Steve Burns
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON – (WMAL) The owners of the District’s vacant office buildings are stuck in a Catch-22, D.C. Councilmember Robert White said.
“These building owners of these older buildings are in trouble,” White told WMAL. “They can’t get new tenants, but they can’t rehab their buildings unless they have paying tenants.”
Combine that with the District’s ever-more-desperate search for affordable housing, and White said his unusual idea is getting some traction. His bill would create a work group that would have the ultimate goal of creating a public-private-partnership, funding a conversion of much of the District’s vacant offices into affordable housing.
“We have to find some out-of-the-box idea that would allow us to accelerate the pace of building” affordable housing, White said. Despite laws requiring new developments to include certain rates of affordable housing, and funding efforts like the Housing Production Trust Fund, White said identifying and preserving affordable housing gets more challenging every day as the District sees an unprecedented influx of new and expensive development.
At the same time, the District’s office vacancy rate continues to be a thorn in the side of policymakers. It sits just below 11 percent, holding steady over the past five years according to an analysis from the Lincoln Property Company. The same analysis saw both Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland’s vacancy rates go down in the first quarter of 2017.
White said the office-heavy downtown area can be enlivened further with people not just working but living in the area as well. Plus, he said, residents would be near multiple Metro stations, an important aspect for low-income workers who can’t always afford cars.
While the District would no doubt see higher tax revenue if outdated office buildings were rehabbed and reoccupied as offices, White said the city has to be aware of where demand is.
“The demand for office buildings is not as high for housing,” he said. “Our most urgent need is affordable housing, not necessarily office buildings.”
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