An unexamined part of Matt's article is that the Biden administration has been unwilling to actually execute on its goals of getting federal workers back into offices and that is really bad for DC. Amusingly, Trump would probably stick it to federal employees and make them come back which would really help DC's budget.
In fairness. Biden, and specifically his CoS Jeff Zeints, really tried to get federal workers back into the office. It's going to be impossible to go back to pre pandemic levels of in person work in downtown DC.
Maybe this will be part of the excuse Trump uses to decimate the bureaucracy.
If my employer tells me to come back to the office, its with the understanding that if I don't do what they ask, I will not be employed there much longer *for cause.* How has Biden and/or Jeff Zeints approach differed from that approach?
I don't think this accurately reflects how this would've gone down. When Biden began his back to work orders, I was living with 3 people who were working for the federal government. Two were hybrid, and one was basically fully remote. When I teased them about having to go back in, they all told me that they didn't think it was possible because a decent percentage of their team had either left DC and were working fully remotely or moved further away from the office and now had an hour plus long commute. Importantly, some of these people were managers. Additionally, one of my roommates was working with a contractor and was told by his company that they would be following the company's WFH policies.
Listen, I actually really like working in person and totally get the impulse to be angry about federal workers being lazy at home. It's just a complicated situation and I don't think something you can discuss in broad strokes.
> moved further away from the office and now had an hour plus long commute
Festering, obviously-foreseeable problems like this are why smart organizations brought people back right after they got vaccinated, when the pandemic was over for most practical purposes, three full blessed years ago.
I'm not angry about them working from home. If there were indications that working from home was more effective, I would support that. I get to work from home some and enjoy it!
But this idea that the government can't do what many large companies did and require their employees to come back into the office is bonkers. All of the things that you mentioned were issues where I work. But they decided this was something that was going to happen, set a date, and with a few exceptions for really critical people, made it happen. Did a decent chunk of people change jobs - yes. But in organizations of thousands of people people join and leave on a regular basis...
All those things happened in private sector employment too, but most companies brought office workers back to the office in 2021. I haven’t heard any good reason why federal employees couldn’t have been back in their offices around the same time.
As a DC Government employee (and manager) who went back into the office in the summer of 2021 with a large number of coworkers who were aggressively opposed to doing so but did so anyways, why is their objection to coming back to the office dispositive of whether Biden could have actually moved forward with requiring it? I'm not seeing the connection here. Biden could have imposed the requirement. Those who refused to do so could have quit. Much larger numbers would have grumbled about it but would not voluntarily lose their jobs over their objections.
There are well over 300k federal employees in the DC MSA. The top ~10% of the workforce is about 30k workers. You're telling me that somewhere around 25 thousand(!!!) workers in the DMV area could quit and get new jobs in a week that would provide them similar or better work life benefits including allowing them to work from home more than the 50% the Biden administration is seeking to achieve?
Consider me dubious at best and closer to outright disbelief.
No, it tells you that well educated and competent employees typically already get inquiries from recruiters on a regular basis, and can leave without much difficulty.
It was extremely obvious even at the time that employers who cared about in-person work (which should be all of them) should have told everybody to be ass-in-chair full time by spring or summer 2021, and that the longer they dithered, the harder it was eventually going to be.
We lost maybe 5% of our headcount in doing this, and it was the best decision our c-level ever made.
The actual problem is agencies have gone hog wild on remote recruitment. We could force a bunch of DC area employees back into the office more frequently. (DC teleworkers at DoT are supposed to average 2 days a week) But you rapidly run into the problem huge portions of some agencies are remote now with no in person office said employee could plausibly report to. So you’re stuck with either 1. En masse firing remote employees 2. Engaging in a resentment building exercise where DC area employees have no flexibility while their colleagues elsewhere can work by the pool.
With that said revoking the remote work agreements for everyone without the 50 mile radius is an obvious first step, and all the whiners who moved out to the edge of the dc pay zone during and post pandemic can live with the consequence of their decisions.
And then you lose the best employees, because they have options. The ones that leave first are typically people with valuable skills, who are already getting emails from recruiters on a regular basis. Those are also typically the skill sets that are hardest to replace.
Federal employees do not regularly receive emails from recruiters by in large. They tend to have good skills but are often quite conservative professionally and not big risk takers. That is after all part of the appeal of an employer who never goes bankrupt!
I'm a fed and have not seen a big push to get employees back into the office - IIRC Biden/OMB sent a memo out telling agencies to do something about it, but it seems like each agency can do whatever they want.
I think what has changed is *managers* - who typically couldn't telework before the pandemic - now have gotten used to the perks of telework and they're not eager to be in the office 4 or 5 days per week.
I think it's going to be hard to push bargaining unit employees into more in-office days if you have a hard time getting managers to do it leading by example.
The Biden Administrations is trying to get them to do hybrid schedules, with the aim to have them back into the office 50% of the time, not 100%. They have been completely unable to do that.
There’s no real point in doing hybrid if the work can be done from home. Remote saves money on office leases, reduces pollution, and expands the applicant pool for hiring.
I think you're probably right. But even if you're right that doesn't answer the question of what is the best long term model for either individuals or organizations.
We know that IRL interactions form stronger bonds. We know that time spent commuting is a complete waste, and we know that most people enjoy the flexibility of WFH.
But we went from a world of virtually everyone commuting to work to a world of common WFH just about overnight. We have no data really tracking where the equilibrium should be between the two extremes.
Why do you think developing people / facilitating career progression is better remotely? (especially for women)
I WFH 95% of the time and I like it, but I feel like I'm relying _a lot_ on the fact that my immediate boss is another long-time coworker that I worked with heavily before the pandemic. I definitely feel less connected with those coworkers I haven't hung out with much in person.
Before the pandemic, I thought that remote work was as good as in person. At least where I've worked, in person has been better than even hybrid. Remote is far better for training. It's a lot easier to get hold of people.
The other thing I didn't really appreciate before the pandemic is how often solutions to problems have come up just during random conversations in the hallway. You say hi, start chatting about something completely unrelated to work, one of you mentions a random work problem, the other person has expertise and an idea which ends up saving hours and hours of time. I may be biased because this is from working a technical role in a non-tech company but I've seen it happen among non-technical staff. You don't get the kind of socializing that is conducive to this with hybrid. And maybe this is something that only happens with badly managed companies, but I'm not so sure.
The problem is that development people and facilitating career progression requires your highest performers and most experienced people to be in the office, and those are the exact people with the leverage to WFH (either you will let them WFH or someone else will).
The coordination problems are immense. Things that can’t be done informally have to be done formally and that multiples the work effort by at least 10x in my experience.
And we won’t get started on finding out why someone keeps missing deadlines. In one case they were saving a ton of my by not having child care for their newborn. In another they were providing full time elder care.
> People like work from home because it allows them to not work as much.
I see a certain type of person say this and it makes my blood BOIL. It is so absolutely condescending to people who enjoy the work they do, but whose work product is not necessarily enhanced in quality by doing it under the watchful eye of an overpaid and self-righteous middle manager who has no talent but for completing annual performance reviews on time.
I promise you, I can sit in my office, twiddle my thumbs, prop my iPhone against my monitor and watch YouTube videos quite effectively at my office, and that's exactly what I'll do if these hubris-filled mandatory RTW morons get their way.
This is extreme bullshit. Measure outputs, not inputs.
Pay for outcomes, not participation trophies. If the outcomes do not happen, performance manage. If they do happen, worry less about whether people are moving their mouse 20 minutes per hour, 8 hours a day, and more about what other outcomes you wish to pay for.
If you default to thinking everyone is lazy, it's probably a company culture problem. If you continue to treat everyone this way, you become the kind of company that attracts the type of people who skip their morning constitution because they would rather take a dump on company time. Forcing them to come into the office doesn't help, because, again, you are measuring a bunch of stuff that doesn't matter rather than measuring the outcomes you are paying for.
If you think there are some in-office factors that increase productivity, that's probably fine, but if you are asking people to come into work because you think they work better while you are looking over their shoulder.... ugh, your productivity problems are a *you* problem, not a remote-work problem.
That is incorrect, provided that you have decent connectivity and reasonably sensible procedures. In fact, remote tends to make informal collaboration easier.
“ reasonably sensible procedures” is doing a lot of the work in your argument. Half of all managers are below average as are half of all employees - the great management challenge is to get these people to do what needs to be done. That’s a lot harder when everyone is at home.
It changes the informal collaboration. Meetings with a whiteboard to hash things out can handle some things that I've never matched with remote stuff.
But having a discussion in a slack thread on a channel allows you to link that to other people in the future, its searchable etc, in a way that "your memory of a whiteboard meeting" is not.
"The Biden administration told Congress in April that it is working toward a goal in which those eligible for telework are in the office at least 50% of the time."
Debating whether that is the best policy would be interesting, but if Federal workers don't need to be in the office, then I think Trump's plan of moving the offices away from DC is substantively more laudable. Redistribute these high paying jobs across the country and focus on areas like Mississippi or W. Virginia where an influx of high paying knowledge jobs could have a transformative affect on the economy.
I am not sure that follows. There are a lot of jobs where being available to have an in person meeting in x location is important (video calls are grossly inferior) but being in the office every day is unnecessary. So there are agglomeration benefits to being in DC even absent a mandate to be in a particular number of days a week. Lisa is right that the issue is moot for full time telecommuters since they can move wherever (during the pandemic my mom spent a while doing her DC federal government job from the West Coast) but there are reasons to want people to still be within commute distance even if mostly remote.
Sure - I would just spread them out more and be more intentional about it. DC is one of the wealthiest cities in the US. It makes sense to spread that wealth out and focus on areas where an influx of high paying professional jobs would have a large affect. Imagine the federal government moves 100 thousand jobs over a decade to Jackson, Mississippi. It would have way transformative impact there in a way that doing that in the Acela Corridor would not.
