A version of this article was also published by Greater Greater Washington on February 27th. Minor edits were made in accordance with WS style.
THE EVOLUTION of the Washington region’s transit systems from a web of privately owned companies into the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority stands as one of the great achievements of Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 Great Society program, as the title of Zachary M. Schrag’s 2006 history of Metrorail contends. Uniting eight independent governments across the District, Maryland, Virginia, and the federal government to reach a consensus on design, operation and funding wove together the region’s disparate private systems into one of the nation’s leaders in public transportation. Despite an uneven and unfinished legacy, and decades of disunity between regional governments, the prescient thinking of our region’s leadership in the mid-twentieth century is one of its strongest public assets in the twenty-first. It is impossible to imagine the DMV without WMATA, as Matt Girardi of ATU Local 689 wrote for GGWash recently.
Our elected and appointed decision makers should take up the mantle of regional megaprojects in the public interest once again. We can apply the Great Society feeling that the region successfully stirred up for mid-century transportation planning to today’s housing crisis.
The pandemic laid bare how decades of WMATA’s infrastructure and operating fleet gradually deteriorated from a lack of preventive maintenance and sustainability planning. WMATA had no dedicated capital funding until 2019 and still has no dedicated operating funding, which is necessary to pay the people who run the trains, drive the buses, and plan the routes.
In May 2024, WMATA’s board joined with the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) to launch the DMVMoves initiative. The joint task force is charged with securing elusive regional consensus again, to complete the job that their forebears could not: dedicating revenue to WMATA’s operations funding that would give it the financial foundation necessary to both maintain high-quality service and invest in its future. So, the leaders of the region’s jurisdictions are, ostensibly, attempting to ensure that the huge amount of public investment that’s gone into WMATA maximizes benefits for everybody who lives in the DC region.
This mindset should extend beyond how people move into how they live. Today’s housing and mobility crises—whether we talk about sprawl, gentrification, exclusionary zoning, homelessness, car-dependency, social isolation, environmental health, or beyond—can all be traced in some way to the failure to maximize the capacity and use of public-works infrastructure like WMATA.
Once, an abundance of housing was produced in the US through a largely segregated program of public housing and cheap financing to develop greenfields into suburban homes for the middle class. Wholesale neighborhood change in center cities was justified as a means by which those cities’ fortunes would rise through slum clearance. More frequently this displaced residents into disconnected sprawl, which ultimately benefited few but the arbiters of those decisions. The abandonment of state construction of public housing amid broader deindustrialization in the 1970s and 1980s was a ticking time bomb, not unlike the state of WMATA after stations’ ribbons were cut and the need for ongoing maintenance became prevalent.
Most of the low-hanging housing-related fruit has been pulled, nationally and regionally. For example, subsidizing private-sector rents and land values through vouchers and tax credits while decimating industrial stakeholders (manufacturing, culture) and policies (rent control, public housing) who benefit from low-cost land has created an economic trilemma between cost, location, and quality: Most people can only have two of three in their favor.
To make housing affordable for DMV residents, we need the same level of regional cooperation that was achieved at the birth of WMATA. Fortunately, DMVMoves has the opportunity to promote housing abundance and bolster WMATA’s legacy in a way that our descendants in the twenty-second-century region will laud.
An outline of the 21st-century socialization of the housing market has begun to solidify, most recently exemplified by the Homes Act, introduced by Senator Tina Smith and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in September 2024. The bill would create a national housing development authority for permanently affordable homes—a “Fannie Mae” for community land trusts, public rental housing, limited-equity cooperatives and non-profit housing. By using a revolving loan fund model and operating at a federal scale, the program would support the construction of desperately needed housing that is desirable and environmentally sound and is built in places where people need it, where cost, location and quality of life are all favorable.
The current assault on the federal government, far from making the bill in question irrelevant, shows the desperate need to start addressing the trilemma locally. This would have the political benefit of creating a broad cross-section of stakeholders by empowering everyone who lives in a home—instead of dividing us between asset owners and debtors, and owners and renters—to push for the financing needed to build more places to live. Allowing everyday people to see themselves empowered by the housing market would transform it into a social good and a unifying regional force, in the same way that WMATA functions today.
Our region’s leaders should apply the same principles to the solutions identified for WMATA’s long-term financing sources. WMATA is both the primary source of land value that undergirds the regional housing market, and the primary stakeholder in ensuring that demand for transit ridership is high. Financing social housing in conjunction with WMATA would create an economy of scale that would fundamentally reshape the fabric of our region, pointing us toward a future where everyone in the DMV has a true public option for housing.
This is not a quick fix. But there are no short-term policies that can match the scale of the region’s housing need, so we may as well get started right away. For regional stakeholders to realize a vision of housing abundance, we’ll have to prioritize transforming existing public assets into resources for public housing, bearing the risk upfront in order to reap the rewards down the line.
Additional opportunities, such as transforming parking structures and surface lots into housing, could be pursued. Regional governments could give WMATA and a new social housing authority the ability to override zoning limits and minimum parking requirements. This would give it increased financial capacity to produce housing and lock in as many future WMATA riders as possible. The most impactful opportunity would be to co-plan new lines, such as the Silver or Purple lines, or proposed new lines like a Blue Line loop, entirely around an eco-district vision. Public entities can and should acquire underutilized offices and land now to build momentum for both housing and transit; a land value tax would make doing so more attractive.
Although the development of a social housing program is beyond the mandate of today’s DMVMoves task force, housing is on WMATA General Manager Randy Clarke’s mind. At a presentation in October 2024, Clarke said “if it was up to us,” every parking lot at a station would be housing. Clarke and DMVMoves’ participants should account for that sentiment in their recommendations, reaffirming and expanding upon WMATA’s existing joint development plan to position it as a unifying force for transit-oriented social housing.
Many pieces are already in place for such a crossover. COG already convenes the region’s leaders; Maryland and DC have begun to take social housing proposals seriously; and Virginia's rejection of a stadium deal at Potomac Yards demonstrates the hunger that people have for housing and transportation solutions that will materially improve their lives, not those of billionaire team owners.
The federal government, as the region’s current largest employer and landowner, stands to directly benefit from the effect genuine regional housing affordability would have on its ability to recruit and retain the most talented workforce it can. The stakes are that high when it comes to housing affordability for federal workers and all who rely on them to administer federal programs.
The DC region can lead the development of a comprehensive solution to a lack of housing supply in a way that prioritizes and empowers people to live where they want, in beautiful amenity-rich communities, at a price they can afford. As the enemies of egalitarianism in America are already crowing about, increased state votes in the Electoral College in the 2030 re-apportionment process are expected to flow primarily to Texas and Florida, with Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Idaho, Utah, and Arizona also potentially expected to gain votes. Meanwhile, California, New York and Illinois could lose multiple votes, and Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Oregon might also be on the chopping block.
To overcome the structural barriers to progressive policy that exist in the US constitutional order, it is imperative to create an attractive, functioning alternative. We must reverse the downward trend in people’s perceptions of their own economic well-being in the geographic locations that are best positioned to do so, thereby stanching and reversing the current patterns of economic and geographic mobility. We can’t afford housing policy that is measured in centuries rather than business cycles.
In the decades prior to the American Civil War, the tension between “free” states and slave states was one of the dominant political battle lines, with northern states eventually recognizing the existential threat that slave states posed to their ability to remain ‘free’. In Trump’s second presidential term, it is necessary that the District and the region once again become a beacon of social and economic democracy.
Support a Land Value Tax for WMATA — sign this petition to DMVMoves members and receive emails from the DMV Green New Deal for Transit Campaign!
