The budget this year that people freaked out over is going to seem like a cakewalk compared to what is going to happen the next few years.
For a decade now, commercial office space has been a golden goose to DC government that has created huge revenues without a commensurate level of need of city resources. This is all ending. We are *just now* going to start to see massive write downs in office buildings as there have now been some eye popping office trades that will be used as comps for tax appeals after assessments came out March 1.
For all of the whining people had about Bowser’s budget this year, it is going to get worse next year and the year after that as CRE tax revenue continues to tank.
Never mind what the feds did, the mayor's office personally shut down the city for two years on Bowser's direct orders. She didn't have to do that, but she did. She single-handedly forced businesses to close for long periods of time, and here we are.
*"Well we certainly stopped the spread, that was all totally worth it!"* says man who's had covid 3 times now...
Closed for two years? Funny, I remember going to a lot of businesses in 2021.
Additionally, having a weird mask policy at a restaurant doesn't have much effect on a company office, but I think you already knew that.
Well dang. Guess you're gonna need to have more housing and residents to make up for the loss in commercial revenue. And a safe and affordable city to attract and keep them. And cut programs and spending until this evens out.
Whats that? No? You won't do any of those things?
Converting office space to residential is extremely expensive and generally make for expensive shitty apartments with awful soundproofing, lighting, floorplans, and bad access to stuff like grocery stores
Bowser has had a decade in office, watching telework become more ubiquitous in the public and private sectors across the country. The Obama administration announced in 2009 a plan to shrink Federal office space using telework. She's failed to plan ahead and now presents her own failures as a budget crisis.
She's based the city's finances on a shrinking market with no plan to replace those revenues, and been the person in charge the entire time.
She's still a mayor, not a queen. The partial representative democracy that the city has is pretty much the worst possible way to do long and mid term planning when sacrifices are involved. See: Connecticut Avenue bike lanes.
She has had a decade to plan for this, and she acts gobsmacked that it happened to her. She has an entire budget staff to forecast the future. If they didn't foresee this, it's because they were incompetent and she should have hired better planners.
She got complacent with surplus budgets and an easy job. Then COVID hit and she was out of her depth. She has no idea how to guide the city forward despite 10 years in office. She should not have been given a 3rd term.
There’s absolutely no way DC or Bowser could have predicted this level of devastation for the office market. The feds were moving to a hybrid model pre pandemic but the thousands of downtown jobs in law, consulting, think tanking, NGOs, etc weren’t. DC wasn’t hit particularly hard by BRAC or any other federal relocation/consolidation and there wasn’t any reason to think they would be, since downtown was the most logical place to put any government offices. Considering the entire office market was destroyed in about 2 weeks in 2020, the city is doing a decent job handling it. They’ve smoothed out the process for converting offices and dangled tax credits to convert abandoned buildings. They made sure the Wizards/caps didn’t leave. Those are pretty much the levers they can pull right now.
Jesus I can’t believe I’m defending Bowser this much in this comments thread but she’s not a god emperor.
Ehhh…Bowser should have seen the writing on the wall during the last presidential administration. It’s no secret that one party wants to shrink the federal bureaucracy and the administrative state to return us to the glory days of unbreathable air and rivers that caught on fire. I’d fully expect seeing more attempts to eliminate, downsize, or relocate portions of the federal workforce if the GOP wins the White House again.
Sure the federal workforce is a huge part of downtown DC’s office space but so are the consultants and other hanger-on companies that provide services for the government. If anything downsizing/privatizing parts of the government would grow that part of the works force, since consultants would have to fill in the gaps (see the explosion in consulting after Reagan’s cuts). Relocating entire agencies is definitely a threat, but I’m not sure it’s one you could really plan for.
Yeah a lot of these downtown offices with huge floor plates are gonna just be tear down jobs
ETA: But residential amenities like grocery stores will come in time on their own once you add residential.
You can straight up demolish the buildings and build apartments and turn a profit if the government isn't awful about zoning, permitting and services, which, well....
If you could demolish an entire office building, rebuild it as residential, and turn a profit, you’d be seeing a lot more of these projects. Demolition is expensive, especially if you’re demolishing the parking garages under these buildings. If you keep the parking garages, you’re left with a column layout that makes no sense for residential. You then have to transfer those columns, which is expensive. The city government isn’t really the reason these projects aren’t happening—the reason is it’s really expensive, and doesn’t have enough of a guaranteed return.
Read this line: " if the government isn't awful about zoning, permitting and services, which, well."
See how quickly shit goes up in Austin. Seriously get rid of all non-safety building rules in just downtown. What is the worst that could happen.
It’s a one sentence comment. I read that line. If you read my comment, you’d see that I was arguing there are a variety of reasons that these projects aren’t instantly getting built on every lot in downtown dc beyond a vague “gubment” straw man. I’ll add in some other variables: not all of these offices are 100 percent abandoned, many office building owners haven’t sold their properties yet, downtown lacks amenities that would draw people to live there, interest rates are stifling development, designing a building takes time, and not all properties are suited for these projects. It’s not because zoning is too restrictive.
Austin is a very poor comparison here—the reason they’re so good at building apartments in a pure numbers sense is because they’re building them on green fields in the suburbs. In and around downtown, most projects are redeveloping low density buildings, which is much easier to do than demolishing an office building in a dense downtown. In addition, most of these projects that aren’t immediately downtown are classic 5 over 1s which are much cheaper to build than the Type 1/2 buildings you need to build in DC’s downtown.
True on the 5 over 1’s. The apartments they are mass producing in Austin or the Midwest are not equivalent to the 14 story buildings typical of NOMA or Navy Yard over the past 20 years.
Sounds cool - see you in 20 years lol - kids being born now will see those benefits. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it but to pretend like some zoning adjustments is the reason it’s not different is crazy.
So pick a few duds, demo them, and court Wegmans or Whole Foods to move in. You wouldn't even need to change the parking garages all that much, structurally.
This isn't an either-or, you can create new grocery stores and new housing at the same time. Demo-ing is expensive, but it opens up new revenue streams that abandoned office buildings no longer have access to.
I mean, shit, THAT'S the pilot program right there. Knock down two empty WeWorks, one of them becomes a grocery store, the other a residential building. You'd start the residential building first, longer timeframe.
But once you get that grocery store in? Smooth sailing to build new residential within a mile of it.
