Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.
It isn’t particularly surprising, I suppose, that in Zachary Schrag’s Metro history The Great Society Subway the role of central city savior is played by, you know, Metro. What is somewhat surprising, even to an unapologetic transit supporter like me, is how convincing his case is; faced with riot scarred neighborhoods and a downtown abused by suburban office and retail growth, the city was teetering on the brink before Metro helped usher in enduring prosperity. What shocks me most of all about Scrag’s history, however, is how difficult a time Metro’s builders had getting stations placed in some neighborhoods. The same community organizations you cheer when reading accounts of epic struggles against highway builders seem like total villains as they cost WMATA millions by forcing hearing after hearing on the placement of an airshaft.
Frustrating, yes, but it isn’t hard to understand the base attraction of territoriality (Jackson Graham, who led most of Metro’s early construction and faced dozens of angry residential neighborhood groups, found himself in retirement leading an effort to oppose the building of a road adjacent to his favorite country club). What’s more difficult to identify and argue against in these situations, what fails to enter our minds often as we contemplate a new project, is the cost of doing nothing. We see money spent, and we imagine how else it might have been used, we see an airshaft and we think of the tree it displaced–that part of opportunity cost we get–but the burdens placed upon us by sitting on our hands are frequently ignored.
This week, the always enjoyable and informative Post columnist Marc Fisher wrote a piece arguing against the development of Poplar Point, a long neglected piece of relatively open land on the Anacostia, across from the Near Southeast baseball stadium development. His piece was eminently sensible from the point of view of the common man discussing land use over a beer. The residents of Ward 8 deserve a park just as much as those who live in upper Northwest. They need a place for their children to play, and after all natural land is scarce; there are, moreover, plenty of other places to develop east of the Anacostia river.
Hard to disagree. But what Fisher doesn’t acknowledge is that the potential tax revenues from development at Poplar Point, the potential jobs in retail establishments there, the gain to the city from having a bit more of its 66 paltry square miles developed are real and tangible things. On the surface, the cost of a park at Poplar Point is just the money needed to clean up trash and install some park benches. In real life, the cost is lost tax revenues and jobs, an additional barrier between economic activity in Near Southeast and Anacostia, and reduced space east of the river for commercial and residential properties. Open land in the Washington metropolitan area is scarce, but unused land near the center of the city is far scarcer. Maybe, after everything is added up, the park does outweigh the development. If so, then we should by all means build a park. But we do no one any good by pretending that the cost of that green space is simply the amount needed to clean up those few acres. The lost opportunities could easily run to the tens of millions of dollars, or much, much more.
Picture taken by Cary Scott Photography.
