Washington Retail District’s Future Rides on Streetcars

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/business/washington-retail-districts-future-rides-on-streetcars.html?ref=us&_r=0
 

Washington Retail District's Future Rides on Streetcars

By EUGENE L. MEYER

APRIL 15, 2014
 

 
Workers tested a new streetcar that will run along the H Street commercial corridor in Washington and, city officials and others hope, drive development. CreditDaniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times


WASHINGTON — The streetcars stopped running in 1949, replaced by buses. In the wake of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. the 1968 riots devastated the commercial corridor. Only in recent years has revitalization occurred and gentrification taken hold.
This summer, if all goes as planned, the return of streetcars after 65 years will be another step forward for the former H Street NE shopping district in the nation’s capital.
The return of the trolleys is being hailed by city officials, businesses and developers as a new generator of economic wealth that will more than pay for the first of eight planned and heavily subsidized streetcar lines, eventually extending for 37 miles throughout the District of Columbia. District planners are projecting as much as $8 billion in new investment within 10 years of the lines’ completion.
“What light rail does for a retail corridor is it’s really a big multiplier,” says developer Jim Abdo, whose conversion of a late-19th-century building that was once a convent and then the former Capital Children’s Museum into high-end condos a few years ago was an early catalyst for much of what has happened since.
Landmark Lofts at Senate Square, a project of Mr. Abdo’s development company, anchors the west end of H Street NE and the western terminus of the 2.4-mile line, across the Hopscotch Bridge from the District’s train terminal, the 1907 Beaux-Arts Union Station, also a major hub for East Coast travel.
The renovated Atlas Performing Arts Center, formerly a movie house that closed after the riots, anchors the eastern end of the corridor. Expectations are that the streetcars will accelerate the H Street renaissance.
Anwar Saleem, 59, a business owner and executive director of the nonprofit H Street Main Street, grew up in the neighborhood and rode the streetcars as a boy. “Before the riots, H Street was a hustling, bustling neighborhood,” Mr. Saleem said. “You could buy anything, from jewelry to music. You name it, H Street had it. Oh, it was crowded. It was one of the best commercial areas in the city.”
Today, H Street residents, once predominantly low-income African-Americans, are increasingly mixed, racially and economically, as rowhouses within a block or two of the corridor undergo upscale renovations, property values rise and ethnic restaurants and fashionable pubs proliferate. A 39,000-square-foot Whole Foods is set to open in 2016.
Now, within half a mile of H Street, according to a report by the Washington, DC Economic Partnership, a nonprofit organization that promotes business opportunities, 63 percent of the neighborhood’s nearly 16,000 residents are college graduates, 31 percent have graduate degrees, and the median household income is $90,397, compared with a Census Bureau estimate of $64,267 citywide.
“What I like about H Street is that, even with gentrification, it still has an air of genuine H Street culture,” said Amy Lettis, 39, a songwriter who recently moved to the neighborhood with her friend Kristen Owens, 23, a singer who also is a hostess at Sticky Rice, an Asian fusion restaurant. “I don’t think corporate America will ever take it over.”
The District’s streetcar era began with horse-drawn cars in 1870 and ended in January 1962 with the last run on a route from Union Station to Glen Echo, in suburban Maryland. Some two-thirds of the planned system would restore service to former trolley routes. The new network is intended to complement the regional Metro rail and bus system.
Installation of streetcar tracks and overhead wires began in 2009. Since December, the District’s Department of Transportation has been testing three electrified vehicles along the route. The city owns six streetcars, made in Portland, Ore., and the Czech Republic. They cost $4 million each. The cost to build the H Street line is $135 million.
The start of service has been delayed several times while the testing goes on and operators are hired and trained. Meanwhile, the city has been ramping up its promotional efforts, distributing “Friend of DC Streetcar” decals and coasters to H Street restaurants and businesses.
Along the route, a dozen raised platforms are in place for passengers to get on and off.
“We have a stop right in front of our restaurant,” said Ron McNeil, general manager of Smith Commons Dining Room & Public House, which opened about three years ago. “The buzz on H Street is good. The whole area is much more vibrant. You see a lot of construction.”
Terry Bellamy, director of the District’s transportation agency, said the initial line was projected to have over one million rides in its first year of operation. For a while at least, buses will continue to operate with the streetcars on the route. Fares are expected to be $1 with a computerized SmarTrip card, or $2 in cash. But officials expect a much bigger payoff.
A 2012 consultants study predicted that the new system would encourage economic development, including “additional retail spending of new households and workers attracted by the streetcar.” The “visible permanence” of the streetcar “can serve as a powerful attraction to private real estate investment,” the study added. These economic benefits, the study said, “would exceed the projected cost of creating the system by 600 percent to 1,000 percent.”
Last year, 558,000 square feet of commercial space was built or was under construction in the corridor, compared with 18,000 square feet during the previous 20 years, according to a report by D. J. O’Brien, of CoStar Group, a real estate information business.
Mr. Abdo said he had felt the H Street corridor “was always under the radar but had a great historic fabric that was still intact.”
“When I went there,” he added, “a lot of it was boarded up, covered with graffiti, decimated in the riots. But since we made our investment, it’s been one of the fastest-growing retail corridors in the city. When you add this piece, it’s the icing on the cake.”


A version of this article appears in print on April 16, 2014, on page B9 of the New York edition with the headline: Washington Retail District’s Future Rides on Streetcars. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe

[yardlet6]

If they could bring back F Street with new stores to replace the dead department stores it would be better.