Scores of office buildings sit empty across the Washington, DC region, a drag on tax revenue and neighborhood vitality and a reminder to local officials of a long list of community needs: More classroom space. Affordable housing. Job-generating retail and manufacturing businesses.
Some of the vacancies are the result of federal sequestration cuts, which forced government agencies and contractors that occupied older buildings to downsize or shut down.
Others are signs of a broad shift by businesses to more modern office space, often near mass transit or other millennial-friendly amenities.
“It’s a nationwide problem,” said Barbara Byron, director of the Office of Revitalization in Fairfax County, Virginia, which recently formed a committee to figure out how to fill 20 million square feet of vacant office space — an amount three times the size of the Pentagon.
Officials are eager to put at least some of the buildings back to productive use as a way to boost tax revenue, make use of infrastructure that would be costly and time-consuming to build from scratch and bring new energy to fading neighborhoods.