If the Trump administration's move of two USDA offices to Kansas City is any indication, you won't see much transformation like you want. A large majority left the agencies, either for retirement or for other jobs in D.C., they were replaced mostly by government workers already in KC angling for grade bumps, and the end result was a workforce that was less experienced with more teleworkers, as well as demographically whiter.
As an aside, there are a lot of advantages to having the federal workforce consolidated in one area - my wife was able to meet with people doing the same job at other agencies during her time there, allowing for a lot of cross-pollination of ideas and best practices. And given the government's hiring difficulties, having a pool of contractors to pull from that can bounce from agency to agency without having to move states is a benefit, even if consolidates power in some large contracting firms that I don't particularly look favorably upon.
The USDA thing was Trump screwing stuff up, but on a small scale. If the federal government announced it was moving 20k-100k of the 400k jobs in the DMV to Jackson, MS metro over a ten year period, it would allow for a much better transition than Trump doing one department in four months.
As for there being value to having the federal workforce consolidated in one area, I think there are benefits. But also negatives. The question is which set of trade offs we want to accept. The federal employees in DC and their union are making the case that there is little value in having them come into the office which means that the benefits appear to be smaller than what we might otherwise think.
I think people underrate how much mandatory RTO would help every city and the country's economy as a whole. IDK that a congressional law on the matter is the right approach, but we need to develop a culture of back to normal. The problem is it creates large incentives for particular firms to buck and be the lifestyle firm. But yes absolutely zero excuse for the federal government not to do so.
While avoiding commuting is the lion's share of the benefit, the argument that people need to go into the office so they can waste money on buying lunch is also, in and of itself, incredibly stupid.
Arguing that the in-person nature of work results in productivity increases whose benefits outweigh the astronomical deadweight losses of commuting is a good argument *if* empirically justified. Arguing for an RTO because "People are saving money on lunch and not just time on commuting" is just intrinsically dumb.
I'm sick of working from home and I know lots of people who say the same. I've been doing it for 4 years at this point and while I don't love commuting (who does), I hate not having a separate workplace even more.
Question: Would you like to be in the office even if all your coworkers were WFH? You'd get the separate workspace you request, but you'd still have to be "remote" for meetings etc.
Personally I like WFH but my brother doesn't, and he wishes more people would go into the office - his work experience would be much better at the office with his coworkers also there.
No, that's a good point. I want to work somewhere where being in the office is expected and normal, not just sit at a desk on zoom all day. I could get that now with my current job and it's not at all what I want.
I too, prefer to be paid money at my leisure and convenience.
Sadly, we know remote learning was a total failure during Covid.
I’ve read Microsoft’s studies on remote work, which were quite depressing in the amount of additional work, the decline in organization connection, and flexibility being a curse rather than a benefit.
I don’t believe we’ve had peer review research on the effects of remote work, but I’m not holding my breath.
There have been a lot of studies on remote work. Generally very favorable in productivity, but it varies by task and type of work. Technical and professional work is well suited. Not one size fits all.
How would it help the economy? The economy is people doing productive activities. The initial biggest economic problem work-from-home caused was a loss of business for downtown lunch places, and a lack of good lunch options where people worked from home. Nowadays, the bigger problem it causes is increased demand for residential space, as people need better home offices, so everyone wants homes one or two rooms larger than they otherwise would. But if that residential space gets built, and lunch options become more spread out, the big issue is agglomeration and transportation. Agglomeration would come from residential density, and transportation is an advantage of work from home.
The online education model has not taken off, even for higher education. A professor can record all their lectures, make them available online, host zoom calls for class discussion and monitor student's understanding via one-on-one video calls. But this has been shown to be inferior to in-person teaching.
Sure, there are some online programs, so the remote education has some place. But the vast majority is, and will be, in-person. Same for businesses.
I’ve made this point before: Mentoring young, inexperienced employees remotely is basically impossible. Someone who enters the workforce in a wholly remote position is at a disadvantage later in her career versus workers from the same cohort who spend significant time in an office among managers.
I suppose it depends on what you do, but I don’t think being physically around managers is a large benefit when starting a career. Peers, yes, but for me, online interaction with peers is generally just as good or better. Probably depends on the field and the person.
WFH is the NIMBY of the workforce. Throughout this thread, individuals are describing how it is better for them personally while pooh-poohing the arguments made by those with a broader scope about the positive effects of returning to in-person.
It’s actually the reverse - it’s people like you arguing for the neighborhood character of coming into the office instead of letting people define what works best for themselves and their organization.
The conflict is between the individual contributors who want to define what works best for themselves (local optimization) versus senior leaders who want to define what works best for the organization (global optimization).
We've been through this with education at all levels from elementary through college -- remote works for some but is overall not as good as in-person. I suspect it will work out to be the same for most corporations.
> who want to define what works best for the organization
Who want to ensure they don't lose their neighborhood character. It's fine to want that (I don't think everyone who doesn't like remote work should be forced to pretend to like it and it's perfectly fine to decide it's not what you want for your organization), but the NIMBYs are obviously the RTO side.
Maybe I missed it if anyone mentioned it below, but a big part of the issue is the non-federal workforce in DC: private sector white collar workers, lawyers, lobbyists, think tanks, etc. If anything, a large part of of the federal workforce has to be in the office because they handle classified or sensitive material that is not allowed to leave the office. Even if people aren't working on highly classified issues, there's topics where if you're working on them, you have to be in the office.
I don’t think you understand how hard that is. I have a back office job at JPMorgan Chase. Our CEO has repeatedly made public statements about the need for coming to the office. The official target is that we come in 60% of days, but you’re not actually punished until your in office percentage is less than 50%. Vacation, sick days and holidays count as in office days. You can request “excused work from home” if you’re not feeling well or have a plumber coming that only requires direct manager approval. Many people come in for only part of the day, like just the afternoon. Together that means people are in the office physically far less than 50% of the time.
Yes, it’s possible to tinker at the margins, but work from home is here to stay and there’s no way to go back. There are so many structural hurdles to cracking down on WFH. In my job, my team is now spread across offices in the US, so all meetings happen on Zoom regardless of whether anyone is in office. In my job, there’s resistance from basically every layer of management all the way down on trying to enforce in office attendance. Finally, the federal government is competing with the private sector for workers, so it’s going to be very hard to unilaterally change office attendance norms. The federal government is already uncompetitive on pay, so needs to be more generous on benefits to make up for it.
I have a very simple question - your boss calls a meeting and says, "hey team, we're ratcheting up the WFH requirements. Anyone who is not able to hit the 60% target this month is under review. Two months in a row gets you a written notice. Three months and you are terminated. Their really serious about this."
You'll quit when you can find a better job - yes?
But until then, you're going to come into the office and hit the 60%, also yes?
I'm assuming you are not working in Chase's back office as a life passion and therefore you would take another job if it offered more money. So you're talking about finding another job that pays the same or more likely pays less. How much of a pay/benefit cut are you willing to take, to come into the office your current (30%?) instead of 60% of the time?
I'm guessing the calculation for the *vast* majority of people is that they will look around, see that there isn't something amazingly better out there, and then show up while grumbling a bit.
The problem with that theory is that, in many cases, the employer cannot easily replace those employees.
You don’t lose clerks and receptionists. You lose AI experts, senior developers, senior system engineers, computer security experts - people who are very hard to find, and who have LOTS of options to work how they want.
I think this requires a deeper understanding of why "AI experts, senior developers, senior system engineers, computer security experts - people who are very hard to find, and who have LOTS of options to work how they want" are taking jobs with the federal government in the first place. A employer who is notorious for being relatively low paying, slow moving, and kludgy for these types of employees.
People not having to go to work has been a nice way to paper over some of government's issues with overstaffing and lax supervision. Go to work please!
Reading this before I've had my coffee and thinking, "wait, why does AOC get to appoint someone to the DC Zoning Commission? That seems like a pretty powerful committee assignment..."
She's been bought off man, just like all the others. Why do you think she's gone so mainstream?
Listen to any true left winger's theory of government, and you'll find that the only reason seemingly popular ideas like universal health care, high housing subsidies, and billionaire beheadings aren't already law is because all politicians succumb to corruption. Trying to explain to them the difference between salience on an issue as opposed to stand alone popularity is a lost cause.
The fact that Republicans don’t jump at the opportunity to punish places like NYC, Boston, and San Francisco with conditional transportation funding shows how uncommitted they are to owning the “Libs.”
It’s all a charade and hot air theatre from them. Exactly what one would expect from a bunch of contrarian nihilists.
Blue cities not building enough housing is arguably the key reason Trump has been electorally viable for three straight elections. In addition, blue cities not building housing is why Florida and Texas has gained House seats and CA and NY has lost seats. Until Texas flips probably around 2028* (if trends continue the way they do) why would the GOP want to change the status quo?
Also very much disagree with the assertion that “own the libs” is only hot air. See Trump withholding disaster relief for blue states in his first Presidency. See the Trump administration (and Kushner) withholding COVID supplies April 2020 because COVID was supposedly a blue city problem and see basically everything contemplated in project 2025 especially around abortion (you really believe Trump will stick to his centrist positioning on abortion? I give you his promise to protect health care and then ACA repeal going down by a whisker).
I can almost guarantee they haven't connected the dots on "blue states are expensive -> more EVs for TX and FL." They are not playing 4D chess like that.
I think my point is glib statement or not, there really is a possible explanation as to why the party supposedly committed to deregulation isn't more interested in punishing blue cities with policies that supposedly align with their committed values.
