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The mayor of Washington, D.C., says President Joe Biden should either help bring more federal workers back into the office or help convert underutilized office spaces into housing or other uses.
Muriel Bowser said in an inaugural address as she was sworn in for her third term Monday that one of her key initiatives would be to revitalize Washington’s downtown, which she called “the proverbial goose that lays the golden egg,” by eventually adding 100,000 residents to the area’s current population of 25,000. Bowser said transforming office space into housing could also be crucial to realizing the area’s full potential, adding that “we’ve built the largest housing production trust fund in the nation because of our growing downtown.”
“The federal government represents one-quarter of D.C.’s prepandemic jobs and owns or leases one-third of D.C.’s office space,” Bowser said in the address. “We need decisive action by the White House to either get most federal workers back to the office most of the time, or to realign their vast property holdings for use by the local government, by nonprofits, by businesses and by any user willing to revitalize it.”
Washington, D.C., has “partnered with this White House successfully many times,” Bowser said. And, as Bowser highlighted last month, underused office spaces like the Vanguard building — formerly home to the Peace Corps — have already been set aside for conversion into housing.
Though Bowser’s comments didn’t make clear how much federal office space the city would hope to see converted into residential or other uses, Bowser said in a press briefing Tuesday that, overall, she’d like to see a better balance between commercial and residential space in the downtown area. Neighborhoods with mixed compositions fared better in the pandemic, she said.
“I think you can count on continued conversations with our federal partners on the downtown,” Bowser said.
“Currently, about 46% of federal employees say they’re not required to be at their offices all the time, according to a recent survey.”
Before the pandemic, it was estimated that 200,000 federal workers commuted to D.C. offices every day, according to a December 2021 NPR report. Only 3% of federal employees teleworked daily.
Currently, about 46% of federal employees say they’re not required to be at their offices all the time, according to the most recent federal employee viewpoint survey from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Indeed, some government workplaces have embraced flexible work and telework to retain and recruit employees, and a quarter of employees said in the same survey that they teleworked three or more days a week.
The shift to teleworking has sparked broader concerns about the future of the capital’s economy — and that of big urban centers overall — with potentially fewer employees around to use public transportation, buy lunches and coffees or rent apartments within walking distance of their offices. In San Francisco, where the vast majority of the economy is fueled by office-based industries, remote work has contributed to a far emptier downtown, according to Bloomberg News.
The District of Columbia’s economy is also largely dependent on commuters, given that 70% of its workers lived outside the city before the pandemic, according to a May report from the D.C. Policy Center.
With more of those workers telecommuting — and the nonpartisan D.C. Policy Center noting that the metropolitan area has a higher-than-usual share of jobs that can be done from home — office occupancy remained low at the time of the report, at about 37% citywide and 35% in the downtown area.
“Downtowns and neighborhoods that have multiple uses are more resilient to economic downturns as they do not rely heavily on one use-type, such as office space,” the report said. “When employment is down, versatile places can still attract residents, shoppers, or other visitors. The District’s ability to evolve to become more resilient may take time, but in the immediate term, incremental changes, such as placemaking or establishing a new identity for downtown beyond an office district, can help to increase foot traffic.”
However, it’s difficult to determine how readily federal government properties could be transformed into housing. Only one in about 20 office buildings in Washington, D.C., could actually be considered appropriate for housing, Josh Bernstein, chief executive of the D.C.-based real estate management firm Bernstein Management, told the New York Times — in part because converting a space could in many cases cost more than building something new. Similarly, few office buildings in New York City are convertible, the Times reported.
Yet D.C. is leading the pack in cities tackling “adaptive reuse,” or turning old buildings into new apartments, with 1,565 such apartments built between 2020 and 2021, according to a recent report from the aparment-information firm Yardi Matrix. Office buildings, factories, hotels and warehouses made up the bulk of buildings turned into housing nationwide during that time frame.
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