Reply to The Pandemic Hit Cities Hard And Then There's Washington, DC

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Lots of hand wringing over nothing. Let the market work it's magic - you'll see shrinking office footprints for individual organizations, a consolidation of office space, and conversion to residential.

For example, office buildings closest to Dupont Circle and Mass Ave are prime candidates for conversion to residential given their proximity to other residential neighborhoods & amenities. If some of those are converted, existing office tenants will consolidate in more traditional office areas (K St, Metro Center).

It's going to take a couple years for all of this to shake out. But it will happen. DC still has a shortage of residential units by tens of thousands of units. This city's housing supply has not kept up with demand.

Once vaccines are available for kids, we will see a return to office. My prediction is January 2022 people start returning in large numbers for a few days per week.[/quote]

Yesterday's Post article confused me, TBH. Its said residents who can telework are moving out of the city in droves for a variety of reasons including cost of living and personal security.  Then it said the city will use this to convert offices to downtown residences. But it sounds like offices AND residents are leaving. Who is going to live there? Will they be subsidized/part of the affordbale housing plan? People with means are not clamoring for DC condos right now.[/quote]

Those who moved out of the city is not a massive tsunami, IMHO. A lot of it was families who would've moved eventually. And even with the real decline in population, its still nowhere near enough to make up for the deficit in housing units that DC needs.

What's hurting DC right now is the fact that the city did not have two years' worth of interns and recent graduates move to DC for entry level jobs. That's tens of thousands of new residents who didn't show up to rent apartments or houses.

A lot is in flux right now. DC will bounce back similar to NYC, but it will just take longer. And I predict it will coincide with the mass vaccination of children. Neither my spouse nor I are eager to jump back to our offices while our kid is unvaccinated.[/quote]

What difference will vaccination of children make? Kids are at minuscule risk from Covid - it is far less dangerous than the flu for them. Covid is endemic now and it’s not going away, so we as a society will have to decide if that means permanent remote work or not. As we have all seen over the past two years, white collar work can be done remote[/quote]

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