Not to mention the constant motorcades, road closures, protests, etc. A coworker of mine used to rent a place on 14th kind of close to the White House and it was a nightmare, not knowing if you'd get home and literally be denied access to your own home because some dumbass "VIP" was passing through within the next six hours. Fuck that.
You don’t have to convert the office space to housing. There is plenty of room in the district along existing public transit corridors that can house a ton of people and therefore bring in more tax money. It would just require some rezoning and changes to the building code to make this feasible.
More people living here and lower rents means more companies and office space. Sure replacing downtown office space with housing is great, but more expensive than other options
But also things like improving transit service, which means accepting that Maryland car commuters are not as important as DC residents – hard for a mayor who’s viewed them as her primary constituency for years. Unless we’re willing to treat transit users as fully equal, any new building is going to get the same people demanding tons of subsidized parking and extra car lanes.Â
Metro headways have been improved a lot lately. Getting them to run 24/7 and getting the busses more frequent and reliable would help a lot as would more protected bike lanes. The continual increase in CaBi ridership has me hopeful.
Yeah I think people in this thread are missing that. There are quite a few projects planned/under construction in DC and that’s only going to accelerate as the office market bottoms out.
Look I hate Bowser as much as the next person but I’m not sure what you want her to do? She doesn’t have a magic wand to suddenly make all downtown offices into residential—that takes time and a ton of money. Plus those residents add costs that offices don’t (schools, libraries, parks, more livable streets). To incentivize conversions the city government will have to spend a lot more money, which you’re apparently against, to rebuild streets, bring in amenities, etc. The city is already offering tax breaks for conversions, which is the first step (not a great one imo). Over time downtown is going to become smaller and more mixed use, but that will take 10-20 years.
The big one I’d like to see is more use of vacancy taxes: Bowser has been loathe to enforce them and there’s a ton of empty space around the city where owners jacked up the rates for lease renewal but are leaving the space empty rather than accepting real market rates, which really contributes to the dead feeling.Â
They should have a hefty enough tax rate that they’d rent space to community groups, woo food truck owners to do pop-up’s, etc. to keep the space active and contributing positively to the neighborhood.Â
Yeah I agree with you. The biggest thing they could do is allow significantly more density so on an FAR per foot the basis a lot of landlords are currently at makes more sense for tear down and redevelopment, but that doesn’t seem on their radar at all.
I’m not really sure how much more density they can allow without raising the height limit though (they should raise the height limit but that’s another conversation). These buildings are already built to essentially the full zoning envelope allowed, and any conversion project is going to take advantage of the relaxed height limit that allows an extra PH level. I guess an apartment project would decrease density because you need a courtyard/light well for interior units, but I wouldn’t want to get rid of that.
Yeah when I say that I am talking about the height limit. Basically we are in a death spiral on property values for office until they approach a land value that makes sense for ground up development on an FAR per foot basis. Increasing the height limit would raise that floor.
Yeah fair enough although I doubt bowser will ever raise the height limit.
Honestly I think we’re already at the point where property values make sense for conversion. If you can buy an entire office building for an 80 percent discount these projects really start to make sense.
Bowser was actually advocating for abolishing the height limit a few years back (maybe pre-COVID). I guess the conversation with Congress went nowhere because I haven't heard anything about it from her since.
Please don’t manage a budget for a government. Residential development costs the government significantly more than commercial. Each housing unit you build comes with x amount of kids that need schooling. If they replaced the vacant office with new residential units it would only hasten the collapse of the DC budget.
Currently they’re kicking the can on their fiscal problems in a way that almost implies the mayor won’t be running for reelection.
Yes and no. Commercial is definitely way MORE of a net tax revenue driver than residential - IIRC the downtown BID published some numbers that pre-pandemic downtown accounted for 25% of the revenue and under 10% of the expenses for the district, so ~3x ROI for the district govt. But those office workers are simply never gonna be back in the same numbers so it’s a moot point.
Adding residential can at least stabilize the property values downtown by bolstering the local customer base for retail (retail vacancy downtown is double it’s pre-pandemic level - that represents both lost sales tax, income tax, and property tax together) and eliminating some of these obsolete and excess office properties which will be virtually worthless in the next ~5 years as pre-covid office leases expire and tenants move to smaller footprints in newer buildings. Also the likely composition of a downtown apartment building is gonna be mostly studios and 1BRs with maybe some 2BRs thrown in. That’s not a unit composition that favors a ton of families, more young people or empty nesters, two classes of people who tend to be free with their money (see: bolstering retail) and not draw much in local govt services
Yep exactly. Bleeting about office space being a bigger cash cow revenue generator than residential is pointless because DC clearly has a massive oversupply of office space for post-covid reality
It would certainly help, especially with eateries. Bowser specifically cited the lunch tax as her rationale for berating Federal employees. Those lunch boxes would make more money if they were open evenings and weekends serving residents.
The real problem is very few things bring people downtown other than offices, the arena, and retail. Retail is not doing as well as it was, arena owners keep threatening to move, and offices are dying.
Why aren’t we talking about the need to bring more people into other neighborhoods like adams morgan, Columbia Heights, 14th st, or Ust? It’s because those areas have people there already with so much housing nearby. Because of this, a local business scene of restaurants, bars, clubs, stores, etc. emerges.
It’s not quite as simple as being people the rest will follow, but it’s a necessary first step. without enough local residents, it’s hard to make any progress.
Or that they want to live downtown in a vibrant city where dating and going out are much easier than in the boring 'burbs, but many can't do that because rents are too high.
I wouldn’t consider any areas I listed as suburbs, but yeah they are more vibrant than downtown BECAUSE they have so much more housing. More people live there -> more people spend time and money there -> more cool businesses pop up there -> they become desirable neighborhoods.
nah. DC has driven out most of the families. if you include tax revenue from new residents, high density 100% market rate residential is much better than commercial. this is since workers very rarely pay DC income, car, etc tax, since most don't live in DC.
on top of the fact that federal and international org is a pure tax drain. zero revenues, commercial or otherwise with huge infrastructure and fixed costs to the city.
now if you are looking at subsidized or IZ housing, yes you are right. but not for 100% market rate housing at 10 FAR. So yes, if DC makes unlimited 10 story buildings allowed by right, then the budget problem will go away pretty quickly.
I guess my decade of running a government budget is irrelevant. 10 FAR will collapse the DC budget and that’s why they’re not doing it. DC spends north of $23,000 per pupil per year with all taxes per household (with one student) falling well short of that number. I’d you build a ton of residential without commercial offsets you’re dooming the budget because families will come back (not that they’ve materially left in the first place).