Now first, that commitment to free market values was always never as strong as it was made it out to be (one of many examples, I remember when supposedly at the height of the Tea Party, this supposed libertarian moment, GOP ran ad after ad in 2010 talking about their commitment to protecting Medicare). Second, GOP has more NIMBYs than the Democratic party if polling is to be believed. But third is that GOP has smart staffers too (despite the grown education gap and Matt correctly noting this will result in more cranks/hacks being part of the GOP, it's not like they have no highly educated people in the party). I think it's entirely plausible to me that in private conversations they will say how blue city housing policy has been very good for them; why rock the boat.
Yes it did. It was an extortion effort to get Democratic governors to praise Trump. There were high profile bidding fights for supplies like ventilators and masks and in a few instances the federal government seized medical supplies purchased by state governors and allocated them to places like Florida.
There were public statements also blaming NYC for how bad Covid was in the city and delays of federal help.
I know FEMA cut into line for supplies, either by invoking emergency powers or outbidding states. I also recall that Andrew Cuomo complained about being denied ventilators, only to have it come out later that NY State had plenty of ventilators sitting on shelves, unused. What I don’t recall hearing about at the time, nor can I find anything now, that says blue states were targeted.
Key quote "At the end of July, writing for Vanity Fair, I revealed that Kushner had commissioned a robust federal COVID-19 testing plan, only to abandon it before it could be implemented. One public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force said a national plan likely fell out of favor in part because of a disturbingly cynical calculation: 'The political folks believed that because [the virus] was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.'"
I'll believe a lot of bad things about Trump, but its hard for me to believe he or his administration would be so stupid as to believe this: "The political folks believed that because [the virus] was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors,"
Katrina happened!
This sounds more like "One public health expert" has got an ax to grind.
It's remarkable how quickly many self-described DC YIMBYs (even ones subscribed to Slow Boring!) retreat when the Height Act is mentioned. "But Paris!" "But the monuments!" "But existing zoning!"
The question is whether being a low-rise city or viewing the monuments (something that can only be done in very specific places anyway) is worth the tradeoffs. How high must our rent prices be so that some rooftops can eke a peek at the Washington Monument? How many tents on the street are worth being low-rise? How high must our taxes be to accommodate a smaller tax base?
Some also point out that DC's Comprehensive Plan doesn't allow for building to the Height Act maximums in many areas, which is true. But locations aren't fungible. The downtown core would be a great place for taller buildings, and other locations are not. These objectors are also often opposed to redeveloping historic neighborhoods (e.g. rowhomes in Logan Circle), though altering the Plan without removing the Height Act would push redevelopment to these historic neighborhoods. You can't have it both ways. Let the market work.
Yeah installing new mechanicals and wiring into spaces which weren't designed for it can be a nightmare. Then you have to work around weird floorplans with materials that are much less friendly to amendment than traditional stick framing is.
I was talking to a developer who said that you need office buildings to drop by 40-50% to make the economics work. With companies pushing people back into the office and interest rates imminently coming down that seems unlikely to happen.
I wouldn’t bet on the long term sustainability of remote work. I’m working in a project now that would have been sticking my head in someone’s office and meeting in a conference room and 8 hours total work. With everyone remote it’s now 20 people and we’ve probably already spent 100 man hours just on planning. With everyone remote everything needs to go through formal channels and be tracked.
Oh my god so much this. I’m about to quit my remote job in favor of a mostly in office one because I can’t stand this. The “tracking through formal channels” thing especially, and it’s worse because every stakeholder has a different method of tracking. Not to mention how much longer everything takes when your team is spread across timezones (someone please tell me how I am supposed to effectively work with people in California and India at the same time from the east coast).
I feel like personal experience with remote work has a big impact on people's perceptions, so I'm pretty skeptical of claims about the future of remote work. My small law firm (less than 15 employees) has had a mix of people in office, working remote, and hybrid scheduled ever since 2020. I think it has worked out really well for us. The people who work remote have more flexibility to take care of the their kids and don't have to commute. People who want to work in office can. And I haven't noticed any significant drop in productivity - any inconvenience seems well offset by keeping everyone happy and motivated. The end result is that my sense is remote work is here to stay and fighting against it is a pointless, losing battle.
My wife's law firm is slowly forcing people back into the office and is going to loose good employees as a result. Every explanation they give for making people come back is not about productivity (by all accounts all of the necessary work is being done while working remote), but about the partners just not wanting a remote office. They're making their employees lives worse for no good reason and I think they'll regret it in the long term. My wife is also pissed because when they hired her they promised remote work and are now reneging on that promise.
Presumably the role of the law firm is training associates and sorting out those who will be making partner from those who won’t. This process is working just as well remotely? I have my doubts.
Why can't you message or video call the person whose office you'd go to and what about remote forces 20 additional people to be involved? This sounds more like your remote process being broken, not a problem with remote in general.
If the ticket tracking system makes everyone unproductive, they should just.. not do that. Going remote doesn't force management to make other bad decisions.
Sure it does. You need to track everyone’s productivity more closely to make sure they are actually working for you. Not working another full time job or providing childcare for their triplets.
If your company sincerely needs that level of tracking or people won't do their work, then I agree, WFH is probably not right for your company.
But that has not been _my_ experience with WFH, nor have I ever heard scuttlebutt about it happening in my company.
At the end of the day, not all companies / company cultures / industries? will support WFH to the same level as each other.
I'm learning something about how bad it can be at other companies - so thank you for that, but I hope you take away that it actually does seem to work for a lot of places as well.
I think this is very true for small organizations (< 10-20 people).
For larger organizations, Metcalfe's Law makes it impossible to "cut through the red tape" and get stuff done by hashing it out in meetings anyway. Big orgs do not get silo'd because they want to be or because that is the best way to do business, and the only way out of silos is creating interfaces (either in the literal software sense, or in the metaphorical sense of procedures/process/documentation).
Once you've gotten to the size/stage where most things require formal process to get done anyway, the vast majority of the work is remote-friendly. If I'm working at Amazon and need to take a meeting with someone in another building (or another campus), me being in the office doesn't really facilitate any productivity.
“Once you've gotten to the size/stage where most things require formal process to get done anyway”
I’ll give you an example.
Hi Patrick (at Amazon) I need a report of all third party sellers with sales volumes between $5 million and $10 million who primarily sell to customers between 18-28….
Sure, click click clicky click here you go.
Formal - use the idea portal to create an idea ticket that is routed to the intake manager who rejects it because you included the wrong cost center. Start a new one with the correct cost center. This one is closed as it’s been routed to the wrong team even though you included the right team in the request…
Even very large organizations can, when they are running well, handle a lot of things informally. One of the great downfalls of large organizations is when they think they need elaborate processes for everything and even worse when the think the process is the product.
What you described is not in any way a remote vs. in person problem
If someone cannot respond to a slack thread that says "Hi Patrick I need a report of all third party sellers with sales volumes between $5 million and $10 million who primarily sell to customers between 18-28", then walking up to them and saying it isn't going to make them do it faster, either
And by the way just because I can do something for you quickly doesn't mean I should stop everything else I am doing to do it for you. That would be true if your thing is more important than my thing (or the thing of the person who needs my thing). I think "write a ticket so we can prioritize it" is a perfectly reasonable response, and better than "cool, I'll keep that in the back of my mind for after I do this other thing, because I am sure there's no way I could possibly forget about it, and you certainly are the only other person asking me for a thing"
If walking up to them makes them do it faster then the downside you're ignoring is that they were busy with something else and your looming presence is giving _you_ more priority at the expense of whatever they were doing.
That will undoubtedly be good _for you_, but that doesn't make it good for the other person.
Now, this can be solved with good culture - "Only walk up to someone's door for truly urgent things, use slack (and expect a delay) for slightly less urgent things, but that's equally true of in-person _or_ remote - the culture helps.
> If I'm working at Amazon and need to take a meeting with someone in another building (or another campus), me being in the office doesn't really facilitate any productivity.
The fact that your example is about meeting with someone who is *remote* to you is kind of telling that you're not responding honestly. The people you work with day-to-day are not going to be in another building or another campus.
Have you worked at Amazon? I have. Taking meetings with people in other office buildings is not even a remotely uncommon (yes, pun intended). Same for Microsoft.
Corporations with tens of thousands of employees don't operate like Dunder Mifflin. I'm not the one being dishonest here. There is a reason that Amazon bought several city blocks' worth of buildings in Seattle -- it increased productivity vs. the old days when people would hop in a shuttle bus to get to a meeting across town in another building.
My husband is forced to be in the office 3 days a week and NONE of the people he works with day-to-day are in his building or even on his campus(and it's not because they're WFH). (Not Amazon, but a different large corporation)
I didn't say it couldn't happen. I said, if your example of why working remotely is superior is that sometimes you have to go to another building for a meeting, perhaps you aren't being sincere in your responses.
I agree with Matt in everything here, so I'll just provide another fun DC Zoning nugget:
For reasons known only to God and the Bureaucracy, it is the law in DC that if your property is adjacent to Rock Creek Park - an untamed forest in the heart of the city - the Commission for Fine Arts (CFA), a federal agency, gets mandatory review of your project, no matter what the project is.
This led recently to a downzoning of a new multifamily project at Walter Reed from 300+ condos to 100ish townhouses, but also screws everyday people as well. Some friends of ours live across the street from Rock Creek, and CFA took 6 months to review the facade replacement on their house that was actively crumbling from water intrusion.
To be clear, they live across the street from a forest. I guess we need the feds there to provide review to make sure the raccoons and deer aren't opposed to our friends repairing their home?
Just an insane, unnecessary government check that shouldn't exist.
I recently sold my NYC apartment and moved into an apartment in a similar building in DC. Both were built in the late 1920s. The New York building is 16 stories tall, but the DC building, despite having “Towers” as part of its name, is six stories.
