Reply to Real talk about the city’s economy, federal buildings leases, and telework impacts

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Bowser and council need a plan for city center to K street. like others have said my Fed friends are all working in NE, SW. All firms that I know of are doing hybrid work as are Feds. While the city is struggling, I see close-in suburbs thriving. Getting lunch during work from home days - you can see how busy it is with Uber drivers and people picking up salads or sitting down to a quick meal before going back to home offices. The revenue from food and services has shifted partially to these areas. [/quote]
What is interesting to me is that they knew this was coming before COVID and did not only did nothing about it but aggressively pursued policies to exacerbate the problem.

In 2019 the city published a report on office to residential conversation, noting that there was a rise in commercial office vacancies starting in 2018 and that two-thirds of office vacancies across the region were in the downtown core. While COVID and WFH may have exacerbated the problem, it is an issue that well predates COVID and they know it but no one wants to talk about that.

Instead of concern about the rising commercial vacancies in downtown DC, they aggressively pursued planning decisions that would further exacerbate the problem in downtown DC. They keep approving more and more new commercial office space across the city in new neighborhoods, despite the over-supply. And furthermore, they aggressively pursued upzoning and residential construction through the Comp Plan. Remember, all of these things were going on at the same time.

I would really like to understand how DC planned to attract new residents downtown, if downtown had to compete against new residential construction in Ward 3, which was specifically targeted for additional residential construction in the Comp Plan. But more challenging than that, what developer is going to invest in downtown DC if they have to be concerned that their investment could be undermined at any time by new construction in Upper NW.

Allowing downtown DC to become like this were all deliberate choices by this mayor. It is not the Federal government or COVIDs fault. [/quote]

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