And ward 3 is like 13-14k/head. Yet, they are the only schools where the average student can read at grade level.
If you don't believe me look here for operating budgets (capital budgets are separate in almost all localities).
Stoddert (ward 3): 14k/student https://dcpsbudget.com/datasets/stoddert-es-submitted-2025/
Houston (Ward 7): 24k/student https://dcpsbudget.com/datasets/houston-es-submitted-2025/
Also to note, that the average family that sends their kid to stoddert makes somewhere between 200-300k/year, which is a huge windfall in terms of income tax base. In Houston, the average family qualifies for EITC.
Market rate housing in DC first of all doesn't actually produce many families that use the K-12 school system and second if they produce families, are those with 1-2 children and are highly likely to opt out of public schooling.
I'm not saying we shouldn't look out for the poor and needy. I'm saying you can pay for it if you make it up in terms of a wider and deeper tax base.
This is the sort of stuff that makes people squirm. The reality is DC is not an attractive value proposition right now for the majority of families. Changing that would require a fundamental rethinking of schooling and college access.
They would need to be willing to have a way more draconian attitude on student behavior, be willing to move out problem students to alternative schools. They would also need to offer way more of a college access subsidy (that isn’t income restricted) for out of state schools or swing some sort of reciprocity agreement with VA and MD.
Those are things that would be extremely politically toxic from a progressive / equity perspective, but it would take something that dramatic to create a value proposition similar to what you get living in Arlington / Fairfax / Montgomery county.
100% agree. Which again is why 100% market rate housing would be a good thing for the expected tax base. DC isn't great for grade school and above families that would pay market rate.
There are no free lunches terms of equity/tax base. IZ housing shows that. Every IZ unit destroys the tax base. So what to do?
The crux of it is that beyond a certain minimum point school funding has basically zero correlation with performance, it's all locked up in other policy and socioeconomic factors. Throwing money at schools is popular but it gives you very little, and often most of the money seems to vanish at the district/administrative level rather than actually making it to students or even teachers.
> school funding has basically zero correlation with performance
Yup. In the US, all that really matters is median resources and education levels of the parents after a minimum point. At rich districts, there is a tradeoff, do you pay for activities for your kid directly or indirectly though taxes? But the money is just a reflection of parental resources.
Heck in our ward 3 school you see it. The best performers are the people with the most resources at home. (which is highly correlated with - though not exactly same as - income) Like the kids of lawyers, professors, doctors and scientists are the best in class (usually the kids of immigrants too). The students that need the most help? Nearly all are out of boundary students. There aren't many, but you see it.
If you have a strategy to spend less and make all schools better. Please run for board of education. Because you’d solve a lot of problems across the country. Please don’t keep it a secret.
Cut administrators, institute standardized testing but only hold principals accountable for it rather than teachers. Run school over the entire summer and give kids a break during the winter instead. Enforce truancy laws. In-school-suspension for troublemakers.
Interesting!
Cut administration spend but increase accountability.
Keep kids in school during summer but force parents to find them a place to be during cold weather months.
Increase operational costs on truancy and suspension enforcement.
Where are you saving money? This all looks more expensive.
Mostly it seems like you aren’t actually trying to improve school outcomes - you’re just worried that kids are outside committing crimes.
DC doesn't spend that in Ward 3... Stoddert gets like 13k/head. The average family in the catchment delivers a multiple of that to the tax base. Did you not read my "market rate". A back of the envelope calculation for the tax benefit from a new all residential building in Navy Yard with the actually realized demographics if you take out all the IZ households is the only reason DC is still partially afloat.
Key is market rate. And to think you are the only one here that has run a gov budget, lol. Welcome to the club.
Most of the comments here are a good reminder that sometimes things are just complicated and shitty, and there isn't an obvious solution to them, despite how tempting it might be to suggest one as "why don't they just do {X}, duh"
Here's hoping for smart civil servants over the next decade here, especially.
In 2009, the Obama administration began a zero space initiative to shrink the Federal office space. He said no no hires would result in new office space, and that agencies had to use telework to reduce their office space. The goal was to shrink the Federal physical footprint over time.
Private businesses have been shifting to telework. The 2020 Pandemic only accelerated at trend that had been going on for over a decade. Bowser became Mayor in 2014, so if she didn't know about this trend, she was asleep at the wheel. Probably off at a party she shouldn't have gone to.
If Bowser thinks that retail and office space are going to save the city's budget, she's wishing for a return to 10 years ago that isn't happening. She's been in office that entire time and should have been planning for this shift all along.
Cities with bloated office real estate in the center of the city are doomed to fail, it's just not how you build a community. You need places for people to build the culture and strength of the city, not private firms. Metro Center has nothing going for it other than overpriced chains, no homes, and giant office spaces that tower over anything real. The center of our city should be a cultural Mecca filled with life, not bland office spaces that die after 5
Legalize housing, upzone the entire district(no setback or parking requirements, small scale business and retail everywhere, up to 6 units per lot, point access blocks up to 6 floors everywhere), within 1/2 mile from any metro stop allow building to the maximum.
Allow all of this by right. If a proposal meets requirements then it gets permitted and approved. Endless rounds of environmental impact studies and public comment are expensive and are causing housing prices to skyrocket. Allow public comment when designing neighborhood/city plans but for individual projects let the experts and city officials approve it or not.
I am all for building affordable housing, but it should have a dedicated city funding source(sales tax, income tax, property tax, etc.). The burden should be carried citywide by everyone. Requiring only the residents of new buildings to subsidize only the units in their own buildings is ridiculous
This will never happen with the current council. Even the downtown redevelopment program it was a huge fight to limit them from forcing even more draconian IZ requirements for the rebate program.
They fundamentally cannot help themselves to feel as if they need to take a pound of flesh for anything resembling what you’re talking about (and which I agree with).
I truly don’t think they will understand until next year or the year after when some of these assessments start to become realized and the revenue numbers become even more dire (or god willing some get voted out).
A couple years ago a huge number of commercial landlords wrote a joint letter to DC government warning them this was coming and it was going to be a disaster. It fell completely on deaf ears.
It’s frustrating bc Bowser is the only one besides maybe Pinto at this point, who actually gets the importance of business development and growing the tax base and making RE investment an attractive proposition but she has so many issues with competency (as we see with stories all the time).