Colloquially the answer is probably yes, but technically no. The NYC apartment was a co-op, not a condo.
I grew up in suburbia and (obviously!) forget that for many people, choosing to live in an apartment of any kind rather than a house seems weird. I lived in a SFH for years and loved it, but at this point in my life I want to spend less time and money on taking care of a larger living space and garden, making those resources available for other things.
I rented in a co-op building once and had to interview with a member of the board. Also the process of renting in that building was much more financially invasive than getting an actual mortgage. Crazy stuff
I agree with the idea of amending the height act. One thing I would note is many people are convinced it exists to preserve viewsheds of the capital in particular. As such I would trim the pink area a bit, all areas north of mass ave, and about two or three blocks of the area closest to the capital. By my rough eyeballing of a map, that would prevent any of the rich people around the cathedral from having a view of the capital building blocked by a tall building. That is where the powerful support against such a measure would come from.
Hot take -- adding high-rise apartments a short ways north /northeast of downtown DC will actually *increase* the number of people who have views of the Capitol from their residential building.
Not directly related to the topic of the post, but whenever the New York Times publishes an article about housing, the top-voted comments (all presumably from older left-NIMBYs) are all about there's no housing shortage and how private equity is to blame for high home prices and rents. Sadly the Glaeser op-ed Matt links to in the second sentence turns out to be no exception. As Matt notes often, the housing shortage is one policy failure Blue America can't pin on Red America.
I really think this is a young vs old vs red/blue thing. While it’s not a guarantee that an older homeowner is going to be a NIMBY, it’s unlikely they’re going to be a YIMBY unless they receive some immediate tangible benefit. Younger apartments dwellers or young families have very different interests and needs that middle age and older home owners and that will always come into conflict. As has been written a lot, the majority of community input of most communities(regardless of political affiliation) is against development and it’s because the incentives for homeowners and long time community members is to be NIMBY. As long as housing is seen as an asset to build wealth, rather than a place to live, the incentives for density, additional affordable housing often goes against the interests of most affluent and successful members of a community. Until the YIMBY movement gives a good reason for NIMBYS to not to be or the incentive structure is reversed, things are unlikely to change.
I don't disagree with most of what you wrote, i just wish these people would be honest about their NIMBYism instead of denying the shortage exists or blaming someone else.
I think you’re wildly overestimating how much is about value preservation vs a general opposition to change. As an example you see a ton of opposition to gentrification even from homeowners who stand to benefit.
I’m not sure if you’re replying to me or Andy but it’s both. General resistance to change is a basic universal that is really hard to overcome but the value preservation is a big thing beyond economics and traffic. People complain about “changing the character of the neighborhood.” My point is people hate change generally, and unless there’s a really massive upside economically people will resist even if they benefit in some way. I think my issue is more a general critique of classical liberalism and neoliberal economics which is what YIMBYism is that based on. There’s too much put on universalism, rationalism and a desire to fix issues. From my experience people are tribal, irrational and are only willing to fix things if the economic solution has minimal or non-existent psychological and cultural tradeoffs. I just want people to realize how hard this is beyond just the economic and logistical issues.
My personal favorite crazy federal idea is "Post Office Towers".
Basically, the FedGov and particularly the Postal Service are immune to local zoning ordnances. They just have to purchase land, announce to the locals that they're building an office, and build it.
My idea is for a new legislation that requires every Post Office to be built with adequate housing to sustain its local workforce; we could also do some sort of requirement for "ground floor retail space flexible enough to satisfy basic needs", as well as one for "second floor admin and amenities" like gyms and rental offices. Postal workers would get first dibs on rental units in these towers, and then the rest of the units would be put up on the local market.
The next phase is where it REALLY kicks in. The legislation would direct the Post Office that as soon as a Postal Tower gets completed, if local market rents were still too high for the average postal worker to reasonably afford, then they'd have to build ANOTHER tower. Once the new one's completed, the previous one gets sold onto the private market, and the cycle repeats! The sale of each tower helps capitalize the next round of construction, all without the interference of meddlesome local zoning boards.
Two more little "extras" we could do to sweeten the pot:
1. Each building's deed could carry a "rent to own" provision. Some portion of rent paid builds up as a sort of credit that can be cashed in towards a down payment to purchase one's apartment.
2. Retail spaces would lease on shorter, more reasonable terms than the private market -- 1-2 year "prove it" deals. Right now, the private market is deathly dysfunctional, and private commercial landlords keep spaces vacant because they'd rather eat the cost than sink 5-10 years into a bad tenant. This hurts flexibility; so instead, we make the retail leasing more flexible for both sides.
3. Similar to the "rent to own" thing, we could require some percentage of sales to be to housing co-op corporations. Both are good strategies for building wealth.
When you mentioned secondary centers I thought you were talking about places like Rosslyn and McLean. It's true that there are no normal skyscrapers in DC but there are in the Virginia parts of the DC urban area (and Rosslyn in particular deserves to be considered part of the urban core).
Agglomerating government offices into DC does not increase the tax base. Government-owned offices do not pay property tax.
The long standing dispersion of offices works well for employees. There is no room to move the Pentagon from Virginia into DC. People who work at the FBI Academy are not commuting through DC, they largely live in Stafford and Spotsylvania. People who work at NIH are not commuting through DC, they live in Maryland.
(1) There’s no property tax on government buildings, yes, but highly paid government employees do pay local income taxes.
(2) In a space-constrained city like DC, if you consolidate government functions into taller buildings with smaller footprints, the parcels they vacate become available for private use and therefore become taxable.
"Agglomerating government offices into DC" it does to the extent that federal jobs in DC typically are much higher paying than the US median and therefore you are bringing in people with more money to spend into the city. If you think about a state or city giving tax breaks to an employer so long as that employer creates new high paying jobs, same idea here.
Federal workers are not at the top tier of its metro salaries, and generally do not live in DC if they can avoid it. The big salaries in the area are with private employers and contractors.
The average annual pay for a Federal employee in DC is around 130k. (Couldn't find median, but given that federal salaries don't have as extreme outliers, would expect the average and median to not that far apart). Which is not top tier among metro salaries, but is WAY above the median salary even in large metros. For comparison, the median salary in NYC is about 70k.
I was offered 54k as an entry level civil engineer at a federal job in DC and turned it down because there was no way i was going to be able to make that work.
Putting aside everyone else's points, the federal government does actually make 'Payments in Lieu of Taxes' on property it owns (see https://www.doi.gov/pilt) and frequently (though presumably much less in DC than elsewhere) leases standard commercial property, rather than owning the real estate themselves.
Yeah, and at every level too! You’d be surprised at how many post offices are actually on leased land, especially in urban areas. (And I’m not talking about post offices in a large building, I’m talking about a building that’s just a post office where the owner of the parcel is a private entity and USPS has a ground lease.)
It’s politically counterproductive for Democrats to make it easier to build more housing within DC proper. Every extra person living in DC proper loses a vote for House and Senate, and DC will have 3 electoral college votes regardless of its population size under the 23rd Amendment.
Instead, Democrats should do everything in their power to upzone northern Virginia until everything from Alexandria to Tysons Corner is an actual city, with high rises and mid rises predominating in place of today’s dominant single family housing. Make Virginia a safe blue state with more representatives and electoral college votes after 2030.
Note that this is a direct trade off—people have to live somewhere, so if the population of the greater DC area remains constant, we should want to reduce the population of DC and increase the population of Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax, and Loudoun.
Paris doesn't have tall buildings (yes, yes, I know there are tall buildings in La Defense, but that is not the central business district) and it is held up as an urbanist paradise. So is the urbanist paradise Paris or Manhattan (or Manila)?
Well if you want to rip all the single family homes out of dc and replace them with single stair 6 story apartment buildings with no parking, I am good with that.
You can do very high density with height caps as long as everyone accepts 1850s levels of living space and car access. Although even then the Tokyo pattern is better
On the topic of what the federal government could do to spur housing construction, could Congress exempt colleges and universities from having to comply with local zoning laws and require that colleges that receive federal funds (i.e. basically all of them) offer on campus housing to 100% of students? There are a lot of college and graduate students in the US and a decent fraction of them don’t live on campus, and many colleges don’t have sufficient on campus housing for the students they do have.
How would you adjust that for the substantial percentage of students who don’t want to live on campus? Do the universities build for 100% and leave the excess vacant?
So colleges might overbuild on campus housing a little, that doesn’t seem like the worst thing. If colleges had excess supply, perhaps that would translate to lower prices, which might induce more students to choose on-campus living. When I was a grad student I would have chosen the cheapest option, full stop.
There’s already too much college capacity for the number of likely students. Birth rates declined a decent bit in 2008 and never really recovered, so we’re already in for a wave of college closures and painful adjusting over the next decade. This is probably the one of the worst possible times for a massive capital expansion.
Yes, a college near me closed in June. They kept their buildings in excellent shape, and the city and county are trying to figure out if some could be used for housing in some way. This is just one of dozens of colleges that have closed in the last decade, so it may end up being the opposite - colleges end up providing housing for others.
You have to look at the situation for different colleges and universities. I was teaching at Texas A&M for 9 years, and there the majority of students live in big private apartment complexes a few miles from campus. There has definitely been some really tall student housing construction near campus, though I don’t recall how much was privately owned and how much was done by the university. But at any rate, given the huge existing amount of privately owned student housing, the university constructing enough for all students would create a huge glut. Maybe there’s a way for the university to buy up the big apartments - but there’s also a construction type they call the “Aggie shack” that consists of a four bedroom home with four parking spots in the driveway, aimed at students, that is problematic in many ways, but there are hundreds or maybe thousands of them around town. I don’t think the university wants to take over all of those.
