Housing Policy

The D.C. Streetcar's Other Failures

Plus: The "Montana miracle" wins one last court battle, D.C.'s "devastatingly unambitious" growth plan, and your Fourth Amendment right to refuse federal housing vouchers.

Christian Britschgi | 3.24.2026 1:45 PM

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Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week's newsletter includes stories on:

But first! A few reflections on the failure of the Washington, D.C., streetcar, which will cease operations by the end of the month.

The D.C. Streetcar's Other Failures

The D.C. Streetcar is set to shutter operations later this month after an ignominious decade of crawling up and down the city's H Street Corridor.

Few are shedding any tears for its end.

As the obituaries note, the streetcar effectively offered the same service as the bus lines that already covered H Street, save for the fact that it was slower, didn't directly connect to any Metro stations, and would occasionally get stuck behind cars parked partially in the right-of-way.

As someone whose decade of living in D.C. has run concurrently with the streetcar's life, I can say that I can only remember riding it one time. The last time I considered using it to travel from one end of H Street to the other—the only trip the streetcar can perform—it was faster to just walk.

Rent Free Newsletter by Christian Britschgi. Get more of Christian's urban regulation, development, and zoning coverage.

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Given that even the most rosy-eyed transit enthusiasts have become D.C. Streetcar critics, bemoaning its failures as a mode of transportation feels a bit like beating a dead horse, with the only real difference being that the dead horse will probably get you to your destination faster.

That's in no small part because the streetcar was not built to be a good piece of transportation infrastructure. Instead, its funding from the Obama administration as part of its post-recession "streetcar revival" was predicated on its utility as a driver of local economic development and domestic manufacturing. Moving people from A to B was a secondary goal at best.

As it happens, the D.C. Streetcar failed at those wider goals as well.

The Portland, Oregon, factory that built streetcars for D.C., Tucson, and Portland, and which was supposed to be the linchpin of the streetcar revival, closed over a decade ago. Meanwhile, H Street today is in economic decline. Local business owners blame higher crime and, ironically, the damage streetcar construction did to small businesses.

As it closes for good, however, the D.C. Streetcar does have one final lesson to teach.

Increasingly, urban politics is turning away from reflexive NIMBYism. More and more, politicians are winning elections with promises to get cities building again.

That's a welcome attitude generally. But there are risks embedded within this vibe change as well.

It's true that infrastructure dollars often are wasted on endless processes, consultation, and review that end up building nothing—California's high-speed rail being the canonical example.

The D.C. Streetcar is a good example of how, even when something is built, it can still be a wasteful disappointment.

The planners can get things wrong even when they're not stopped by litigious NIMBYs gumming up project completions. Pro-growth politicians can easily become seduced by big, expensive megaprojects that they can cut a........

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