Rant to Reason - Office Lack of Work edition
Click to enlarge for easier reading and greater art appreciation
A couple of weeks ago (middle of April 2023), Biden made an announcement that he wanted to get more federal workers back into offices. He gave no hard deadlines, expressed an openness to continuation of remote work in some capacity and spoke of the benefits of recharging the downtowns of America that have stood partially empty due to Covid. Mayor Bowser also expressed support for the plan, citing the decline in business downtown due to reduced numbers of people consistently spending time and money in the distrct (small “d” district as a part of the big “D” Distrcit).
Both the President and the Mayor recognize something that is kinda hard to argue with: empty and underutilized architecture is not awesome. An empty piece of architecture provides little productivity or joy. It is easy to look at those partially empty buildiings in downtown DC and think
“Things are better around here when there a bunch more people eating lunch, doing a little shopping, and hitting up the happy hours” (and, yeah, DC loves its Happy Hours).
“There used to be a lot more office workers down here everyday before this whole damn COVID shitshow”.
“So, let’s get those damn spend-bots… I mean consumers… I mean office workers back down here to liven things up”
The first two statements are pretty reasonable. The first identifies an desirable state of being. The second identifies a cause that led to the current situation getting further from that desirable state of being. The third statement is also pretty reasonable. It is also pathetically unimaginative. It assumes that the only remedy for the current less desirable situation is a return to previous situation. It fails. It fails to explore any alternative to “get office workers back in offices, because office workers work in offices and our offices don’t have have enough ofiice workers doing office work in them”. It fails to take advantage of the opportunity created by COVID’s disruption. That disruption and resulting opportunity has given cities and nations to make a considered choice about how to put the pieces back together.
So, if the stated goal is to bring people, money and vibrancy back to a downtown district, what are options are there?
The question that might be asked at first is “Well, what else do we use those buildings for? More museums? Housing? An Aquarium?” And yes, the use of those buildings will be part of whatever systems/ scenes/ situations are created, promoted and supported in that area, but it can be helpful to think about the use of those buildings not as a problem to solve, but as part of a a whole system. And as part of that system, there are the people that inhabit those buildings, either as office workers (previous system) or something else (tourist, resident, etc).
Let’s start with the (recently) historic inhabitants: the District office worker. It is fairly well reported that DC has a high cost of living. Not surprisingly, many people that work in DC cannot afford to live near their place of work. And, despite the District having some of the better transit in the country, that is depressingly low bar to measure up to, the DC commuter scene results in:
Second longest average commute in the country at 34.9 minutes (NY’ers spend an additional 130 seconds getting to work). Neaby Central Maryland also breaks into the top ten.
60% of DC commuters driving a car with no other passengers as method of getting to work
DC commuters paying through the nose for the pleasure of such a long commute. According to CNBC they pay through the nose for this pleasure, spending about 12 grand a year in fuel, maintenance, and life force.
Somewhat shitty air quality
For some cool census tract derived commuter data visualization, check this interactive map
So DC commuting sucks As Jaqueline Simon of the American Federation of Government Employees points out, “Every human being hate commuting”. The AFGE is the union that represents a shitload of federal employees and they are encouraging that teleowrk remains part of the landscape going forward. So, the data implies, and the union confirms that many of those people that have worked in those building would rather not be a member of the DMV commuting hoard that has to spend, on average 70 minutes and 20 bucks everyday getting to and from work.
Two big groups of workers that cannot telework are folks that provide in person services and people who do things with stuff in a particular place in a manual labor kinda way. These include cafe workers at the museums, carpenters at the Capitol, security guards at the… well, just about everywhere in this town. Most of those people needed to keep most any large building functioning by cleaning, sorting, repairing, shipping, receiving, distributing, packaging, smiling, pointing, serving and protecting rlive quite a distance from those buildings and its not because they have grand estates on former farms in Loudon County. Yes, some of them enjoy the neighborhoods they return to after sweeping the corridors of power. But there are quite a few who would prefer to live closer to where they work.
So, would converting offices into apartments work?
This 2017 article cited 14 million square feet of vacant office space in DC, with 8.2 million sq ft of that area in downtown. At the time that was already a high mark of vacancies. This was part of a long term decline in the amount of office space that office workers required for doing a comparable amount of office work due to changes in file storage and personnel trends (fewer filing cabinets and typists that filled those filing cabinets)
This article cites some of proposals from 2017 to incentivize commercial to residential conversion, such as tax break to private developers. It presents some of the challenges to these conversions, such as zoing restrictions and construction differences. But, as his article also points out, there had already been some successful conversions at that time which were completed before these incentives and with the inherent challenges. So, with that in mind, what could be the impact of a change of perspective by the Feds during this COVID induced opportunity? Let’s number some dubious numbers through…
Some Dodgy Math
This 2017 article cited 14 million square feet of vacant office space in DC, with 8.2 million sq ft of that area in downtown. .
The current vacant office space in DC adds up to 22 million square feet, (about 12.7%) an increase of 8 Million square feet. So, if conversions made sense in with 14 mil, let’s say that any additional empty space could also be taken off the commercial office space market without adverse effects.
So, start with 8 million square feet available. If the the Mayor and the President are focusing on downtown, lets suss out how much of that space is is downtown. Consider the 2017 city to downtown ratio, and we will come up with about 4.25 million square feet, but this likely too low considering the impact of the Fed government downtown and higher proportion of federal workers that are still remote. So, let’s call it 5 million square feet downtown.
Of that 5 million, some of it surely being sat on by the bane of downtowns across the nation: the profiteering management companies and developers that will sit on unused property, waiting for an uptick in the market, all the while writing off their self-inflicted losses. Let’s say they are all shit-heels. They aren’t, as evidenced by the fact that some were doing these conversions several years ago, but lets take them out of the equation for the moment. about a third of downtown real estate is used by the feds (I read that on the internet somewhere, so it is true). So, we are down to 1.65 million square feet. Some of those empty offices may want to be used for office work once again. On the other hand, the Feds have been trimming down their office footprint even before COVID, so let’s stick with 1.65 million square feet
The buildings already have elevators and lobbies, but lets give a bit of discount for the fact that office space is a bit of pain to divvy up so that everyone gets a few windows. So carve out a gym or laundry room or whatever from some of less usable spaces and we can take a wild stab at… 1.4 Million Square Feet
What do you get for 1.4 million square feet?
500 studio apartments for the single workers (250,000 sq ft) - 1.1 person per unit +550 people
500 one bedroom apartments for some of the couples or the better off singles (400,000 sq ft) - 1.8 people per unit = 900 people
500 2 bedroom apartments for the people different arrangements of people that live in two bed flats (600,000 sq ft) - 2.3 people per unit = 1150 people
150 3 bedroom apartments for families and such 3.5 people per unit + 525 people
That comes out to 3125 people. Damn. That’s a bit less than i was guessing. But i did try to keep it somewhat conservative. And that’s only the federally owned or leased (yeah, fuckit, the feds should hold the lease and sublet to the city) RECENTLY emptied office space. But, 3125 people is a small town that needs to eat and shop. And, thankfully, not commute.
I will update with photos and an acknowledgement that Bowser is a bit more expansive in her thinking than portrayed at the the top of the story. Maybe. Well, the acknowledgement part is kinda done already, so, cheers to me. Gonna go to someones driveway for a burger and beer and to start my next rant.