MARC trains in Brunswick, MD

BeyondDC likes to gripe about how Washingtonians are too obsessed with Metro. Metro is great, we like to argue, but it’s not the only tool out there. We can do a lot with regional rail and streetcars, too. We were delighted then to catch the Post’s article today regarding MARC’s expansion plans. The Maryland commuter rail operation that’s long been relegated to shuffling a handful of trains in and out of the city each weekday is, for the first time since it was known as the B&O Railroad, thinking big. Plans call for a litany of long and short term improvements, including more frequent trains, extensions into Virginia and Delaware, and service on the weekends, among other things. The idea is transform MARC from, in the words of the Maryland Transit Administration’s own Henry Kay, a “marginal”, mere commuter operator, into “something that resembles public transit”. In other words, something that more resembles Chicago’s Metra than Virginia’s VRE.

If that’s not exciting news, we don’t know what is. Saturday trips to the Inner Harbor and Sunday jaunts to Harper’s Ferry sound fantastic.

The message: Live in one of these or you’re not welcome

A quick note to the folks complaining that large single family detached houses are sometimes used as apartment buildings: YOU ARE WHY HOUSING IS OVERPRICED!

There’s a dearth of affordable housing in virtually every metropolitan region in this country with a healthy economy. There are a multitude of reasons, but the most important one is that we have systematically made real affordable housing illegal in almost every conceivable way. Apartments above shops are illegal. Granny flats in the back yard are illegal. More than 3 unrelated persons living together in a house is illegal. Even small single family detached homes are frequently illegal. The list goes on and on. In much of America it is illegal, or at best very difficult, to build anything that’s not a luxury detached house for the upper middle class. Until that changes there will always be an unsolvable affordable housing crisis, and there will always be groups of people pooling money to live in the only kind of housing the law permits there to be enough of.