Return To The Office
One attrition tool to reduce the size of government. There will be others too. Also, it could be the rebirth of our cities, with urban New Urbanism, starting in downtown DC.
Enter DOGE. Department Of Government Efficiency. The plan is to reduce the size of the federal government, thereby reducing the power of the administrative, or “Deep State.” It’s long overdue. The federal government has grown too big and too powerful, no matter whether there is a Democrat or Republican administration, and/or Congress. It won’t be done overnight, but “return to the office,” is a good start.
During Covid, a lot of government workers took advantage of remote work policies, and moved out of the DC area; they relocated to parts of the country where there is affordable housing, good schools, and a lot less crime. If they are forced to come back to the office five days per week, some will move back the DC area, most likely reluctantly; they are the ones that can’t retire yet, but have too much time invested to leave and head to the private sector. They will grit their teeth, and endure the I-270 commute, just like the good old days. For some, they will now be even further away from DC. They moved to West Virginia. Hello 24/7 MARC Train on all three lines? They thought that remote work was here to stay. It wasn’t. For others, it will be an attrition tool.
Many will retire if they have the time in, or look for greener pastures in the private sector, or both. Both? Yes. Except in certain jobs where there would be a conflict of interest or national security issue, there is nothing stopping you from taking early retirement, or full retirement, and then going to work in the private sector. In fact, with the MAGA economy, there should be a lot of new jobs opening up in the private sector. Many will pay quite well. If you want to stay in a low cost/low crime area, you might stay in Upstate New York, where you fled during the Covid lockdown, when you were told to work 100% remote. If you look, there will be plenty of private sector jobs, who will allow you to work 100% remote. I have a friend who lives in Vermont and has an office in Washington, DC. She has to come into town for meetings, four times per year. Her association moved to a smaller office space that was cheaper. They didn’t need to rent the extra office space with everyone working 100% remote. It’s different with the government. The government owns the office facility, and it is sitting empty.
The first urban development question then becomes, what do we do with the government office buildings, including Federal Triangle? How about commercial, office, residential? Mixed-use. Most of the Federal Triangle was built in the late 1920s/1930s. It has lots of windows. They didn’t have air conditioning back then. They opened the windows, and ran fans. Older buildings like that, are easier to convert to mixed-use, with offices on the first or second floors, and residential units on the subsequent floors. Let’s see…DC was set aside as the seat of government, and if you worked for the government, you were supposed to live in DC. Hmm…
Congress should pass a law requiring all federal employees who work in DC, including themselves and their staffs, to live in the District Of Columbia, and send their kids to DC public schools. Suddenly, DC would have very little crime, and the best public school system in the country. I can see the Duke Ellington School For The Arts, rivalling the Julliard Preparatory Division, and be a public school too. As a side note, I would also change the law making DC public school teachers, federal employees again. That would end the discrepancy in pay between the public schools, and the charter schools. Washington, DC has about 4500 public school teachers. We can shrink the government in other areas. We can, however, retire a lot of administrators, that will no longer be needed after we revamp the Department Of Education. Good bye Assistant Superintendent For Diversity.
You create federal employee villages. If you work for a department, the department provides the housing, as part of your employment contract. You could still work from home. Home would be on the 5th floor, and you could come down to the office on the 2nd floor in the morning for a meeting, then go back upstairs and get your work done. Since it’s a closed meeting with just other staff members who live in the building, you could all, including the GS-15s, show up for the meeting in your pajamas. Yes, you would have to get dressed if you were going to stay in the office, or when you headed out for lunch, at one of the new foreign-owned, mom-and-pop places that opened as a result of “return to the office.” Don’t forget the bodega that the Indian family opened in your building too, and parked out front is a really good food truck owned by a Korean family. DC is coming alive again.
In addition to all those stately government buildings sitting less than 1/4 full, there are a lot of other empty office buildings in downtown, DC. If they are no longer needed, and if they are too hard to convert to mixed-use, tear them down, and have some nice parks in their place. Lots of greenspace has a calming effect. Then, build the 15-minute, mixed-use “villages” (they used to be called “neighborhoods”), around them. Let the lobby firms, non-profits, and think tanks build their own communities, around that greenspace. Who knows, maybe the Brookings Institute will mingle with the Hudson Institute.
Along with the government neighborhoods, the associations, non-profits, lobbyists, and think tanks will have their neighborhoods. The Catholics already have theirs: It’s the Brookland area, and it is known as “Little Rome,” because of the number of monasteries, convents, Catholic colleges and seminaries, as well as the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. My church, St. Anthony of Padua, is the parish church for that area. The area is mixed-use/residential. There is a nice mix of SFHs, townhouses, and multi-unit residential buildings. There are shops and restaurants. My favorite is Murray and Paul’s. It’s open for breakfast and lunch, and is cash only. You can get a “heart attack on a plate” breakfast for around eight bucks. Just about everything you need is within walking distance, and there is the Metro and a 24/7/365 bus line. I wish I could afford to move there.
The problem with Washington, DC, it was, and still is, a “sort of” city. Unlike the heavy industrial and port cities, like New York and Baltimore, there never has been a whole lot of industry in DC. It never had the huge wave of immigrants, who came over here to work in the factories. In the industrial cities, they settled into neighborhoods with others from the “old country.” They had their own grocery stores, as well as doctors and lawyers, who spoke the native tongue.
Washington’s primary “industry” always has been government, and those that served and/or influenced, those in government. Everything else was “sort of.” It “sort of” had neighborhoods, but rather than being mostly ethnic, they were more based on income class.
Being a Southern city, DC was also segregated by race. My wife’s father grew up in a working class family. They lived in a row house, in a White working class neighborhood on Capitol Hill. He never went to college, but he and his siblings, attended Catholic school from K-12. Yes, a working class family could afford to send all five of their kids to Catholic school on one income. There was also a streetcar stop, right in front of their house. Two blocks away, was a Black working class neighborhood. The streetcar stopped there too. The kids all played together.
Even after President Harry Truman desegregated the federal government in 1949, DC remained a segregated city. Some neighborhoods were segregated by street. Besides being segregated racially, the city was also segregated by income class among the races. The Blacks, Asians, and Whites had their rich, middle class, and poor neighborhoods.
The city continues to segregate by income class, with very little middle class left. DC has the same problem that plagues most cities: The middle classes left for the suburbs and exurbs. You now have your upstairs/downstairs coalition, with hardly enough middle class glue, to hold it together. The key to that glue in DC, is to have the federal government come back to the office, and provide them with housing as part of their employment contract. The private, and semi-private sector in the District, should do the same.
President-elect Trump has said that he wants to make Washington, DC the showplace world capital that it should be, as the capital city of the United States Of America. DC’s mayor and city council, need to be having regular meetings with President Trump, on how that goal can be achieved. Make American Great Again, needs to start with Washington, DC.