First published in The Baltimore Sun
By DAVID BOWERS and SHEILA SOMASHEKHAR
PUBLISHED: July 19, 2024 at 6:10 a.m.
Petworth, Columbia Heights, Shaw. These Washington, D.C., neighborhoods serve as cautionary examples of what happens when our region doesn’t take sustained, proactive action to stabilize people and communities in the face of major public and private investment: destabilization of families, displacement from homes and communities, and loss of connection and culture.
Time and time again, we’ve seen examples in our region and across the country of large-scale transit investments harming low-income residents and locally owned businesses. We are all still grappling with the long-term impacts of this harm. Now, we are confronted with the question, will we let it happen again?
The Purple Line, which will run light rail through Montgomery and Prince George’s County, is now only a few years from opening. Without consistent and proactive intervention, the same patterns will affect communities along the Purple Line’s 16-mile corridor, where nearly half of households earn below 60% of area median income and nearly 70% of residents are people of color. Residents will be forced to move farther away if efforts to create and preserve affordable housing do not keep up.
We are already seeing warning signs. Recent University of Maryland research suggests that the line has already increased single-family housing and multifamily rent prices near stations, and small businesses near the line are closing more rapidly than those further away.
The Purple Line Corridor Coalition (PLCC), including Enterprise Community Partners, has been advancing a proactive housing strategy to ensure different outcomes in the Purple Line corridor than we’ve seen elsewhere. Since 2019, the coalition has been working toward a shared goal to add or stabilize 17,000 homes affordable for households with incomes at or below $72,000. As of 2023, 10,100 affordable homes are already completed or in the pipeline.
To add the remaining 6,900 homes needed, we need bold investment in affordable housing along the corridor. The recently finalized state and county budgets are steps in the right direction. We’re encouraged to see expanded commitments to housing affordability in this year’s State budget, including $110 million in new funds for rental housing programs to tackle the shortage of 96,000 homes statewide and stabilize renters experiencing housing insecurity. Montgomery and Prince George’s County budgets also committed more than $90 million in new funds for affordable housing.
In addition to the public sector, we need partners across private and philanthropic sectors to build on this momentum and make even more targeted investments along the Purple Line.
The Purple Line Corridor Coalition provides a venue for this cross-sector and cross-county collaboration, and we’ve seen what is possible when public and private-sector groups work together. Initiatives including the $12 million Purple Line Capital Pool, supported by JPMorgan Chase, Kaiser Permanente and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, have leveraged more than $104 million and created or preserved more than 1,000 affordable homes in less than three years.
A recent study commissioned by Enterprise Community Partners estimates $740 million is needed from private, public and philanthropic partners to meet the PLCC’s 17,000-home goal. To successfully leverage the more than $2 billion already available across state and local government funding and private-sector financing, this investment should go toward creating a fully capitalized loan fund to provide below-market, must-pay loans and increasing existing sources of financing for affordable housing development and homeownership support.
Acquisition capital from Montgomery County’s Affordable Housing Opportunity Fund and the Purple Line Capital Pool enabled Enterprise Community Development to acquire Parkside Terrace, an 87-unit property where Enterprise is preserving affordability and modernizing homes. Creating a corridor-wide acquisition fund would further scale impact along the Purple Line, enabling affordable housing developers to nimbly acquire properties currently serving low-income households where affordability can be preserved. Policies that support transit-oriented development and easier entitlement processes are also needed to attract and facilitate more development in the corridor.
Our goal is ambitious, but the stakes are high. The Purple Line is a nearly $10 billion transit project. Its success should be measured by how well it bolsters communities and serves the people who live and work along the corridor. We have the opportunity to prevent the patterns of displacement we’ve seen in so many neighborhoods in the region and across the country. We urge partners across public, private and philanthropic sectors to make the bold investments we need today to ensure this historic transit investment works for everyone in the decades to come.
David Bowers (dbowers@enterprisecommunity.org) is vice president of Enterprise Community Partners. Sheila Somashekhar (ssomashe@umd.edu) is director of the Purple Line Corridor Coalition.