College towns are the one place where it feels like housing gets built in a big way and i don't really think they need the policy attention. Certainly, the schools don't need to be forced into more capital expenditures.
I would say Boston is a big exception—lots of students living off campus and a serious housing shortage. Any blue city with a housing shortage probably has at least a few universities and building more student housing on college campuses would seem a way to help.
I don't see how Congress has the authority to exempt colleges and universities from complying with local zoning laws. Something a state government could probably do, though.
An unexamined part of Matt's article is that the Biden administration has been unwilling to actually execute on its goals of getting federal workers back into offices and that is really bad for DC. Amusingly, Trump would probably stick it to federal employees and make them come back which would really help DC's budget.
In fairness. Biden, and specifically his CoS Jeff Zeints, really tried to get federal workers back into the office. It's going to be impossible to go back to pre pandemic levels of in person work in downtown DC.
Maybe this will be part of the excuse Trump uses to decimate the bureaucracy.
If my employer tells me to come back to the office, its with the understanding that if I don't do what they ask, I will not be employed there much longer *for cause.* How has Biden and/or Jeff Zeints approach differed from that approach?
Because they’re obviously not going to fire the 80% of dc workers who won’t come back full time. It’s a hard situation!
80% of their employees are not going to do that. You *very publicly* fire the 10 worst every week and within a month, you'll have 90% participation.
I don't think this accurately reflects how this would've gone down. When Biden began his back to work orders, I was living with 3 people who were working for the federal government. Two were hybrid, and one was basically fully remote. When I teased them about having to go back in, they all told me that they didn't think it was possible because a decent percentage of their team had either left DC and were working fully remotely or moved further away from the office and now had an hour plus long commute. Importantly, some of these people were managers. Additionally, one of my roommates was working with a contractor and was told by his company that they would be following the company's WFH policies.
Listen, I actually really like working in person and totally get the impulse to be angry about federal workers being lazy at home. It's just a complicated situation and I don't think something you can discuss in broad strokes.
> moved further away from the office and now had an hour plus long commute
Festering, obviously-foreseeable problems like this are why smart organizations brought people back right after they got vaccinated, when the pandemic was over for most practical purposes, three full blessed years ago.
I'm not angry about them working from home. If there were indications that working from home was more effective, I would support that. I get to work from home some and enjoy it!
But this idea that the government can't do what many large companies did and require their employees to come back into the office is bonkers. All of the things that you mentioned were issues where I work. But they decided this was something that was going to happen, set a date, and with a few exceptions for really critical people, made it happen. Did a decent chunk of people change jobs - yes. But in organizations of thousands of people people join and leave on a regular basis...
All those things happened in private sector employment too, but most companies brought office workers back to the office in 2021. I haven’t heard any good reason why federal employees couldn’t have been back in their offices around the same time.
As a DC Government employee (and manager) who went back into the office in the summer of 2021 with a large number of coworkers who were aggressively opposed to doing so but did so anyways, why is their objection to coming back to the office dispositive of whether Biden could have actually moved forward with requiring it? I'm not seeing the connection here. Biden could have imposed the requirement. Those who refused to do so could have quit. Much larger numbers would have grumbled about it but would not voluntarily lose their jobs over their objections.
You don't even need to fire that many people. If you credibly threaten to do this, many of your best employees will conveniently resign on their own.
If they aren't willing to do the thing you want/need from them, they aren't your best people, so you are probably better replacing them.
80% of the best would probably do exactly that, and for most, be able to get new jobs in a week.
There are well over 300k federal employees in the DC MSA. The top ~10% of the workforce is about 30k workers. You're telling me that somewhere around 25 thousand(!!!) workers in the DMV area could quit and get new jobs in a week that would provide them similar or better work life benefits including allowing them to work from home more than the 50% the Biden administration is seeking to achieve?
Consider me dubious at best and closer to outright disbelief.
That just tells you more about the fecklessness of our DC workers. How embarrassing. I bet you could fire 50% and not skip a beat.
I think it depends on the agency!
No, it tells you that well educated and competent employees typically already get inquiries from recruiters on a regular basis, and can leave without much difficulty.
Why is that obvious?
It was extremely obvious even at the time that employers who cared about in-person work (which should be all of them) should have told everybody to be ass-in-chair full time by spring or summer 2021, and that the longer they dithered, the harder it was eventually going to be.
We lost maybe 5% of our headcount in doing this, and it was the best decision our c-level ever made.
Employers should not care at all about in person work. They should care about getting the job done.
DC workers have options. At least, the good ones do. And most employers in the region are very flexible about remote work.
I mean, people were buying houses based on WFH. If they didn't nip it in the bud, it was obviously going to be a very long term problem.
The actual problem is agencies have gone hog wild on remote recruitment. We could force a bunch of DC area employees back into the office more frequently. (DC teleworkers at DoT are supposed to average 2 days a week) But you rapidly run into the problem huge portions of some agencies are remote now with no in person office said employee could plausibly report to. So you’re stuck with either 1. En masse firing remote employees 2. Engaging in a resentment building exercise where DC area employees have no flexibility while their colleagues elsewhere can work by the pool.
With that said revoking the remote work agreements for everyone without the 50 mile radius is an obvious first step, and all the whiners who moved out to the edge of the dc pay zone during and post pandemic can live with the consequence of their decisions.
And then you lose the best employees, because they have options. The ones that leave first are typically people with valuable skills, who are already getting emails from recruiters on a regular basis. Those are also typically the skill sets that are hardest to replace.
Federal employees do not regularly receive emails from recruiters by in large. They tend to have good skills but are often quite conservative professionally and not big risk takers. That is after all part of the appeal of an employer who never goes bankrupt!
I'm a fed and have not seen a big push to get employees back into the office - IIRC Biden/OMB sent a memo out telling agencies to do something about it, but it seems like each agency can do whatever they want.
I think what has changed is *managers* - who typically couldn't telework before the pandemic - now have gotten used to the perks of telework and they're not eager to be in the office 4 or 5 days per week.
I think it's going to be hard to push bargaining unit employees into more in-office days if you have a hard time getting managers to do it leading by example.
In private sector it's the same thing. The real reason RTO is not widely enforced is that a lot of senior managers just below C Suite love WFH.
Do we know that return to office is optimal? I do not. I see non-federal offices working hybrid days just fine.
The Biden Administrations is trying to get them to do hybrid schedules, with the aim to have them back into the office 50% of the time, not 100%. They have been completely unable to do that.
There’s no real point in doing hybrid if the work can be done from home. Remote saves money on office leases, reduces pollution, and expands the applicant pool for hiring.
Tasks / jobs can be done remotely. Developing people and facilitating career progression is better done in-person.
I think you're probably right. But even if you're right that doesn't answer the question of what is the best long term model for either individuals or organizations.
We know that IRL interactions form stronger bonds. We know that time spent commuting is a complete waste, and we know that most people enjoy the flexibility of WFH.
But we went from a world of virtually everyone commuting to work to a world of common WFH just about overnight. We have no data really tracking where the equilibrium should be between the two extremes.
I think it depends on the job, tbh. It's true of some jobs and workplaces but can't be generalized to all.
Maybe for some but this is a blanket statement that is simply not true across the board.
That has not been my experience. Particularly for women.
Why do you think developing people / facilitating career progression is better remotely? (especially for women)
I WFH 95% of the time and I like it, but I feel like I'm relying _a lot_ on the fact that my immediate boss is another long-time coworker that I worked with heavily before the pandemic. I definitely feel less connected with those coworkers I haven't hung out with much in person.
Before the pandemic, I thought that remote work was as good as in person. At least where I've worked, in person has been better than even hybrid. Remote is far better for training. It's a lot easier to get hold of people.
The other thing I didn't really appreciate before the pandemic is how often solutions to problems have come up just during random conversations in the hallway. You say hi, start chatting about something completely unrelated to work, one of you mentions a random work problem, the other person has expertise and an idea which ends up saving hours and hours of time. I may be biased because this is from working a technical role in a non-tech company but I've seen it happen among non-technical staff. You don't get the kind of socializing that is conducive to this with hybrid. And maybe this is something that only happens with badly managed companies, but I'm not so sure.
The problem is that development people and facilitating career progression requires your highest performers and most experienced people to be in the office, and those are the exact people with the leverage to WFH (either you will let them WFH or someone else will).
The coordination problems are immense. Things that can’t be done informally have to be done formally and that multiples the work effort by at least 10x in my experience.
And we won’t get started on finding out why someone keeps missing deadlines. In one case they were saving a ton of my by not having child care for their newborn. In another they were providing full time elder care.
People like work from home because it allows them to not work as much.
Turn a hybrid model into in-office on M-W-F and work from home on T-Th and see how much squealing happens.
> People like work from home because it allows them to not work as much.
I see a certain type of person say this and it makes my blood BOIL. It is so absolutely condescending to people who enjoy the work they do, but whose work product is not necessarily enhanced in quality by doing it under the watchful eye of an overpaid and self-righteous middle manager who has no talent but for completing annual performance reviews on time.
I promise you, I can sit in my office, twiddle my thumbs, prop my iPhone against my monitor and watch YouTube videos quite effectively at my office, and that's exactly what I'll do if these hubris-filled mandatory RTW morons get their way.
That is incorrect. Decent management looks at productivity. It is actually easier to slack in office, as there is typically less scrutiny.
This is extreme bullshit. Measure outputs, not inputs.
Pay for outcomes, not participation trophies. If the outcomes do not happen, performance manage. If they do happen, worry less about whether people are moving their mouse 20 minutes per hour, 8 hours a day, and more about what other outcomes you wish to pay for.