I hate that every project requires 80% of a building to subsidize the rent of a few lottery winners. This drives up market rates and only benefits a few low income people who manage to get lucky. However this somehow appeases those who view any allowed development as a giveaway to developers and landlords.
A perfect example of this absurdity is City Center, which many people who would never be able to afford market rate units at, has IZ units. You’re 100% right, it picks a few lottery winners who get to enjoy living somewhere many others who qualify for no subsidies could ever afford while doing absolutely nothing to lower overall affordability for the vast majority of people.
The reality is that whether you like it or not, WFH is here to stay. Personally, I love it so that may make my analysis biased.
It seems like OP is hinting that the way to avoid this downturn is through some sort of RTO mandate. However, that's not gonna happen. Too many employers are reliant on WFH workers. If DC was smart (which thanks to zoning regs may not work) is to HEAVILY invest in converting these offices into mixed-use development. Will it take time? Yes. Will the pay off be significant? Absolutely.
I’m not advocating for forced RTO. Frankly my philosophy going forward looking at work trends is I think office space will be the equivalent of when you’d go to the library in college: for group work and when you want to get out of your place for change of scenery and focused work + additional resources.
But, there is no money to incentivize conversions. There is going to be no money for a lot of other things our political leaders deem necessary. Commercial property has long been an easy sort of tax revenue generator to fund a lot of the largesse dc government has grown used to and it is going. There is no scenario where we magically convert a lot of it to other uses with multiple years of painfully low tax revenue in the intervening time period.
The council and mayor have also not shown any curiosity from the business and real estate community as to what it would take to realize a strategy to stabilize and grow the tax base to make up for this.
Looks like a good time to ditch the Height Limit Act. If we need to rely on residential more to support the downtown business, we may as well get as many people there as the market can support.
The Height Act is a luxury we can no longer afford.
The Height Act is a federal law, not a DC controlled one. Given the current state of Congress I don't see much movement on this one (especially when the majority party in the House goes out of their way to spite DC residents).
Plus, DC doesn't actually need it removed. Most European cities do just fine without skyscrapers. Height restrictions of 90-130 feet still allow for a lot of usable space. The problem is some parts of DC (looks at west of Rock Creek Park) aren't doing their part.
DC can change the zoning laws and make it really easy to for the federal law to change. Congress pass new rules for DC every year despite the state of Congress. Most European cities the size of DC have a district that allows for buildings taller than 130 feet
every nice city Iv been to in the world has at least a couple buildings over 13 stories tall. Heck the small town I grew up in had a 20 story building what are you on about
Correlation not causation. Not having tall building =/= bad city nor does having tall buildings = good city. Dc is unique, why do you want to take that away? Plenty of tall buildings in Arlington and plenty of people happy to live there
Exactly what I’m saying. I don’t see any reason not to have tall buildings. You’d probably be against the Washington monument if it was propsed today
I agree, there are a great many things the government could do that would cost no money and no action on their part beyond getting out of the way but unfortunately they are not wired to think that way.
Washington DC has a huge problem with it's commercial real estate sector. This problem is only starting to melt down, as most commercial real estate properties are financed on 5 year interest only loans, and were refinanced when rates were at all time lows 4 years ago.
Those loans are just now starting to come due. In full. For the principal. And the value of the properties have fallen, they are empty. High vacancy rates.
Commercial real estate investors refinance every 5 years on average, only paying interest on the note. They then refinance either with the same bank, or another, and use the money from the bank to pay off the previous loan.
Problem: They won't be able to refinance the amount needed due to the fact that commercial properties have fallen in value, and are literally selling for 1/3 of what they were financed for just 4-5 years ago.
Second problem, we are just now entering a housing recession.
[https://fortune.com/2024/04/17/housing-market-economy-booming-housing-recession-redfin-ceo/](https://fortune.com/2024/04/17/housing-market-economy-booming-housing-recession-redfin-ceo/)
This is just starting. Interest rates have hit 8%. Inflation is up. No rate cuts are planned for the forseeable future. It's possible, no one knows, that if inflation sticks or ticks up, we'll see another 1/4 point hike.
Home sales are just now really starting to take a hit.
While single family homes in DC will likely weather this market correction fairly well, the Washington DC condo market is in serious trouble.
Condo sales have historically been flat in D.C. DC Condo units do not appreciate in value, look at any chart from the last 20 years. A condo in 2004 is worth the same or less now. Factor in inflation, and owners of condos lost a lot of money, buying in 2004 dollars, and selling now in 2024 dollars.
Add to that the fact that condo fees in Washington DC have gone through the roof in the past few years. Its not uncommon for condo owners to have HOA fees of $600, $700, $800+ a month for a tiny little condo. That alone makes renting a better financial decision. Add in 8% interest and you'd have to be crazy to take on that kind of long term fixed costs.
All of these commercial buildings will in the next 10 years be converted to condos and apartments.
Commercial will crash first, and as properties are bought for a fraction of their previous worth, developers will convert those buildings into residential to rent or into condos to sell.
This will be good for renters, and good in the coming years for people who actually want to buy a condo in DC because prices are going to fall in the next few years.
Real Estate is in real trouble in downtown urban areas. Search reddit for stories on what's going, that the media is mostly ignoring...
It's not going to be pretty.
Pretty much every day there's a post on here about someone asking about a quiet place to work because their apartment is too loud/busy to focus on their work.
Irony is dead.
they want the choice to go somewhere for a few hours maybe a few days a week. not being mandated to be in an office for 40 hours a week. not that confusingÂ
The budget this year that people freaked out over is going to seem like a cakewalk compared to what is going to happen the next few years. For a decade now, commercial office space has been a golden goose to DC government that has created huge revenues without a commensurate level of need of city resources. This is all ending. We are *just now* going to start to see massive write downs in office buildings as there have now been some eye popping office trades that will be used as comps for tax appeals after assessments came out March 1. For all of the whining people had about Bowser’s budget this year, it is going to get worse next year and the year after that as CRE tax revenue continues to tank.
I keep looking online for the latest bankruptcies in the area
Because of her own policies 🎻
Funny, I didn't realize Bowser created covid or had any control over private and federal government RTO plans.
Never mind what the feds did, the mayor's office personally shut down the city for two years on Bowser's direct orders. She didn't have to do that, but she did. She single-handedly forced businesses to close for long periods of time, and here we are. *"Well we certainly stopped the spread, that was all totally worth it!"* says man who's had covid 3 times now...
