places do the same. One of our kids lives in Brooklyn, the young people's paradise, but the other lives outside St. Louis. That's similar to what friends' kids did.
In the late '60s, my old Information Services division of GE moved from Phoenix to Rockville because there were more computer people around Washington than anyplace else. That talent led more computer / network companies to grow there. My second big employer had important centers in Virginia, so for most of 35 years I often traveled back "home" on business.
Losing the New Senators in 1971, yes, that was a killer. Even more since the expansion team never had money and always lost. The down-turn disaster, I think, was losing the Old Senators after 1960. That team had been Washington's since the founding of the AL, and it had just gotten strong again in 1959 and 1960. The core of the 1960 team went to the World Series in '65; the Nats had always been more popular than the Redskins, especially from 1955 onward, the period when George Preston Marshall pride himself on running an all-white team into so many losses that we, kids, began calling them "the Deadskins". The Griffith family would have owned DC.
(Big flip-over: in late Summer, 1971, Bob Short announced that he would take his Senators to "some jerkwater town with no more distinction than being halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth", as Shirley Povich put it. George Allen, the new Redskin coach, announced that the Skins would go to the playoffs to avenge the insult done to the Nation's Capital, the true "America's Team". Everybody thought Allen was crazy, but the Skins did it. It has taken little dan snyder more than twenty years to destroy the fan-base that Allen started)
Stadium location? I had not thought about it. When I go to a game, which usually means one weekend a season, I park at Shady Grove (Red Line) or Greenbelt (Green line). The Navy Yard Station is too small for game crowds, and that ought to be fixed. A worse problem is that Metro was built without express lines. Shea Stadium / CitiField is single that has a third track between the two local tracks, and that one is express on weekday evenings. The MTA lengthened the CitiField platform to handle large crowds. Metro should do the same.
While I'm at it, having a .500 record will draw fans. Who wants to pay to see the home team lose? The Caps marketed themselves that first and maybe second year by saying "When we win, it's magic!". That can't go on long. As in, "We lose two out of every three games...maybe you will be here for the win!"
