My Neighborhood

Across the river, in DC....there's this effort underway to build a trolley-car line....roughly thirty-seven miles within the District of Columbia.  Cost?  Well....it's figured at $1.5 billion and you can bet on it approaching $2 billion, and maybe costing even more than that.

The first part of this was supposed to be active in 2013.  No one is expecting that line to be finished....because of various issues, and meet that anticipated opening.  The trolley-cars are all foreign made, and electrical.  Because there's a law in DC forbidding high-voltage trolleylines (going back one hundred years)....folks aren't sure if the city council will have the guts to fix this issue.

So we come to today's little item of interest.  The city paid almost half a million....to tell them how this will change DC.  You would have thought a report like this would have been created ten years ago when they first discussed the matter, and been part of the planning process.  It wasn't.

The report says that property values (property taxes would be related) will escalate, possibly up another seven billion dollars over the next decade or two.  In fact, they kinda hint that most poor folks in eastern DC....will likely be forced out as they discover various offers for their houses, and just leave DC.  The black voting ratio?  They don't cover that topic....but it's very likely that half the black population in eastern DC will be gone within two decades....if this trolley-car line is ever completed.

The idea here....if you think about it, is that the report convinces various big players in DC politics to climb onboard and accept expenditures for the trolley.  Stores, apartments, condos, and various construction projects will eventually come because of the new trolley system.

I suspect if half the population would have realized the implications back a decade ago....of the black population being eventually pushed out....then it wouldn't have been accepted so much by the city council.

DC by 2030?  I'm guessing it will be this interesting transformation....with less crime....less drugs....and maybe less corruption.  Some European-style trolley-cars will be roaming across the landscape and some idiots will claim it almost looks like Amsterdam.  And the likely three billion dollars spent....will seem like a great idea.