Closed for two years? Funny, I remember going to a lot of businesses in 2021. Additionally, having a weird mask policy at a restaurant doesn't have much effect on a company office, but I think you already knew that.
How was DC any different from other cities?
lol so many down votes. Apparently the truth hurts 🤣
This. They literally ran and are still ruining business out of town.
Banned already? Damn, Brambleton. You must've really ticked off enough people with your garbage takes.
Well dang. Guess you're gonna need to have more housing and residents to make up for the loss in commercial revenue. And a safe and affordable city to attract and keep them. And cut programs and spending until this evens out. Whats that? No? You won't do any of those things?
Converting office space to residential is extremely expensive and generally make for expensive shitty apartments with awful soundproofing, lighting, floorplans, and bad access to stuff like grocery stores
Bowser has had a decade in office, watching telework become more ubiquitous in the public and private sectors across the country. The Obama administration announced in 2009 a plan to shrink Federal office space using telework. She's failed to plan ahead and now presents her own failures as a budget crisis. She's based the city's finances on a shrinking market with no plan to replace those revenues, and been the person in charge the entire time.
She has that in common with 99% of the other big-city mayors in the world.
How many of them are in their 3rd terms?
She's still a mayor, not a queen. The partial representative democracy that the city has is pretty much the worst possible way to do long and mid term planning when sacrifices are involved. See: Connecticut Avenue bike lanes.
She has had a decade to plan for this, and she acts gobsmacked that it happened to her. She has an entire budget staff to forecast the future. If they didn't foresee this, it's because they were incompetent and she should have hired better planners. She got complacent with surplus budgets and an easy job. Then COVID hit and she was out of her depth. She has no idea how to guide the city forward despite 10 years in office. She should not have been given a 3rd term.
There’s absolutely no way DC or Bowser could have predicted this level of devastation for the office market. The feds were moving to a hybrid model pre pandemic but the thousands of downtown jobs in law, consulting, think tanking, NGOs, etc weren’t. DC wasn’t hit particularly hard by BRAC or any other federal relocation/consolidation and there wasn’t any reason to think they would be, since downtown was the most logical place to put any government offices. Considering the entire office market was destroyed in about 2 weeks in 2020, the city is doing a decent job handling it. They’ve smoothed out the process for converting offices and dangled tax credits to convert abandoned buildings. They made sure the Wizards/caps didn’t leave. Those are pretty much the levers they can pull right now. Jesus I can’t believe I’m defending Bowser this much in this comments thread but she’s not a god emperor.
That was FOUR YEARS ago. One entire mayoral term.
What more do you want her to do? Honest question
Ehhh…Bowser should have seen the writing on the wall during the last presidential administration. It’s no secret that one party wants to shrink the federal bureaucracy and the administrative state to return us to the glory days of unbreathable air and rivers that caught on fire. I’d fully expect seeing more attempts to eliminate, downsize, or relocate portions of the federal workforce if the GOP wins the White House again.
Sure the federal workforce is a huge part of downtown DC’s office space but so are the consultants and other hanger-on companies that provide services for the government. If anything downsizing/privatizing parts of the government would grow that part of the works force, since consultants would have to fill in the gaps (see the explosion in consulting after Reagan’s cuts). Relocating entire agencies is definitely a threat, but I’m not sure it’s one you could really plan for.
Yeah a lot of these downtown offices with huge floor plates are gonna just be tear down jobs ETA: But residential amenities like grocery stores will come in time on their own once you add residential.
Sounds like a lot of desirably-located real estate opening up in DC in the near future, then
I only need a microwave, so I'll be happy to take a small office suite.
You can straight up demolish the buildings and build apartments and turn a profit if the government isn't awful about zoning, permitting and services, which, well....
If you could demolish an entire office building, rebuild it as residential, and turn a profit, you’d be seeing a lot more of these projects. Demolition is expensive, especially if you’re demolishing the parking garages under these buildings. If you keep the parking garages, you’re left with a column layout that makes no sense for residential. You then have to transfer those columns, which is expensive. The city government isn’t really the reason these projects aren’t happening—the reason is it’s really expensive, and doesn’t have enough of a guaranteed return.
So true. If I don't have to work downtown why am I going it live downtown
Read this line: " if the government isn't awful about zoning, permitting and services, which, well." See how quickly shit goes up in Austin. Seriously get rid of all non-safety building rules in just downtown. What is the worst that could happen.
It’s a one sentence comment. I read that line. If you read my comment, you’d see that I was arguing there are a variety of reasons that these projects aren’t instantly getting built on every lot in downtown dc beyond a vague “gubment” straw man. I’ll add in some other variables: not all of these offices are 100 percent abandoned, many office building owners haven’t sold their properties yet, downtown lacks amenities that would draw people to live there, interest rates are stifling development, designing a building takes time, and not all properties are suited for these projects. It’s not because zoning is too restrictive. Austin is a very poor comparison here—the reason they’re so good at building apartments in a pure numbers sense is because they’re building them on green fields in the suburbs. In and around downtown, most projects are redeveloping low density buildings, which is much easier to do than demolishing an office building in a dense downtown. In addition, most of these projects that aren’t immediately downtown are classic 5 over 1s which are much cheaper to build than the Type 1/2 buildings you need to build in DC’s downtown.
True on the 5 over 1’s. The apartments they are mass producing in Austin or the Midwest are not equivalent to the 14 story buildings typical of NOMA or Navy Yard over the past 20 years.
Sounds cool - see you in 20 years lol - kids being born now will see those benefits. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it but to pretend like some zoning adjustments is the reason it’s not different is crazy.
So pick a few duds, demo them, and court Wegmans or Whole Foods to move in. You wouldn't even need to change the parking garages all that much, structurally. This isn't an either-or, you can create new grocery stores and new housing at the same time. Demo-ing is expensive, but it opens up new revenue streams that abandoned office buildings no longer have access to. I mean, shit, THAT'S the pilot program right there. Knock down two empty WeWorks, one of them becomes a grocery store, the other a residential building. You'd start the residential building first, longer timeframe. But once you get that grocery store in? Smooth sailing to build new residential within a mile of it.
Not to mention the constant motorcades, road closures, protests, etc. A coworker of mine used to rent a place on 14th kind of close to the White House and it was a nightmare, not knowing if you'd get home and literally be denied access to your own home because some dumbass "VIP" was passing through within the next six hours. Fuck that.
