May 20, 2010 - 1:02 am

Carless in LeDroit

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Among the nicest features of LeDroit Park are its walkability and its proximity to downtown.  We can bike downtown to work in 15 minutes, or if it’s raining, take the bus or the metro and be there in 25 minutes.  The restaurants, shops, and bars along U Street are only a short walk away.

The notion that it is easy to live in LeDroit Park without a car consistently confounds many suburbanites, but our variety of transportation options is no accident.

Our neighborhood is just outside the original L’Enfant city.  In L’Enfant’s time, the main form of transportation was the human foot, so a city designed from scratch, like Washington, had to be relatively flat, like Washington, and compact, like Washington.  Horse-drawn streetcars made commuting across the city easier, and electric streetcars eased the daily climb to neighborhoods like Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant.

After World War II, housing construction exploded, particularly suburban housing construction.  The suburban housing model was— and, for the most part, still is— based on several main principles, most significantly, the uniformity of housing sizes (usually large) and the separation of residential and commercial uses.  Both larger lots and the separation of uses create longer distances between any two points, requiring a greater effort to go between home, work, and the grocery store.

These longer distances between daily destinations made walking impractical and the lower population densities made public transit financially unsustainable.  The only solution was the private automobile, which, coincidentally, benefited from massive government subsidies in the form of highway building and a subsidized oil infrastructure and industry.

LeDroit Park was founded in 1873 and the first wave of single-family and duplex houses designed by James McGill soon followed.  The second housing wave brought rowhouses to LeDroit Park, but most of the neighborhood was finished in the early twentieth century long before the dominance of the automobile.

Notice this 1908 photo of the 400 block of U Street in LeDroit Park.  You’ll see four people, but only one car.

It’s no coincidence that our neighborhood’s founding, long before the automobile age, relates to its walkability and abundance of transit options.  In fact, when we look at the regional Census data, we find a strong relationship between the age of the housing stock and the rate of households without a car.

The only other factor that might influence the rate of carlessness is income, but the closeness of the carless rate and the pre-war housing stock rate is too glaring to ignore. There are plenty of middle-class people in Washington who choose to forgo a private car and the age of the neighborhood may be a strong indication of just how easy it is to live without a car.

1 Comment »