Count on someone at the Washington Post to play the race card in the postmortems over the Arlington streetcar. “Lower-income, racially diverse South Arlington has been counting on the Columbia Pike and Crystal City streetcar projects to deliver a jolt of growth,” says Post columnist Robert McCartney. The county board’s decision to kill the streetcar will therefore “deepen” the “class and racial divisions” that afflict the county.
Yet the people who were against throwing close to $600 million down a couple of ratholes ($358 million for the Columbia Pike streetcar and $227 million for a Crystal City streetcar) aren’t racists. They were just unlike McCartney in their ability to see through the rhetoric and lies used to promote these boondoggles.
Compared with buses, streetcars are inferior in every way but one: they are slower, have fewer seats, add more to congestion, and when one breaks down they all have to come to a stop. The only thing that streetcars excel in is spending other peoples’ money. After seeing the county blow through nearly $1 million on a bus shelter that didn’t even shelter bus riders from the elements, voters were fed up with spending what was supposedly other peoples’ money.
McCartney notes that the voters who lived closest to the proposed streetcar line tended to vote for the county board candidate who supported the streetcar, while those who lived further away tended to vote for the streetcar opponent. He attributed this to class differences. Maybe it’s just that people who weren’t going to benefit from it didn’t want to have to pay for it.
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Virginia political reporter James Bacon suggests that if property owners along the streetcar route think they are going to benefit so much from the streetcar, then they should pay for it themselves. But that’s a trap too, partly because planners haven’t hesitated to mislead residents about the supposed economic development benefits of streetcars. Property owners who don’t buy the lie would be forced to help pay for it anyway.
This happened with the Metro rail Silver Line: commercial property owners all along the route are forced to pay a tax to help pay for it even if they aren’t located near a transit station. As it turned out, the only property owners who truly benefitted from the Silver Line were those at Tysons Corner, and they gained not because of the rail itself but because they were able to use the rail line to persuade the county into upzoning their land to higher densities even though county planners found that the rail line wouldn’t bring in enough people to support that density.
If anyone having anything to do with DC-area transit was a racist, it was the people who planned the original Metro rail system. They deliberately by-passed poor neighborhoods on the excuse that low-income people wouldn’t be able to afford to ride the subway. Later, when lines were extended into low-income neighborhoods, the city quickly used urban-renewal money to gentrify them, pushing the poor to other parts of the region.
Building a clunky streetcar line through lower-income neighborhoods of Arlington County will hardly make up for previous examples of transit apartheid. If anything, it would make it worse: “The wealthy get 40-mph trains. You get 8-mph streetcars. Doesn’t that make you happy?”
Surely these mouthpieces can come up with a better excuse than that. The race card’s getting a little old, haven’t they heard?
Good response, did you submit a copy to the Washington Post? It’s amazing how severe the common sense drought has become in DC.
As a side note, some of the best organized opposition to the Austin streetcar line was from neighborhood groups representing minority cohorts. These groups see mobility for their constituents as the prime charge for public transit, not real estate development. Can’t play the race card down here.
Racist, huh? Let’s think about that one for a moment.
McCartney supposedly worries about the fate of lower-income minorities. But what would be the likely outcome for them if the streetcar were built? If all went according to plan and the streetcar promoted their real estate development scheme, low-income residents (minority or not) would be the first ones forced out of the neighborhood. Since residents of lower-income households tend more often to be renters, the only ‘benefit’ they would see (assuming they didn’t move) would be higher rents. The local property owners would be the ones who benefit, and they are unlikely to be either minority or low-income.
Sounds like a lot of sour grapes and poor logic on McCartney’s part. Place-based economic development strategies are often a failure not only at promoting growth, but also at promoting redistribution.
If you look a the images and renderings prepared by the proponents of proposed incredibly expensive streetcar lines, you will really see racism.
Their pictures always show upper-level whites taking streetcars to wonderfully gentrified neighborhood filled with expensive restaurants. No street people or urban dwellers in sight.
These are the only kind of streetcars McCartney and his friends would ever use.
racist: a person who believes in racism, the doctrine that a certain human race is superior to any or all others.
prejudice: unreasonable feelings, opinions, or attitudes, especially of a hostile nature, regarding a racial, religious, or national group.
There is a difference. The term “racist” is so misused that it has essentially become nearly meaningless, a morally loaded grenade used as an attack rather than an accurate description.
Good point Frank. The article Mr. O’Toole links to never mentions either word. The author’s point (rightly or wrongly) is that the voting down of the transit line will disproportionately hurt low income and minority residents. The “morally loaded grenade” was tossed with a hyperbolic zeal by Mr. O’Toole today.
While I don’t agree with the author on the streetcar issue I do think that institutional discrimination exists and some of it is in the absence of personally meditated racism or prejudice.
The author’s point (rightly or wrongly) is that the voting down of the transit line will disproportionately hurt low income and minority residents.
He argued that killing the streetcar would deepen class and racial divisions. Apart from the validity of that claim (it has none), it seems ironic that were the project to move forward, it probably would have represented more of a threat to racial and class divisions than the board members who chose not to subsidize it. Replacing poor and minority residents with white, upper-middle class yuppies did little to promote racial harmony in New York City in the 1980s. It’s hard to imagine how South Arlington would be different.
MJ,
I wonder, if like Austin, many low income and minority groups in Arlington opposed the streetcar for the reasons you mentioned. Regardless, the author never accused anybody of racism.
I don’t see the race card being played in that article either. What I do see is the author, like far too many others, assuming that gentrification is something that local residents desire. Gentrification is in some ways a fancy term for “forcing poor people out of the neighborhood”. I fail to see how that is something the residents of the neighborhood desire. Maybe the author thinks that if a neighborhood is lacking pet spas, Trader Joes and a high priced sushi bar the residents can’t be happy?