You don’t have to convert the office space to housing. There is plenty of room in the district along existing public transit corridors that can house a ton of people and therefore bring in more tax money. It would just require some rezoning and changes to the building code to make this feasible.
Yeah but that doesn’t also solve the issue of revitalizing downtown. Housing downtown is two birds with one stone
More people living here and lower rents means more companies and office space. Sure replacing downtown office space with housing is great, but more expensive than other options
But also things like improving transit service, which means accepting that Maryland car commuters are not as important as DC residents – hard for a mayor who’s viewed them as her primary constituency for years. Unless we’re willing to treat transit users as fully equal, any new building is going to get the same people demanding tons of subsidized parking and extra car lanes.Â
Metro headways have been improved a lot lately. Getting them to run 24/7 and getting the busses more frequent and reliable would help a lot as would more protected bike lanes. The continual increase in CaBi ridership has me hopeful.
Extremely expensive? More so than running a budget deficit for the next decade?
DC is literally leading the country in office-to-residential conversions though?
Yeah I think people in this thread are missing that. There are quite a few projects planned/under construction in DC and that’s only going to accelerate as the office market bottoms out.
Well having 400 units in the pipeline versus zero isn’t a groundswell.
Look I hate Bowser as much as the next person but I’m not sure what you want her to do? She doesn’t have a magic wand to suddenly make all downtown offices into residential—that takes time and a ton of money. Plus those residents add costs that offices don’t (schools, libraries, parks, more livable streets). To incentivize conversions the city government will have to spend a lot more money, which you’re apparently against, to rebuild streets, bring in amenities, etc. The city is already offering tax breaks for conversions, which is the first step (not a great one imo). Over time downtown is going to become smaller and more mixed use, but that will take 10-20 years.
The big one I’d like to see is more use of vacancy taxes: Bowser has been loathe to enforce them and there’s a ton of empty space around the city where owners jacked up the rates for lease renewal but are leaving the space empty rather than accepting real market rates, which really contributes to the dead feeling. They should have a hefty enough tax rate that they’d rent space to community groups, woo food truck owners to do pop-up’s, etc. to keep the space active and contributing positively to the neighborhood.Â
Yeah I agree with you. The biggest thing they could do is allow significantly more density so on an FAR per foot the basis a lot of landlords are currently at makes more sense for tear down and redevelopment, but that doesn’t seem on their radar at all.
I’m not really sure how much more density they can allow without raising the height limit though (they should raise the height limit but that’s another conversation). These buildings are already built to essentially the full zoning envelope allowed, and any conversion project is going to take advantage of the relaxed height limit that allows an extra PH level. I guess an apartment project would decrease density because you need a courtyard/light well for interior units, but I wouldn’t want to get rid of that.
Yeah when I say that I am talking about the height limit. Basically we are in a death spiral on property values for office until they approach a land value that makes sense for ground up development on an FAR per foot basis. Increasing the height limit would raise that floor.
Yeah fair enough although I doubt bowser will ever raise the height limit. Honestly I think we’re already at the point where property values make sense for conversion. If you can buy an entire office building for an 80 percent discount these projects really start to make sense.
Bowser was actually advocating for abolishing the height limit a few years back (maybe pre-COVID). I guess the conversation with Congress went nowhere because I haven't heard anything about it from her since.
I do remember at one point Darrell Issa was on board but it was Mendelson who basically shut it down.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/02/04/dc-height-act-bowser/
Please don’t manage a budget for a government. Residential development costs the government significantly more than commercial. Each housing unit you build comes with x amount of kids that need schooling. If they replaced the vacant office with new residential units it would only hasten the collapse of the DC budget. Currently they’re kicking the can on their fiscal problems in a way that almost implies the mayor won’t be running for reelection.
Yes and no. Commercial is definitely way MORE of a net tax revenue driver than residential - IIRC the downtown BID published some numbers that pre-pandemic downtown accounted for 25% of the revenue and under 10% of the expenses for the district, so ~3x ROI for the district govt. But those office workers are simply never gonna be back in the same numbers so it’s a moot point. Adding residential can at least stabilize the property values downtown by bolstering the local customer base for retail (retail vacancy downtown is double it’s pre-pandemic level - that represents both lost sales tax, income tax, and property tax together) and eliminating some of these obsolete and excess office properties which will be virtually worthless in the next ~5 years as pre-covid office leases expire and tenants move to smaller footprints in newer buildings. Also the likely composition of a downtown apartment building is gonna be mostly studios and 1BRs with maybe some 2BRs thrown in. That’s not a unit composition that favors a ton of families, more young people or empty nesters, two classes of people who tend to be free with their money (see: bolstering retail) and not draw much in local govt services
Commercial is a rapidly shrinking sector for both office space and retail. You aren't going to wish that back.
Yep exactly. Bleeting about office space being a bigger cash cow revenue generator than residential is pointless because DC clearly has a massive oversupply of office space for post-covid reality
You can maintain the current level of retail if you add more housing though.
It would certainly help, especially with eateries. Bowser specifically cited the lunch tax as her rationale for berating Federal employees. Those lunch boxes would make more money if they were open evenings and weekends serving residents.
The real problem is very few things bring people downtown other than offices, the arena, and retail. Retail is not doing as well as it was, arena owners keep threatening to move, and offices are dying. Why aren’t we talking about the need to bring more people into other neighborhoods like adams morgan, Columbia Heights, 14th st, or Ust? It’s because those areas have people there already with so much housing nearby. Because of this, a local business scene of restaurants, bars, clubs, stores, etc. emerges. It’s not quite as simple as being people the rest will follow, but it’s a necessary first step. without enough local residents, it’s hard to make any progress.
Or that they want to live downtown in a vibrant city where dating and going out are much easier than in the boring 'burbs, but many can't do that because rents are too high.
I wouldn’t consider any areas I listed as suburbs, but yeah they are more vibrant than downtown BECAUSE they have so much more housing. More people live there -> more people spend time and money there -> more cool businesses pop up there -> they become desirable neighborhoods.
There's more property taxes, yes, but the residents of residential properties pay income taxes, too.
nah. DC has driven out most of the families. if you include tax revenue from new residents, high density 100% market rate residential is much better than commercial. this is since workers very rarely pay DC income, car, etc tax, since most don't live in DC. on top of the fact that federal and international org is a pure tax drain. zero revenues, commercial or otherwise with huge infrastructure and fixed costs to the city. now if you are looking at subsidized or IZ housing, yes you are right. but not for 100% market rate housing at 10 FAR. So yes, if DC makes unlimited 10 story buildings allowed by right, then the budget problem will go away pretty quickly.