If you default to thinking everyone is lazy, it's probably a company culture problem. If you continue to treat everyone this way, you become the kind of company that attracts the type of people who skip their morning constitution because they would rather take a dump on company time. Forcing them to come into the office doesn't help, because, again, you are measuring a bunch of stuff that doesn't matter rather than measuring the outcomes you are paying for.
If you think there are some in-office factors that increase productivity, that's probably fine, but if you are asking people to come into work because you think they work better while you are looking over their shoulder.... ugh, your productivity problems are a *you* problem, not a remote-work problem.
People like work from home because it becomes possible to live where a 2 bedroom apartment is not $1.5 million.
That is incorrect, provided that you have decent connectivity and reasonably sensible procedures. In fact, remote tends to make informal collaboration easier.
“ reasonably sensible procedures” is doing a lot of the work in your argument. Half of all managers are below average as are half of all employees - the great management challenge is to get these people to do what needs to be done. That’s a lot harder when everyone is at home.
It changes the informal collaboration. Meetings with a whiteboard to hash things out can handle some things that I've never matched with remote stuff.
But having a discussion in a slack thread on a channel allows you to link that to other people in the future, its searchable etc, in a way that "your memory of a whiteboard meeting" is not.
(EDIT: to fix minor typo)
> In fact, remote tends to make informal collaboration easier.
I could not disagree in stronger terms with this. Collaboration has been a disaster for my company since we went remote.
If federal workers don’t need to be in offices, it is not good for the US or the workers to force them to commute.
Forcing them back is bad for taxpayers, bad for the environment, and bad for workers.
"If federal workers don’t need to be in offices"
"The Biden administration told Congress in April that it is working toward a goal in which those eligible for telework are in the office at least 50% of the time."
Debating whether that is the best policy would be interesting, but if Federal workers don't need to be in the office, then I think Trump's plan of moving the offices away from DC is substantively more laudable. Redistribute these high paying jobs across the country and focus on areas like Mississippi or W. Virginia where an influx of high paying knowledge jobs could have a transformative affect on the economy.
I am not sure that follows. There are a lot of jobs where being available to have an in person meeting in x location is important (video calls are grossly inferior) but being in the office every day is unnecessary. So there are agglomeration benefits to being in DC even absent a mandate to be in a particular number of days a week. Lisa is right that the issue is moot for full time telecommuters since they can move wherever (during the pandemic my mom spent a while doing her DC federal government job from the West Coast) but there are reasons to want people to still be within commute distance even if mostly remote.
If you let people telecommute, they do that on their own.
FYI, the greater DC commute zone already includes part of WV. For example, Harpers Ferry.
Sure - I would just spread them out more and be more intentional about it. DC is one of the wealthiest cities in the US. It makes sense to spread that wealth out and focus on areas where an influx of high paying professional jobs would have a large affect. Imagine the federal government moves 100 thousand jobs over a decade to Jackson, Mississippi. It would have way transformative impact there in a way that doing that in the Acela Corridor would not.
If the Trump administration's move of two USDA offices to Kansas City is any indication, you won't see much transformation like you want. A large majority left the agencies, either for retirement or for other jobs in D.C., they were replaced mostly by government workers already in KC angling for grade bumps, and the end result was a workforce that was less experienced with more teleworkers, as well as demographically whiter.
https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-23-104709.pdf
https://www.reddit.com/r/fednews/comments/16jrxm0/what_happened_after_the_department_of_agriculture/?rdt=43336
As an aside, there are a lot of advantages to having the federal workforce consolidated in one area - my wife was able to meet with people doing the same job at other agencies during her time there, allowing for a lot of cross-pollination of ideas and best practices. And given the government's hiring difficulties, having a pool of contractors to pull from that can bounce from agency to agency without having to move states is a benefit, even if consolidates power in some large contracting firms that I don't particularly look favorably upon.
The USDA thing was Trump screwing stuff up, but on a small scale. If the federal government announced it was moving 20k-100k of the 400k jobs in the DMV to Jackson, MS metro over a ten year period, it would allow for a much better transition than Trump doing one department in four months.
As for there being value to having the federal workforce consolidated in one area, I think there are benefits. But also negatives. The question is which set of trade offs we want to accept. The federal employees in DC and their union are making the case that there is little value in having them come into the office which means that the benefits appear to be smaller than what we might otherwise think.
I think people underrate how much mandatory RTO would help every city and the country's economy as a whole. IDK that a congressional law on the matter is the right approach, but we need to develop a culture of back to normal. The problem is it creates large incentives for particular firms to buck and be the lifestyle firm. But yes absolutely zero excuse for the federal government not to do so.
Mandatory RTO would be extremely bad for people. It would not help the economy. Pointless commuting is not a productive activity.
Normal includes working from home.
While avoiding commuting is the lion's share of the benefit, the argument that people need to go into the office so they can waste money on buying lunch is also, in and of itself, incredibly stupid.
Arguing that the in-person nature of work results in productivity increases whose benefits outweigh the astronomical deadweight losses of commuting is a good argument *if* empirically justified. Arguing for an RTO because "People are saving money on lunch and not just time on commuting" is just intrinsically dumb.
Maybe they should just pay people extra for in-office days. If it truly pencils out.
I'm sick of working from home and I know lots of people who say the same. I've been doing it for 4 years at this point and while I don't love commuting (who does), I hate not having a separate workplace even more.
This is what I dislike about hybrid: I have the downsides of remote work most of the time, but still chained to extremely expensive locations.
Question: Would you like to be in the office even if all your coworkers were WFH? You'd get the separate workspace you request, but you'd still have to be "remote" for meetings etc.
Personally I like WFH but my brother doesn't, and he wishes more people would go into the office - his work experience would be much better at the office with his coworkers also there.
No, that's a good point. I want to work somewhere where being in the office is expected and normal, not just sit at a desk on zoom all day. I could get that now with my current job and it's not at all what I want.
I too, prefer to be paid money at my leisure and convenience.
Sadly, we know remote learning was a total failure during Covid.
I’ve read Microsoft’s studies on remote work, which were quite depressing in the amount of additional work, the decline in organization connection, and flexibility being a curse rather than a benefit.
I don’t believe we’ve had peer review research on the effects of remote work, but I’m not holding my breath.
There have been a lot of studies on remote work. Generally very favorable in productivity, but it varies by task and type of work. Technical and professional work is well suited. Not one size fits all.
How would it help the economy? The economy is people doing productive activities. The initial biggest economic problem work-from-home caused was a loss of business for downtown lunch places, and a lack of good lunch options where people worked from home. Nowadays, the bigger problem it causes is increased demand for residential space, as people need better home offices, so everyone wants homes one or two rooms larger than they otherwise would. But if that residential space gets built, and lunch options become more spread out, the big issue is agglomeration and transportation. Agglomeration would come from residential density, and transportation is an advantage of work from home.
The online education model has not taken off, even for higher education. A professor can record all their lectures, make them available online, host zoom calls for class discussion and monitor student's understanding via one-on-one video calls. But this has been shown to be inferior to in-person teaching.
Sure, there are some online programs, so the remote education has some place. But the vast majority is, and will be, in-person. Same for businesses.
I’ve made this point before: Mentoring young, inexperienced employees remotely is basically impossible. Someone who enters the workforce in a wholly remote position is at a disadvantage later in her career versus workers from the same cohort who spend significant time in an office among managers.
SuperLike (TM)
I suppose it depends on what you do, but I don’t think being physically around managers is a large benefit when starting a career. Peers, yes, but for me, online interaction with peers is generally just as good or better. Probably depends on the field and the person.
WFH is the NIMBY of the workforce. Throughout this thread, individuals are describing how it is better for them personally while pooh-poohing the arguments made by those with a broader scope about the positive effects of returning to in-person.
It’s actually the reverse - it’s people like you arguing for the neighborhood character of coming into the office instead of letting people define what works best for themselves and their organization.
The conflict is between the individual contributors who want to define what works best for themselves (local optimization) versus senior leaders who want to define what works best for the organization (global optimization).
We've been through this with education at all levels from elementary through college -- remote works for some but is overall not as good as in-person. I suspect it will work out to be the same for most corporations.
Get off your high horse, dude, There's no oxygen up there.
"Senior leaders." Excuse me, I forgot to genuflect.
> who want to define what works best for the organization
Who want to ensure they don't lose their neighborhood character. It's fine to want that (I don't think everyone who doesn't like remote work should be forced to pretend to like it and it's perfectly fine to decide it's not what you want for your organization), but the NIMBYs are obviously the RTO side.
Remote is just as good for a lot of jobs, and often better, because of time and location flexibility andimproved ability to recruit the best staff.
Senior leaders, bluntly, frequently do not have a clue what actually works best. If they don’t listen, they can make bad calls.
HEAR, HEAR!!
Maybe I missed it if anyone mentioned it below, but a big part of the issue is the non-federal workforce in DC: private sector white collar workers, lawyers, lobbyists, think tanks, etc. If anything, a large part of of the federal workforce has to be in the office because they handle classified or sensitive material that is not allowed to leave the office. Even if people aren't working on highly classified issues, there's topics where if you're working on them, you have to be in the office.
I don’t think you understand how hard that is. I have a back office job at JPMorgan Chase. Our CEO has repeatedly made public statements about the need for coming to the office. The official target is that we come in 60% of days, but you’re not actually punished until your in office percentage is less than 50%. Vacation, sick days and holidays count as in office days. You can request “excused work from home” if you’re not feeling well or have a plumber coming that only requires direct manager approval. Many people come in for only part of the day, like just the afternoon. Together that means people are in the office physically far less than 50% of the time.
