https://www.yahoo.com/news/remote-made-downtown-dc-ghost-134818408.html Remote work has made downtown DC a ghost town ment Accountability Office found that 17 of 24 federal agency headquarters are mostly empty. Many federal employees are continuing to work remotely and their offices are sitting vacant. DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has urged the White House to use the buildings or turn them over. Downtown Washington, DC is facing a familiar crisis among American cities right now. With the surge in remote work in recent years, downtowns across the country have emptied out and are struggling to bring workers, residents, and visitors back. Major office tenants are opting to downsize or give up their leases, sending commercial real estate into a tailspin. But unlike many other US cities, much of DC's downtown office space is controlled by a single landlord: the federal government. While the government has a wide range of telework policies, all 24 federal agencies have reported that their in-person workforce hasn't returned to pre-pandemic levels because of remote work. And it's having a major impact on DC's urban core.
It was already happening before COVID and before I left in 2018. Many agencies had gone to "max telework." That meant you only had to be in the office for 2 days per 2-week pay period. (Assuming you had a job eligible for telework.) Then, during COVID, there was a push to classify every position possible as "remote." In that case, the employee could live anywhere in the US and never come into the office. (If they lived outside the National Capital Region, the government would pay for their travel, when necessary.) We had huge office spaces just emptying out left and right. Plus we had to design and implement communal work stations and lockers for people who were just there for a day. And we had teleworkers living far and away (I lived in Arizona for my last 3 years.), sometimes flying back to DC to do their office time. (At their own expense, of course.) All of this drained huge amounts of cash from the DC economy. Imagine what a couple hundred thousand workers spent every day, and then imagine the impact of it disappearing. It wasn't just federal office space. The government leases a lot of its workspace, and when those leases expired, agencies moved en masse to smaller spaces, leaving those landlords in the lurch. And then the peripheral business (especially restaurants, bars, and retail); they got super-slammed. Finally, it wasn't just the federal workers. What about the contractors? And all the employees of businesses who supported--and profited from--all those government workers and contractors? Buying that food truck doesn't look like such a hot investment now, ya know?
It is. People who work in DC pay for their homes (in part) with their commutes. There is a strong correlation between the cost of one's home and the distance it is from the center of DC. That's why you have people commuting not just from far-flung places like Woodbridge, but even as far as Harper's Ferry and Baltimore. Lower mortgages, longer commutes. We lived in the City of Fairfax. Grossly expensive. Still, the commute was an hour and a quarter each way. "The thing about the rat race is, even if you win, you're still a rat." -- Lily Tomlin