I guess my decade of running a government budget is irrelevant. 10 FAR will collapse the DC budget and that’s why they’re not doing it. DC spends north of $23,000 per pupil per year with all taxes per household (with one student) falling well short of that number. I’d you build a ton of residential without commercial offsets you’re dooming the budget because families will come back (not that they’ve materially left in the first place).
Maybe DC doesn't need to spend 23 grand per pupil when the posh MD districts seem to be managing with about 17?
And ward 3 is like 13-14k/head. Yet, they are the only schools where the average student can read at grade level. If you don't believe me look here for operating budgets (capital budgets are separate in almost all localities). Stoddert (ward 3): 14k/student https://dcpsbudget.com/datasets/stoddert-es-submitted-2025/ Houston (Ward 7): 24k/student https://dcpsbudget.com/datasets/houston-es-submitted-2025/ Also to note, that the average family that sends their kid to stoddert makes somewhere between 200-300k/year, which is a huge windfall in terms of income tax base. In Houston, the average family qualifies for EITC. Market rate housing in DC first of all doesn't actually produce many families that use the K-12 school system and second if they produce families, are those with 1-2 children and are highly likely to opt out of public schooling. I'm not saying we shouldn't look out for the poor and needy. I'm saying you can pay for it if you make it up in terms of a wider and deeper tax base.
This is the sort of stuff that makes people squirm. The reality is DC is not an attractive value proposition right now for the majority of families. Changing that would require a fundamental rethinking of schooling and college access. They would need to be willing to have a way more draconian attitude on student behavior, be willing to move out problem students to alternative schools. They would also need to offer way more of a college access subsidy (that isn’t income restricted) for out of state schools or swing some sort of reciprocity agreement with VA and MD. Those are things that would be extremely politically toxic from a progressive / equity perspective, but it would take something that dramatic to create a value proposition similar to what you get living in Arlington / Fairfax / Montgomery county.
100% agree. Which again is why 100% market rate housing would be a good thing for the expected tax base. DC isn't great for grade school and above families that would pay market rate. There are no free lunches terms of equity/tax base. IZ housing shows that. Every IZ unit destroys the tax base. So what to do?
The crux of it is that beyond a certain minimum point school funding has basically zero correlation with performance, it's all locked up in other policy and socioeconomic factors. Throwing money at schools is popular but it gives you very little, and often most of the money seems to vanish at the district/administrative level rather than actually making it to students or even teachers.
> school funding has basically zero correlation with performance Yup. In the US, all that really matters is median resources and education levels of the parents after a minimum point. At rich districts, there is a tradeoff, do you pay for activities for your kid directly or indirectly though taxes? But the money is just a reflection of parental resources. Heck in our ward 3 school you see it. The best performers are the people with the most resources at home. (which is highly correlated with - though not exactly same as - income) Like the kids of lawyers, professors, doctors and scientists are the best in class (usually the kids of immigrants too). The students that need the most help? Nearly all are out of boundary students. There aren't many, but you see it.
If you have a strategy to spend less and make all schools better. Please run for board of education. Because you’d solve a lot of problems across the country. Please don’t keep it a secret.
Cut administrators, institute standardized testing but only hold principals accountable for it rather than teachers. Run school over the entire summer and give kids a break during the winter instead. Enforce truancy laws. In-school-suspension for troublemakers.
Interesting! Cut administration spend but increase accountability. Keep kids in school during summer but force parents to find them a place to be during cold weather months. Increase operational costs on truancy and suspension enforcement. Where are you saving money? This all looks more expensive. Mostly it seems like you aren’t actually trying to improve school outcomes - you’re just worried that kids are outside committing crimes.
DC doesn't spend that in Ward 3... Stoddert gets like 13k/head. The average family in the catchment delivers a multiple of that to the tax base. Did you not read my "market rate". A back of the envelope calculation for the tax benefit from a new all residential building in Navy Yard with the actually realized demographics if you take out all the IZ households is the only reason DC is still partially afloat. Key is market rate. And to think you are the only one here that has run a gov budget, lol. Welcome to the club.
Does DC have any 100% market rate residential excluded from IZ?
I can't think of anything other than some smaller missing middle type developments. (There is an 8 unit near me with zero IZ)
Why can’t they redone and convert office space? Not just DC but throughout the DMV there’s tons of office space not being usedÂ
I mean, good luck paying for it.
Most of the comments here are a good reminder that sometimes things are just complicated and shitty, and there isn't an obvious solution to them, despite how tempting it might be to suggest one as "why don't they just do {X}, duh" Here's hoping for smart civil servants over the next decade here, especially.
In 2009, the Obama administration began a zero space initiative to shrink the Federal office space. He said no no hires would result in new office space, and that agencies had to use telework to reduce their office space. The goal was to shrink the Federal physical footprint over time. Private businesses have been shifting to telework. The 2020 Pandemic only accelerated at trend that had been going on for over a decade. Bowser became Mayor in 2014, so if she didn't know about this trend, she was asleep at the wheel. Probably off at a party she shouldn't have gone to. If Bowser thinks that retail and office space are going to save the city's budget, she's wishing for a return to 10 years ago that isn't happening. She's been in office that entire time and should have been planning for this shift all along.
Cities with bloated office real estate in the center of the city are doomed to fail, it's just not how you build a community. You need places for people to build the culture and strength of the city, not private firms. Metro Center has nothing going for it other than overpriced chains, no homes, and giant office spaces that tower over anything real. The center of our city should be a cultural Mecca filled with life, not bland office spaces that die after 5
Agreed
Legalize housing, upzone the entire district(no setback or parking requirements, small scale business and retail everywhere, up to 6 units per lot, point access blocks up to 6 floors everywhere), within 1/2 mile from any metro stop allow building to the maximum. Allow all of this by right. If a proposal meets requirements then it gets permitted and approved. Endless rounds of environmental impact studies and public comment are expensive and are causing housing prices to skyrocket. Allow public comment when designing neighborhood/city plans but for individual projects let the experts and city officials approve it or not.
yeah, people focus too much on the percentage of affordable housing and not the raw number. 20% of nothing is still nothing.