Yes, it’s possible to tinker at the margins, but work from home is here to stay and there’s no way to go back. There are so many structural hurdles to cracking down on WFH. In my job, my team is now spread across offices in the US, so all meetings happen on Zoom regardless of whether anyone is in office. In my job, there’s resistance from basically every layer of management all the way down on trying to enforce in office attendance. Finally, the federal government is competing with the private sector for workers, so it’s going to be very hard to unilaterally change office attendance norms. The federal government is already uncompetitive on pay, so needs to be more generous on benefits to make up for it.
I have a very simple question - your boss calls a meeting and says, "hey team, we're ratcheting up the WFH requirements. Anyone who is not able to hit the 60% target this month is under review. Two months in a row gets you a written notice. Three months and you are terminated. Their really serious about this."
You'll quit when you can find a better job - yes?
But until then, you're going to come into the office and hit the 60%, also yes?
I'm assuming you are not working in Chase's back office as a life passion and therefore you would take another job if it offered more money. So you're talking about finding another job that pays the same or more likely pays less. How much of a pay/benefit cut are you willing to take, to come into the office your current (30%?) instead of 60% of the time?
I'm guessing the calculation for the *vast* majority of people is that they will look around, see that there isn't something amazingly better out there, and then show up while grumbling a bit.
The problem with that theory is that, in many cases, the employer cannot easily replace those employees.
You don’t lose clerks and receptionists. You lose AI experts, senior developers, senior system engineers, computer security experts - people who are very hard to find, and who have LOTS of options to work how they want.
I think this requires a deeper understanding of why "AI experts, senior developers, senior system engineers, computer security experts - people who are very hard to find, and who have LOTS of options to work how they want" are taking jobs with the federal government in the first place. A employer who is notorious for being relatively low paying, slow moving, and kludgy for these types of employees.
People not having to go to work has been a nice way to paper over some of government's issues with overstaffing and lax supervision. Go to work please!
Alternatively trump might send them all to Idaho and Montana.
That would be good. Even better would be to send them to Mississippi and W. Virginia!
Reading this before I've had my coffee and thinking, "wait, why does AOC get to appoint someone to the DC Zoning Commission? That seems like a pretty powerful committee assignment..."
She's been bought off man, just like all the others. Why do you think she's gone so mainstream?
Listen to any true left winger's theory of government, and you'll find that the only reason seemingly popular ideas like universal health care, high housing subsidies, and billionaire beheadings aren't already law is because all politicians succumb to corruption. Trying to explain to them the difference between salience on an issue as opposed to stand alone popularity is a lost cause.
The fact that Republicans don’t jump at the opportunity to punish places like NYC, Boston, and San Francisco with conditional transportation funding shows how uncommitted they are to owning the “Libs.”
It’s all a charade and hot air theatre from them. Exactly what one would expect from a bunch of contrarian nihilists.
Blue cities not building enough housing is arguably the key reason Trump has been electorally viable for three straight elections. In addition, blue cities not building housing is why Florida and Texas has gained House seats and CA and NY has lost seats. Until Texas flips probably around 2028* (if trends continue the way they do) why would the GOP want to change the status quo?
Also very much disagree with the assertion that “own the libs” is only hot air. See Trump withholding disaster relief for blue states in his first Presidency. See the Trump administration (and Kushner) withholding COVID supplies April 2020 because COVID was supposedly a blue city problem and see basically everything contemplated in project 2025 especially around abortion (you really believe Trump will stick to his centrist positioning on abortion? I give you his promise to protect health care and then ACA repeal going down by a whisker).
I can almost guarantee they haven't connected the dots on "blue states are expensive -> more EVs for TX and FL." They are not playing 4D chess like that.
You are over reading a glib statement
I think my point is glib statement or not, there really is a possible explanation as to why the party supposedly committed to deregulation isn't more interested in punishing blue cities with policies that supposedly align with their committed values.
Now first, that commitment to free market values was always never as strong as it was made it out to be (one of many examples, I remember when supposedly at the height of the Tea Party, this supposed libertarian moment, GOP ran ad after ad in 2010 talking about their commitment to protecting Medicare). Second, GOP has more NIMBYs than the Democratic party if polling is to be believed. But third is that GOP has smart staffers too (despite the grown education gap and Matt correctly noting this will result in more cranks/hacks being part of the GOP, it's not like they have no highly educated people in the party). I think it's entirely plausible to me that in private conversations they will say how blue city housing policy has been very good for them; why rock the boat.
I'm actually giving you credit in that your question or glib statement has a certain degree of merit to it.
What's the BBCode notation for 'glib'? */G?
That might be phpbb
I miss web fora.
We are old
People have been projecting that Texas is only a few years from going blue for a LONG time
“See the Trump administration (and Kushner) withholding COVID supplies April 2020…”
Did that really happen?
Yes it did. It was an extortion effort to get Democratic governors to praise Trump. There were high profile bidding fights for supplies like ventilators and masks and in a few instances the federal government seized medical supplies purchased by state governors and allocated them to places like Florida.
There were public statements also blaming NYC for how bad Covid was in the city and delays of federal help.
I know FEMA cut into line for supplies, either by invoking emergency powers or outbidding states. I also recall that Andrew Cuomo complained about being denied ventilators, only to have it come out later that NY State had plenty of ventilators sitting on shelves, unused. What I don’t recall hearing about at the time, nor can I find anything now, that says blue states were targeted.
It was probably actually worse. Remember Jared Kushner was put in charge of Covid response by Trump. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/jared-kushner-let-the-markets-decide-covid-19-fate
Key quote "At the end of July, writing for Vanity Fair, I revealed that Kushner had commissioned a robust federal COVID-19 testing plan, only to abandon it before it could be implemented. One public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force said a national plan likely fell out of favor in part because of a disturbingly cynical calculation: 'The political folks believed that because [the virus] was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.'"
I'll believe a lot of bad things about Trump, but its hard for me to believe he or his administration would be so stupid as to believe this: "The political folks believed that because [the virus] was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors,"
Katrina happened!
This sounds more like "One public health expert" has got an ax to grind.
It's remarkable how quickly many self-described DC YIMBYs (even ones subscribed to Slow Boring!) retreat when the Height Act is mentioned. "But Paris!" "But the monuments!" "But existing zoning!"
The question is whether being a low-rise city or viewing the monuments (something that can only be done in very specific places anyway) is worth the tradeoffs. How high must our rent prices be so that some rooftops can eke a peek at the Washington Monument? How many tents on the street are worth being low-rise? How high must our taxes be to accommodate a smaller tax base?
Some also point out that DC's Comprehensive Plan doesn't allow for building to the Height Act maximums in many areas, which is true. But locations aren't fungible. The downtown core would be a great place for taller buildings, and other locations are not. These objectors are also often opposed to redeveloping historic neighborhoods (e.g. rowhomes in Logan Circle), though altering the Plan without removing the Height Act would push redevelopment to these historic neighborhoods. You can't have it both ways. Let the market work.
Who are these DC yimbys? I have never met or seen a single DC yimby who holds the 1910 Height Act as sacrosanct, much less many of them.
That famous YIMBY sacred cow, the Height Act! All YIMBY hypocrisy shall be revealed by its very mention!
I recently read an article that demonstrated how difficult office to apartment conversions are. Basically you need someone who is highly talented in envisioning space with the ability to work fast and who has lots of money on hand. Maybe there are some lessons to be learned nonetheless. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/28/nyregion/joseph-pell-lombardi-real-estate-office-apartments.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Jk4.clDr.X7ecsQ3hT4Bg
Yeah installing new mechanicals and wiring into spaces which weren't designed for it can be a nightmare. Then you have to work around weird floorplans with materials that are much less friendly to amendment than traditional stick framing is.
I was talking to a developer who said that you need office buildings to drop by 40-50% to make the economics work. With companies pushing people back into the office and interest rates imminently coming down that seems unlikely to happen.
I have no idea what a solution would be, but that seems like a formula for a long period of stagnation.
I wouldn’t bet on the long term sustainability of remote work. I’m working in a project now that would have been sticking my head in someone’s office and meeting in a conference room and 8 hours total work. With everyone remote it’s now 20 people and we’ve probably already spent 100 man hours just on planning. With everyone remote everything needs to go through formal channels and be tracked.
Oh my god so much this. I’m about to quit my remote job in favor of a mostly in office one because I can’t stand this. The “tracking through formal channels” thing especially, and it’s worse because every stakeholder has a different method of tracking. Not to mention how much longer everything takes when your team is spread across timezones (someone please tell me how I am supposed to effectively work with people in California and India at the same time from the east coast).
I feel like personal experience with remote work has a big impact on people's perceptions, so I'm pretty skeptical of claims about the future of remote work. My small law firm (less than 15 employees) has had a mix of people in office, working remote, and hybrid scheduled ever since 2020. I think it has worked out really well for us. The people who work remote have more flexibility to take care of the their kids and don't have to commute. People who want to work in office can. And I haven't noticed any significant drop in productivity - any inconvenience seems well offset by keeping everyone happy and motivated. The end result is that my sense is remote work is here to stay and fighting against it is a pointless, losing battle.
My wife's law firm is slowly forcing people back into the office and is going to loose good employees as a result. Every explanation they give for making people come back is not about productivity (by all accounts all of the necessary work is being done while working remote), but about the partners just not wanting a remote office. They're making their employees lives worse for no good reason and I think they'll regret it in the long term. My wife is also pissed because when they hired her they promised remote work and are now reneging on that promise.
Presumably the role of the law firm is training associates and sorting out those who will be making partner from those who won’t. This process is working just as well remotely? I have my doubts.
Law firms also make it much easier than most places to track productivity as it's easy to track how much you billed.
This IMO makes remote vs in-person much less significant in many cases.
Why can't you message or video call the person whose office you'd go to and what about remote forces 20 additional people to be involved? This sounds more like your remote process being broken, not a problem with remote in general.
