What I've Learned about the DC Metro System and How it Relates to Housing

Welcome back to my series Eight Years a Washingtonian, where I, Kristen Jeffers, host of the Defying Gentrification podcast and creator of The Black Urbanist platform, talk about eight things, in honor of eight years, that I’ve learned living in this region. Today we will be talking about lesson one: Metro is clutch, but Metro doesn’t solve all of your transportation and housing problems. Read the introduction post, and bookmark it so you can go back and read all of the posts in this series at a glance! If you don’t have time to read, here’s a YouTube companion piece to this email where I cover much of this information.

Finally, I’m sharing as much information to help my fellow North Carolinians and surrounding areas survive Hurricane Helene, along with my usual PSAs and reposts of relevant information on my socials. Search for me @blackurbanist or check out my timeline right here on LinkedIN

So the number one thing I was excited about moving here for was to be able to use the Metro system.

Operated by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, or WMATA, pronounced wuh-ma-tah, the system is actually in three parts, the rail system, which is what most people mean when they say Metro, the bus system, which is the truly clutch part of the system as it goes places that the rail system doesn’t go and it even operates all night long on some routes, and MetroAccess, which is the system for helping you if you have a disability and need door-to-door service to and from your destination.

The rail system has a very iconic and colorful map, which as a map geek, I adore. However, said map can be deceiving.

It makes you think that everything is super close to each other. However, since I’ve lived here, I’ve learned that this is the actual map, to scale.

Yeah, not so close. But if you click on the map, you can go directly to the WMATA page and zoom in to see where places are, as well as type in the address you are and where you want to go and it will give you an accurate bus and rail trip between your two destinations, as well as how much the fare is.

But tell that to me as an 18-year-old recent North Carolinian high school graduate in 2004 who insisted on standing on the train from Vienna station to Smithsonian station on our Fourth of July family trip to the region. My knees have never been the same and yes, if you see me in the reserved seats, that’s why. Oh, and my recent tiny fracture in my foot and my occasional dizziness.

And of course, the technology wasn’t there yet to really see the distance. We barely had iPods and iTunes back then. But that paper map and the work of Lance Wyman helped me imagine a future very different than the one I had in North Carolina.

Instead of relying on our bus system which while comprehensive, very much bore the legacy of being a system that transported Black domestics to the homes of their white employers, and sometimes to the mills, even though some of those mill towns were whites-only, here was a transit system that was built for everyone, or so I thought.

Let me add here that post college and graduate school at state universities in North Carolina, I was able to sustain a decent life in North Carolina on a $34,000, roughly $2200 a month back in 2014 (Thank you ADP Gross to Net Calculator for helping me with all my real salary numbers). However, now, the same life I was living then would require me to make $3000 a month solo, and that would come without access to similar rail transit unless I lived in Charlotte.

And even if I did, the National Capital/DMV region (and I mean DC, Maryland, and Virginia, especially along the interstates and the cluster that the Metro system overlays) just has more places of all kinds, from suburban big box stores to apartment buildings, to doctor’s offices, to arts venues and libraries, right on top of or within a 5-15 minute gentle walk to places.

Considering that I struggled to learn to drive in NC, I was super excited to be able to park my car. I would learn later (and I’ll talk about in a future email) how I ended up needing my car here after all.

Some clues as to why are in the comprehensive history of Metro by Zachary Schrag called The Great Society Subway. It goes into extreme detail about why the system was built and how it could grow in the future. (You can pick that up in my Bookshop store, or take a trip to one of my favorite bookstores, Loyalty Bookshop, in my old neighborhood of Petworth in DC (also on Metro)).  

I’ve said that we needed a second edition of this book, but Schrag did write a preface to the paperback edition in 2014 that addresses the addition of the Silver Line, the 2009 Fort Totten wreck, and the hope and promise of the DC Streetcar, the Columbia Pike Streetcar, and Maryland Transit Adminstration’s Purple Line, all set to grow. However, we are seeing reductions and delays in transit service, with the projects I mentioned in the last sentence canceled or severely delayed, as well as the need to settle damages caused by the 2009 wreck and other wrecks and operating issues. Oh and the shootings and stabblings, while not numerous, do cast a shadow on those who do want to use the system again.

Schrag is also working on a sequel that's focused just on the Dulles Corridor. However, I want a similar analysis on other lines and what their impact has been over the years, especially the Green Line as it's my line (besides the Yellow Line) and it was the last line to be built, mainly because it mostly serves, in the language of the time it was finally built in the 1990s and early 2000s, inner-city Black communities.

While the demographics around some of these stations have changed dramatically, part of the reason they changed, which both the book and the Wikipedia entry on the Green Line detail, is the legacy of the 1968 uprising to the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The uprising triggered efforts to plan and rebuild with instead of against and on top of and without the Black community around the proposed stations.

However, the buy-in needed for Black households and businesses of all types to succeed and thrive never happened and what little did happen, like the completion of the line in 2001, happened so late it hasn’t been enough to make these neighborhoods remain the center of Black life and culture.