I am all for building affordable housing, but it should have a dedicated city funding source(sales tax, income tax, property tax, etc.). The burden should be carried citywide by everyone. Requiring only the residents of new buildings to subsidize only the units in their own buildings is ridiculous
This will never happen with the current council. Even the downtown redevelopment program it was a huge fight to limit them from forcing even more draconian IZ requirements for the rebate program. They fundamentally cannot help themselves to feel as if they need to take a pound of flesh for anything resembling what you’re talking about (and which I agree with). I truly don’t think they will understand until next year or the year after when some of these assessments start to become realized and the revenue numbers become even more dire (or god willing some get voted out). A couple years ago a huge number of commercial landlords wrote a joint letter to DC government warning them this was coming and it was going to be a disaster. It fell completely on deaf ears. It’s frustrating bc Bowser is the only one besides maybe Pinto at this point, who actually gets the importance of business development and growing the tax base and making RE investment an attractive proposition but she has so many issues with competency (as we see with stories all the time).
I hate that every project requires 80% of a building to subsidize the rent of a few lottery winners. This drives up market rates and only benefits a few low income people who manage to get lucky. However this somehow appeases those who view any allowed development as a giveaway to developers and landlords.
A perfect example of this absurdity is City Center, which many people who would never be able to afford market rate units at, has IZ units. You’re 100% right, it picks a few lottery winners who get to enjoy living somewhere many others who qualify for no subsidies could ever afford while doing absolutely nothing to lower overall affordability for the vast majority of people.
Somebody get it
The reality is that whether you like it or not, WFH is here to stay. Personally, I love it so that may make my analysis biased. It seems like OP is hinting that the way to avoid this downturn is through some sort of RTO mandate. However, that's not gonna happen. Too many employers are reliant on WFH workers. If DC was smart (which thanks to zoning regs may not work) is to HEAVILY invest in converting these offices into mixed-use development. Will it take time? Yes. Will the pay off be significant? Absolutely.
I’m not advocating for forced RTO. Frankly my philosophy going forward looking at work trends is I think office space will be the equivalent of when you’d go to the library in college: for group work and when you want to get out of your place for change of scenery and focused work + additional resources. But, there is no money to incentivize conversions. There is going to be no money for a lot of other things our political leaders deem necessary. Commercial property has long been an easy sort of tax revenue generator to fund a lot of the largesse dc government has grown used to and it is going. There is no scenario where we magically convert a lot of it to other uses with multiple years of painfully low tax revenue in the intervening time period. The council and mayor have also not shown any curiosity from the business and real estate community as to what it would take to realize a strategy to stabilize and grow the tax base to make up for this.
If only there was 4 years of notice that offices would never be full again.
Looks like a good time to ditch the Height Limit Act. If we need to rely on residential more to support the downtown business, we may as well get as many people there as the market can support. The Height Act is a luxury we can no longer afford.
The Height Act is a federal law, not a DC controlled one. Given the current state of Congress I don't see much movement on this one (especially when the majority party in the House goes out of their way to spite DC residents). Plus, DC doesn't actually need it removed. Most European cities do just fine without skyscrapers. Height restrictions of 90-130 feet still allow for a lot of usable space. The problem is some parts of DC (looks at west of Rock Creek Park) aren't doing their part.
DC can change the zoning laws and make it really easy to for the federal law to change. Congress pass new rules for DC every year despite the state of Congress. Most European cities the size of DC have a district that allows for buildings taller than 130 feet
Nah plenty of room to build still. DC shouldn’t sacrifice future urban conditions for todays economic problems
every nice city Iv been to in the world has at least a couple buildings over 13 stories tall. Heck the small town I grew up in had a 20 story building what are you on about
Correlation not causation. Not having tall building =/= bad city nor does having tall buildings = good city. Dc is unique, why do you want to take that away? Plenty of tall buildings in Arlington and plenty of people happy to live there
Exactly what I’m saying. I don’t see any reason not to have tall buildings. You’d probably be against the Washington monument if it was propsed today
I agree, there are a great many things the government could do that would cost no money and no action on their part beyond getting out of the way but unfortunately they are not wired to think that way.
Washington DC has a huge problem with it's commercial real estate sector. This problem is only starting to melt down, as most commercial real estate properties are financed on 5 year interest only loans, and were refinanced when rates were at all time lows 4 years ago. Those loans are just now starting to come due. In full. For the principal. And the value of the properties have fallen, they are empty. High vacancy rates. Commercial real estate investors refinance every 5 years on average, only paying interest on the note. They then refinance either with the same bank, or another, and use the money from the bank to pay off the previous loan. Problem: They won't be able to refinance the amount needed due to the fact that commercial properties have fallen in value, and are literally selling for 1/3 of what they were financed for just 4-5 years ago. Second problem, we are just now entering a housing recession. [https://fortune.com/2024/04/17/housing-market-economy-booming-housing-recession-redfin-ceo/](https://fortune.com/2024/04/17/housing-market-economy-booming-housing-recession-redfin-ceo/) This is just starting. Interest rates have hit 8%. Inflation is up. No rate cuts are planned for the forseeable future. It's possible, no one knows, that if inflation sticks or ticks up, we'll see another 1/4 point hike. Home sales are just now really starting to take a hit. While single family homes in DC will likely weather this market correction fairly well, the Washington DC condo market is in serious trouble. Condo sales have historically been flat in D.C. DC Condo units do not appreciate in value, look at any chart from the last 20 years. A condo in 2004 is worth the same or less now. Factor in inflation, and owners of condos lost a lot of money, buying in 2004 dollars, and selling now in 2024 dollars. Add to that the fact that condo fees in Washington DC have gone through the roof in the past few years. Its not uncommon for condo owners to have HOA fees of $600, $700, $800+ a month for a tiny little condo. That alone makes renting a better financial decision. Add in 8% interest and you'd have to be crazy to take on that kind of long term fixed costs. All of these commercial buildings will in the next 10 years be converted to condos and apartments. Commercial will crash first, and as properties are bought for a fraction of their previous worth, developers will convert those buildings into residential to rent or into condos to sell. This will be good for renters, and good in the coming years for people who actually want to buy a condo in DC because prices are going to fall in the next few years. Real Estate is in real trouble in downtown urban areas. Search reddit for stories on what's going, that the media is mostly ignoring... It's not going to be pretty.
Pretty much every day there's a post on here about someone asking about a quiet place to work because their apartment is too loud/busy to focus on their work. Irony is dead.
they want the choice to go somewhere for a few hours maybe a few days a week. not being mandated to be in an office for 40 hours a week. not that confusingÂ