Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

> There are 71.5 million square feet of vacant office space in the Washington region, much of it piled in office parks.

> Last year, federal agencies vacated 7,315 buildings, abandoning 47 million square feet of office and warehouse space, Federal News Radio says.

So the amount of vacant space in the area tripled last year, going from 24 million SQFT to 71.5 million SQFT?

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> Another 1 million square feet of office space will flow onto the market over the next seven years, as Marriott International moves out of its Bethesda office park

Where are these companies moving to? Are they moving out of these office parks and into city centers? This article only tells half of the story.

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> With its space-hungry bureaucracies and contractors, Washington became a colossal hive of office parks, especially during years of government expansion — most recently the post-Sept. 11, 2001 period, when the military ramped up and the national-security apparatus spread along the Dulles Corridor.

> The U.S. government hasn’t signed any major leases this year, ... but it maintains 98 million square feet in the District alone (411 million if you throw in Maryland and Virginia).

Is the government portion of this solely from governmental contraction and shrinking of programs?

> Is the government portion of this solely from governmental contraction and shrinking of programs?

Not necessarily. The Department of Defense, for example, has been making a concerted push over the last few years to disperse a bunch of offices that used to all be clustered in the D.C. metro area out across the country at large. As a result, neighborhoods in Northern Virginia like Pentagon City and Crystal City that used to be nothing but endless blocks of government-leased office space have started shifting towards more high-end residential development and the lifestyle businesses that high-end residential development attracts -- trendy restaurants and bars and so forth.

This has led to the somewhat bizarre sight of Crystal City, which was built in the '60s as a sort of dystopian Brutalist Disneyworld of giant, blank office towers connected by a warren of underground tunnels, suddenly looming down disapprovingly on outdoor concerts and tapas joints.

The DOD also abandoned and tore down a couple buildings in Arlington in order to make space for an expansion of Arlington National Cemetery.

The US Federal government is not shrinking and they are not moving into cities.

If you were the newly confirmed head of the Fish and Wildlife Service would you want to stay in some dingy, 30 year old office building, or build a brand new office farther out from the city?

http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/breaking_ground/2015/0...

5 of the 6 highest average income counties in the US are in the suburbs and exurbs around Washington DC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...

So...they're moving from these office parks...to other, more distant office parks?

The article doesn't have any concrete numbers for where companies are moving, but it does offer this:

"People telecommute. People move into the city or into faux-urban areas that are friendlier to pedestrians, that aren’t barnacled on a highway. Younger generations don’t want to be stranded in a “Dilbert” cartoon. They want cozy nooks and nap spaces, walkable commutes, the tastes and conveniences of the city."

The article does suggest that more people are telecommuting, but given the amount of resistance that all employers have to telecommuting, I'm hesitant to believe. I really doubt that, all of a sudden, tens of thousands of federal employees are working from home.

I'm betting they're using smaller offices closer to downtown or urban centers. Mainly because I can't imagine the same large scale offices being cheap for any company downtown.

Actually, teleworking is definitely pushed as an option in the federal government. Not least of which through the "Telework Enhancement Act of 2010"

The current administration is big on it, partly for office space savings, partly to apologize for the paycut most government workers take over the private sector (I suspect, anyhow).

In practice, it looks a lot like hot desking, because you have to show up in the office once a week, and teleworkers usually end up sharing a desk amongst themselves. It allows workers in the DC area to live in affordable West Virginia :D or Fredricksburg or wherever and not kill themselves commuting

I suspect it is driven partly (mostly?) by a reduction in square footage per employee, as a cost-cutting measure. Companies either downsize the space without downsizing their workforce, or do not upsize their space when hiring after they downsized both workforce and space during the recession.

> Younger generations don’t want to be stranded in a “Dilbert” cartoon.

That's funny because Dilbert now almost exclusively deals with tech. This is from the Dilbert's author's blog http://scottadams-tttt.tumblr.com/post/124285032091/top-tech...

Where are these companies moving to? In some cases, shiny new office buildings that are going up in more "hip" and metro-accessible areas like Tyson's Corner. Commuting in DC is absolute hell so companies combat it by either moving to luxe new office buildings close to public transportation or moving out of the area entirely.

Here in Raleigh/Durham, home of Research Triangle Park, a business park that historically housed IBM, GSK, and tons of other big companies, and which was founded to take advantage of the three major universities: NC State, UNC and Duke, by locating itself in the middle of all three (and next to none), we are seeing many companies build large downtown office buildings in Raleigh, rather than The Park. These include RedHat and Ipreo.

Marriott International plans to relocate within the general area, though it seems the exact location is still up in the air, with a focus on somewhere more urban and accessible via public transit. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/digger/wp/2015/03/01/marr...

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