I can imagine what Virginia Beach light rail advocates are saying right about now after reading the editorial title. “Where is this going?”

Urbanization that includes rapid transit can, in the long run, lead to undesirable consequences.  One can look at a large city like New York or a relatively small one like Gresham, Oregon.

Gresham, a council-manager form of government, population 100,000 lies to the east of Portland.  It is the fourth largest city in Oregon.  Gresham is serviced with eight of 27 stations of metropolitan Portland’s MAX Blue Line.  The Blue Line was opened in 1986.

Follow up:

According to Shane T. Bemis, Gresham’s mayor, 40 percent of robberies and drug crimes as well as 80 percent of gang-related police calls in his city take place within a quarter mile of a light-rail station. This accounts for 6 percent of the city’s area. The transit agency, TriMet, blames the problems on the neighborhood, not light rail. “The transit system reflects the community it travels through,” said a transit agency spokesperson. “They have a lot of poverty, unemployment and gang issues, and occasionally that will come onto the train system.”

Neighborhood poverty is attributed to poor regional planning which gentrified Portland’s low-income neighborhoods and pushed the poor into subsidized transit-oriented developments. In addition, the Gresham police say that many criminals are “commuting in from other areas” on the light rail.

One local man relates his story, “Before MAX came to this neighborhood, it was a pretty good blue collar neighborhood. It was a modest low density neighborhood with hard working people raising families with big yards. Most people were proud to live out there.

Then came light rail, followed by density mandates. The old residents slowly moved away and the character of the old neighborhood moved with it. The single family homes were replaced with the density mandate along Burnside, the new Light Rail corridor.

It took 20 years of planning to change a good neighborhood to what it is today.”

Unfortunately, this is a common result of fixed rapid transit lines. It makes one wonder, once Norfolk’s Tide is completed, what will its route look like in 20 years? Norfolk with its Housing and Redevelopment Authority is practicing gentrification in older areas (Oceanview) just like Portland did.

Next?

Then again, what about Virginia Beach?