(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) In her recent inaugural address, third-term Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser begged President Joe Biden to either bring federal employees back into the office or give up the office space occupying much of D.C.’s downtown area.
According to the Post Millennial, Bowser is hoping to transform the offices into housing should the government decide to vacate the space.
“The federal government represents one-quarter of D.C.’s pre-pandemic jobs and owns or leases one-third of our office,” Bowser said in her Jan. 2 speech, which garnered renewed attention following the publication of a Politico column on Friday.
“We need decisive action by the White House to either get most federal workers back to the office most of the time or to realign their vast property holdings for use by the local government, by non-profits, by businesses and by any user willing to revitalize it,” she added.
Since taking office, Biden allowed the majority of the 200,000 federal employees usually inhabiting the area to work remotely for at least part of the week.
Reports from Axios indicated that downtown D.C. during the holiday season was at 45% occupancy.
Another report from Fox News declared that D.C. was the “remote work capital of the country in 2021,” with 48.3% of employees working from home.
“Converting office space into housing is the key to unlocking the potential of a reimagined more vibrant downtown,” Bowser continued. “Right now 25,000 people call downtown home.
She said the goal was to gain 100,000 new residents by adding “15,000 over the next five years and 87,000 more before it’s all said and done.”
The D.C. area’s dearth of affordable housing has long been a struggle for Capitol Hill staffers—and even some lawmakers, like current House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who was forced to take up residence with notorious RINO pollster Frank Luntz after his predecessor, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., banned House members from sleeping in their offices.
But it remained unclear how much of the new space would be dedicated to white-collar professionals and how much to illegal immigrants, who recently have taxed the city’s resources to their brink.
While Bowser has been a vocal critic of states who bused in new arrivals from the Mexican border to send a message to the Biden administration, she recently reaffirmed in a statement that her city would remain a sanctuary for illegals, “because we know that our neighborhoods are safer and stronger when no one is afraid to call on our government for help.”
