The planned Purple Line light rail in Maryland could gentrify neighborhoods, making housing unaffordable for low-income residents, Prince George’s County officials and activists said. “Gentrification is great, but it’s a double-edged sword,” Prince George’s County Councilwoman Mary Lehman, D-Laurel, said during a council briefing on the project. “It displaces working-class people.”
The proposed 16-mile light rail line inside the Capital Beltway would go from the New Carrollton Metro station in Prince George’s County to the Bethesda station in Montgomery County.
Lehman said low-income residents are worried that affordable housing could disappear as projects are built around the Purple Line’s stations and land and rental prices are driven up.
“It could undermine our own goal of having a county where people can work where they live,” she said. “And how ironic would that be if all these workers are displaced by new development and have to move further away from jobs?”
Lindolfo Carballo, a community development organizer with Casa of Maryland, said he is concerned about the effect of the development on small businesses and said the county should work to minimize the displacement of tenants.
“We are not against the Purple Line, we are not against development. We want to see development here,” Carballo said. “The problem is in our experience in other cities, at the end of the day, those that aren’t getting any benefit from those developments are low-income residents.”
But Mike Madden, who manages the Purple Line project for the Maryland Transit Administration, said the agency is aware of the gentrification fears and said transportation officials are “working with both counties to address those concerns as we move forward.”
Madden stressed the potential economic impact from the project; he said 3,000 to 5,000 jobs are created for every $100 million investment in public transit. The project will cost about $1.6 billion, he said.
“With a number of these new systems being built around the country, we have seen tremendous benefit in terms of economic development associated with light rail investment,” he said.
Of the 21 planned stations, 11 would be in Prince George’s County. The agency expects 60,000 riders a day, which he said would take 20,000 cars off the road a day.
Preliminary engineering is expected to
begin this summer, breaking ground in 2014, he said.
