montgomery county is finally talking about its segregated schools. but can we fix them?

Montgomery County’s public schools are growing, and they’re also growing more segregated by race and class, which is hurting student performance across the board. As the county struggles to address these issues, a debate is raging about who belongs in our community, and who gets to benefit from its resources.

Students, parents, teachers, and community members filled the cafeteria at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda for last night's boundary study meeting. Photo by Mike H, all other photos by the author.

In January, the Montgomery County Board of Education hired a consultant to look at the catchment areas for each of the county’s 200-plus schools with a focus on diversity. Like the District, Montgomery County Public Schools hasn't done a county-wide boundary study in decades, due to resistance from parents who don't want their kids' school to change. (This often has to do with the relationship between school reputation and property values.) As a result, the Board of Education redraws boundaries rarely, like when a new school opens.

With the boundaries largely stuck in place, the majority of the county’s minority and low-income students have become clustered in East County and the Upcounty, while schools in the wealthier west side of the county remain predominantly white. Schools where enrollment is rising sit next to schools with hundreds of empty seats.

To avoid redistricting students to a "less desirable" school, MCPS has planned multi-million-dollar additions at Whitman and Bethesda-Chevy Chase high schools. Meanwhile, a few miles away at Springbrook High School, which has nearly four hundred empty seats, MCPS is taking away teachers because there aren’t enough students.

did silver spring build enough housing to stay affordable? sort of.

In 2013, I looked at rents in Silver Spring to see if building tons of new homes could help keep our community affordable. Five years and about 1,700 new apartments later, did it work? Sort of. Rents in many downtown buildings are the same or lower than they were in 2013, but it hasn't been enough to keep prices from spiking elsewhere.

Apartment and condo buildings in downtown Silver Spring. All images by the author.

Housing economists say that a crucial way to lower housing costs is through filtering. Today’s expensive “luxury” homes will become tomorrow’s affordable homes, as newer, fancier homes are built and people who can pay more seek them out while people with more modest incomes move into older homes. We've seen this here in Silver Spring and Takoma Park, where 1950s-era "luxury" apartments have essentially become affordable housing.

But if new homes aren’t being built to replace the older ones, the opposite happens, and owners upgrade their properties and make them more expensive to attract higher-income occupants. Or, as housing researcher Sydney Bennet told Bisnow, “If there aren’t enough cheaper options, it becomes a chain, with a middle-class person living in an apartment a lower-income person might have occupied, and so on.”

Does this actually happen in real life? To find out, last summer I looked at apartments in downtown Silver Spring, which has experienced two big building booms in the 1950s and 1960s, and again during the 2000s and 2010s. In 2013, I noticed a strong relationship between the age of a building and its rent: The older a building, the lower the rent.

before the purple line, silver spring will get this train-chameleon mural

CORRECTION: this story has been updated to reflect the fact that this mural depicts a chameleon, not an iguana; I'm gonna go review my lizard flash cards now

The Purple Line won't open for a few years, but it'll arrive a little sooner in Silver Spring in the form of a new mural that turns the train into...a chameleon. Work on the mural started last week on a blank wall the intersection of Georgia Avenue and Bonifant Street, where Purple Line trains will run once the light rail opens in 2023.

The mural, currently in progress, depicts a train-chameleon hybrid. Photo by the author.

The Silver Spring Urban District, which manages everything from street sweeping to community events in the downtown, commissioned the mural with the Silver Spring Arts and Entertainment District. It held a poll last year for residents to choose from a few different designs, and this train-iguana hybrid won. (Full disclosure: I voted for it.)

The mural fills a block-long blank wall next to the future Purple Line. Photo by the author.

It's an important piece of public art for an intersection that's changed a lot. There used to be another building at the corner, but it was demolished in the 1970s to widen Bonifant Street, revealing the blank wall. In recent years, this stretch of Georgia Avenue has become the heart of Silver Spring nightlife. The Quarry House Tavern, which opened in the 1930s, sits across Georgia, and new venues like Society, Urban Butcher, and Astro Lab have opened nearby. Washington Property Company, which is building a new, 20-story apartment building across Bonifant Street, paid for the mural.

Here's what the mural will look like when it's done. Image from the Silver Spring Urban District.

However, the push for a mural started several years ago from community members. In 2014, local architects Atul Sharma and Mark Schrieber gave a presentation at PechaKucha Night Silver Spring about how underused public spaces could become opportunities for art or community gatherings. One of their proposals was painting a mural on the blank wall. Around the same time, mysterious posters appeared around the then-unfinished Silver Spring Transit Center calling for it to become recreational space.

When it's built, each Purple Line station will also have public artwork on display, but it's cool to see community-led artwork joining it. Hopefully, the train-chameleon will become a well-loved landmark for future riders.