It’s odd, because I used to spend the majority of my waking hours downtown, that I rarely seem to be there now. Not since the pandemic first locked us down, and then changed all of our daily practices. But I did go downtown a few weeks ago. It was a gray and dismal day, and everything looked pretty dismal. The streets were not jammed with traffic, the sidewalks were fairly empty, there were a number of empty store fronts, and generally the place did not look well cared for. I knew of course that downtown activity had been lessened by the pandemic, but I hadn’t thought about how an emptier downtown changed the entire atmosphere of the place. Well, I thought, maybe it really hadn’t. After all, it is a dismal day.

Yesterday, I was downtown again, pretty much in the same neighborhood. The sky was blue, the temperature was in the 70s, a nice breeze was blowing – the weather could not have been better. The feel of downtown, however, was still as dismal as it was on that very dismal day.

I have seen the statistics. Over half of the people who worked downtown pre-COVID have not returned. This includes federal government workers, as well as private sector workers. Washington is a city where working from home caught on, and hasn’t let go. I have also seen the Metro figures which show ridership also down almost 50% (this is par for big city transit, and is apparently a smaller drop than in some cities, like San Francisco and Atlanta).

There are other factors at play, as well. One of the industries that seems to have been little affected by the pandemic is real estate development and construction. And over the past several years, there has been a lot of commercial development in the area, just not in downtown. Those familiar with this area know of the tremendous amount of construction activity in the Navy Yard area and at The Wharf. I have read the Bethesda still has 21 new high rise projects on the boards. And development is still occurring in a number of suburban areas in both Virginia and Maryland. But not so much downtown.

It appears now that employers are assuming that there will continue to be a lot of work from home for the foreseeable future. And a lot of split work – part time from home, and part time at the office. But this means a reconfiguration of office layouts – offices are getting smaller (by a lot), some offices are being shared by two or more employees, etc. This means that as office leases expire, companies are renewing for considerably less space. Vacancy rates are high, and it appears may even climb more.

Mayor Bowser has a plan. Her plan, beyond convincing employers (including the federal government) that they should go back to their downtown workspace, is to have excess commercial capacity reconfigured as residential space. The city would help through tax incentives that would last 20 years. There is at least one such conversion underway now – the building that used to house the Peace Corps offices on L Street is being redone as a multifamily unit building (not sure if it will be rental or condo). We will see how this works.

I do have my doubts. There has been a tremendous amount of high rise or mid-rise residential development in the area, in the neighborhoods mentioned above and many more. I am not sure how much more of this type of development the area can absorb. At least right now, the area’s population, which has increased greatly over the past decade, has been fairly stagnant. The mayor’s goal is to have 15,000 units converted downtown and ready for occupancy by 2028. And for this to be a continuing program after that.

Downtown DC is a large area. By my definition (I do not know if the city has set boundaries for this initiative), it runs from the Capitol on the east, to 25th Street on the west, and from about D Street on the south, to at least M (and some places, maybe P) Street on the north. That’s over 250 square blocks.

The area has a lot of hotels, a few movies theaters (fewer than before), many “fine dining” type restaurants (but fewer lunch places than it had), and a number of museums and tourist spots. But groceries, dry cleaners and the like are harder to find. And, yes, there is some existing residential development, most of which is very high end, especially in the Penn Quarter and City Center neighborhoods, but these are not for the type of “ordinary people” (my term) that the mayor would like to see live downtown. They, at least today, have too many other attractive, and probably more affordable, options.

“Just listen to the music of the traffic of the city, Linger on the sidewalk where the neon lights are pretty……..Things will be great when you are ….. downtown, No finer place for sure…..downtown, Everything is waiting for you…..downtown, downtown, downtown.”

I should add: downtowns are crucial for all sorts of reasons. Anything that the city can do to support downtown development, I support.