Additionally, of their own volition, several Black working and middle-class families who were able to after early desegregation victories moved their families to suburban neighborhoods and satellite towns that have become DC suburbs of Maryland and Virginia, specifically Prince George's County, Maryland, even though some of those sundown towns weren’t exactly ready to welcome us with open arms.

Of course, if you’re part of a Black American family or you’ve immigrated to the US from one of the African or Caribbean countries in the past few years to this region, this is not news to you, this is probably where you grew up or spent time or heard about cousins and aunts and uncles thriving in.

This move to PG (and yes, it’s PG to me, I did live there, this is how I like to say it), is what has created the lore I talked about in the introduction post of this place being the promised land for Black folks. And yes, in the next email, I’ll go deeper into that and how the federal government is the true driver of this and everything else.

But I will say how the federal government chose to fund Metro, how it was governing DC as an arm of Congress until the 1970s when the District was allowed to create its own quasi-state/city government, and the order of the lines being built, has made the real difference.

So much so that if I had grown up here in DC, this is the Metro I would have been born with.

I was born exactly one day shy of a year later in 1985 and another section of the system, the extension to Glenmont, would not come until about six months after I was born in 1986. And this is what Metro looked like on that day I was standing on the Orange Line in 2004.

Two stations would open later that year, New York Avenue, later called NoMA-Gallaudet on the Red Line between Union Station and Rhode Island Avenue, and Morgan Boulevard and Largo, now Downtown Largo, on the Blue Line.

No new stations would open again until the unveiling of the Silver Line’s first phase from West Falls Church to Wiehle-Reston East in 2014, November 2022’s unveiling of the remaining stops to Ashburn, via Dulles Airport and the infill station of Potomac Yard in May of 2023.

If anything, the biggest lesson I’ve learned when I moved here, is that as much as we idolize Metro for what it’s done, it’s never really been there, at least as rail, to serve the Black parts of the region in the same way as the white parts.

And yes, I will drag the planners for this, because during the time period this was conceived, a lot of theories of how housing and transit would work together were created and they’ve become our gospel. I’m here to speak that these things are heresy, but of course, that’s another newsletter.

Based on glancing at both the Metrobus map and the racial population dot matrix maps below, the bus maps seem to point to a similar past as the bus system in my hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina.

A past when Black domestic workers were going to white wealthier homes on the Northwest side of the region. A past when white working-class folks were going to the handful of warehousing jobs in the old, pre-stadium and apartment building Navy Yard from Anacostia. Yes, Anacostia used to be white. Oh and yes, the streetcars, but they were also long gone and discarded. The ones we got back, are barely functioning. Oh, and we are losing our entire District bus system, which is there to supplement the gaps in the Metrobus and rail system, with an inadequate substitute.

Despite all of this, It’s not impossible to live closer to the action and even make good money as a Black person here. As I mentioned above, some of these stations have their own pockets of shops, coworking spaces, and public services and many are Black-owned, some Black and queer-owned.

However, unless you’re military or in another job that is connected to the government in some shape or form,  you will probably be living with a roommate or using housing assistance programs, which unlike in North Carolina, are available to people at all income levels depending on the jurisdiction, to live closer to key job centers regionwide on what you make for a living. 

Regardless of where you live, unless you are living in your specific job center, you’re looking at a minimum commute of 30-45 minutes, sometimes an hour, but that commute could be on Metro, or one of our commuter rails, MARC or VRE, that run service on the Amtrak lines roughly every hour on the hour depending on the state and the line and the day.

However, because the Green, Orange, and Blue lines don’t cover a good chunk of Prince George’s County, a lot of your Black cousins and friends will commiserate about how long they’ve had to drive to work, because they could get a house away from Metro, but not close to Metro with their salaries and with battling still lingering effects of housing discrimination.

Especially if they have children or other folks they are taking care of, or people working in multiple directions, but yet the house that can house all of them on the budget they have is in Waldorf, Bowie, Ashburn, Woodbridge, Manassas, or another place that doesn’t have DC at the end of their address.

This is why I include Baltimore in this region. If you live near Penn Station and can catch the MARC commuter train or Amtrak at the right time of day (and for the right price), you can come out cheaper living in Baltimore, and still be in DC in just under an hour. More on the specialness of Baltimore later, along with my thoughts on parts of Virginia like Alexandria in a later email.

Finally, in my next email, I’ll talk about how much I’ve learned that the federal government really does run everything here, and being connected to it opens all kinds of doors.

Forget just Metro’s doors, almost all doors, as gentrification has pushed not just a lot of people out of DC, but a lot of other industries, artistic pursuits, and businesses on certain budgets away or into cost-prohibitive entry spaces. In case you haven’t figured it out around here, gentrification is real. And it absolutely has everything to do with the presence of Black folks in a neighborhood that the power structure that favors white folks wants for said white folks and those who fit into the framework of whiteness.

But on a happier note get ready to be sick of me when I get my Metro holiday sweater and you already see I chose to rep the system in my Metro Cherry Blossom hoodie on today’s video. The one thing Metro has gotten right over the years is the amazing visual design and branding of its products.

Until next time,

Kristen