Because they will say, “Do you have a ticket.” Why the sudden demand for tickets? To track productivity when everyone is remote.
If the ticket tracking system makes everyone unproductive, they should just.. not do that. Going remote doesn't force management to make other bad decisions.
Sure it does. You need to track everyone’s productivity more closely to make sure they are actually working for you. Not working another full time job or providing childcare for their triplets.
If your company sincerely needs that level of tracking or people won't do their work, then I agree, WFH is probably not right for your company.
But that has not been _my_ experience with WFH, nor have I ever heard scuttlebutt about it happening in my company.
At the end of the day, not all companies / company cultures / industries? will support WFH to the same level as each other.
I'm learning something about how bad it can be at other companies - so thank you for that, but I hope you take away that it actually does seem to work for a lot of places as well.
How did your company track productivity pre-WFH? Ass in seats?
Informally.
I think this is very true for small organizations (< 10-20 people).
For larger organizations, Metcalfe's Law makes it impossible to "cut through the red tape" and get stuff done by hashing it out in meetings anyway. Big orgs do not get silo'd because they want to be or because that is the best way to do business, and the only way out of silos is creating interfaces (either in the literal software sense, or in the metaphorical sense of procedures/process/documentation).
Once you've gotten to the size/stage where most things require formal process to get done anyway, the vast majority of the work is remote-friendly. If I'm working at Amazon and need to take a meeting with someone in another building (or another campus), me being in the office doesn't really facilitate any productivity.
“Once you've gotten to the size/stage where most things require formal process to get done anyway”
I’ll give you an example.
Hi Patrick (at Amazon) I need a report of all third party sellers with sales volumes between $5 million and $10 million who primarily sell to customers between 18-28….
Sure, click click clicky click here you go.
Formal - use the idea portal to create an idea ticket that is routed to the intake manager who rejects it because you included the wrong cost center. Start a new one with the correct cost center. This one is closed as it’s been routed to the wrong team even though you included the right team in the request…
Even very large organizations can, when they are running well, handle a lot of things informally. One of the great downfalls of large organizations is when they think they need elaborate processes for everything and even worse when the think the process is the product.
lol
What you described is not in any way a remote vs. in person problem
If someone cannot respond to a slack thread that says "Hi Patrick I need a report of all third party sellers with sales volumes between $5 million and $10 million who primarily sell to customers between 18-28", then walking up to them and saying it isn't going to make them do it faster, either
And by the way just because I can do something for you quickly doesn't mean I should stop everything else I am doing to do it for you. That would be true if your thing is more important than my thing (or the thing of the person who needs my thing). I think "write a ticket so we can prioritize it" is a perfectly reasonable response, and better than "cool, I'll keep that in the back of my mind for after I do this other thing, because I am sure there's no way I could possibly forget about it, and you certainly are the only other person asking me for a thing"
“ then walking up to them and saying it isn't going to make them do it faster, either”
Yet working a hybrid week has proven you wrong.
If walking up to them makes them do it faster then the downside you're ignoring is that they were busy with something else and your looming presence is giving _you_ more priority at the expense of whatever they were doing.
That will undoubtedly be good _for you_, but that doesn't make it good for the other person.
Now, this can be solved with good culture - "Only walk up to someone's door for truly urgent things, use slack (and expect a delay) for slightly less urgent things, but that's equally true of in-person _or_ remote - the culture helps.
Or, far more likely, they are goofing off on the internet. Not that anyone here would ever do something like that.
> If I'm working at Amazon and need to take a meeting with someone in another building (or another campus), me being in the office doesn't really facilitate any productivity.
The fact that your example is about meeting with someone who is *remote* to you is kind of telling that you're not responding honestly. The people you work with day-to-day are not going to be in another building or another campus.
Have you worked at Amazon? I have. Taking meetings with people in other office buildings is not even a remotely uncommon (yes, pun intended). Same for Microsoft.
Corporations with tens of thousands of employees don't operate like Dunder Mifflin. I'm not the one being dishonest here. There is a reason that Amazon bought several city blocks' worth of buildings in Seattle -- it increased productivity vs. the old days when people would hop in a shuttle bus to get to a meeting across town in another building.
"not uncommon" is not the same as "it's literally all you do", like it is when your whole company is remote like mine.
My husband is forced to be in the office 3 days a week and NONE of the people he works with day-to-day are in his building or even on his campus(and it's not because they're WFH). (Not Amazon, but a different large corporation)
It can absolutely happen.
I didn't say it couldn't happen. I said, if your example of why working remotely is superior is that sometimes you have to go to another building for a meeting, perhaps you aren't being sincere in your responses.
I agree with Matt in everything here, so I'll just provide another fun DC Zoning nugget:
For reasons known only to God and the Bureaucracy, it is the law in DC that if your property is adjacent to Rock Creek Park - an untamed forest in the heart of the city - the Commission for Fine Arts (CFA), a federal agency, gets mandatory review of your project, no matter what the project is.
This led recently to a downzoning of a new multifamily project at Walter Reed from 300+ condos to 100ish townhouses, but also screws everyday people as well. Some friends of ours live across the street from Rock Creek, and CFA took 6 months to review the facade replacement on their house that was actively crumbling from water intrusion.
To be clear, they live across the street from a forest. I guess we need the feds there to provide review to make sure the raccoons and deer aren't opposed to our friends repairing their home?
Just an insane, unnecessary government check that shouldn't exist.
DC resident and didn't know that. fascinating.
I recently sold my NYC apartment and moved into an apartment in a similar building in DC. Both were built in the late 1920s. The New York building is 16 stories tall, but the DC building, despite having “Towers” as part of its name, is six stories.
For this non-urbanist: Is "owning" an apartment just another way of describing a condominium?
Colloquially the answer is probably yes, but technically no. The NYC apartment was a co-op, not a condo.
I grew up in suburbia and (obviously!) forget that for many people, choosing to live in an apartment of any kind rather than a house seems weird. I lived in a SFH for years and loved it, but at this point in my life I want to spend less time and money on taking care of a larger living space and garden, making those resources available for other things.
The problem is when the condo or coop association gets into trouble and has to start assessing things.
Sure, but I can say from experience that one can "get into trouble" with a SFH as well. Roof, basement, gutter, plumbing, electrical, masonry, etc.
Much bigger problems in a co-op than that, which in some cases can prevent you from selling, force you to sell, etc. Co-ops are really dicey.
For me it was more of a PITA than anything else - paperwork, fees, delays, etc. But not going the co-op route again!
I rented in a co-op building once and had to interview with a member of the board. Also the process of renting in that building was much more financially invasive than getting an actual mortgage. Crazy stuff
They're extremely disfavored in locales where they aren't already established (mostly New York City) for exactly this reason.
In NYC it could be a condo or a coop.
I agree with the idea of amending the height act. One thing I would note is many people are convinced it exists to preserve viewsheds of the capital in particular. As such I would trim the pink area a bit, all areas north of mass ave, and about two or three blocks of the area closest to the capital. By my rough eyeballing of a map, that would prevent any of the rich people around the cathedral from having a view of the capital building blocked by a tall building. That is where the powerful support against such a measure would come from.
You cannot see the Capitol from the National cathedral. I used to run around it like twice a week.
But you can from some houses up in that area and you can from some non ground floor of apartment buildings
Hot take -- adding high-rise apartments a short ways north /northeast of downtown DC will actually *increase* the number of people who have views of the Capitol from their residential building.
Not directly related to the topic of the post, but whenever the New York Times publishes an article about housing, the top-voted comments (all presumably from older left-NIMBYs) are all about there's no housing shortage and how private equity is to blame for high home prices and rents. Sadly the Glaeser op-ed Matt links to in the second sentence turns out to be no exception. As Matt notes often, the housing shortage is one policy failure Blue America can't pin on Red America.
I really think this is a young vs old vs red/blue thing. While it’s not a guarantee that an older homeowner is going to be a NIMBY, it’s unlikely they’re going to be a YIMBY unless they receive some immediate tangible benefit. Younger apartments dwellers or young families have very different interests and needs that middle age and older home owners and that will always come into conflict. As has been written a lot, the majority of community input of most communities(regardless of political affiliation) is against development and it’s because the incentives for homeowners and long time community members is to be NIMBY. As long as housing is seen as an asset to build wealth, rather than a place to live, the incentives for density, additional affordable housing often goes against the interests of most affluent and successful members of a community. Until the YIMBY movement gives a good reason for NIMBYS to not to be or the incentive structure is reversed, things are unlikely to change.
I don't disagree with most of what you wrote, i just wish these people would be honest about their NIMBYism instead of denying the shortage exists or blaming someone else.
I think you’re wildly overestimating how much is about value preservation vs a general opposition to change. As an example you see a ton of opposition to gentrification even from homeowners who stand to benefit.
I’m not sure if you’re replying to me or Andy but it’s both. General resistance to change is a basic universal that is really hard to overcome but the value preservation is a big thing beyond economics and traffic. People complain about “changing the character of the neighborhood.” My point is people hate change generally, and unless there’s a really massive upside economically people will resist even if they benefit in some way. I think my issue is more a general critique of classical liberalism and neoliberal economics which is what YIMBYism is that based on. There’s too much put on universalism, rationalism and a desire to fix issues. From my experience people are tribal, irrational and are only willing to fix things if the economic solution has minimal or non-existent psychological and cultural tradeoffs. I just want people to realize how hard this is beyond just the economic and logistical issues.
My personal favorite crazy federal idea is "Post Office Towers".
Basically, the FedGov and particularly the Postal Service are immune to local zoning ordnances. They just have to purchase land, announce to the locals that they're building an office, and build it.
My idea is for a new legislation that requires every Post Office to be built with adequate housing to sustain its local workforce; we could also do some sort of requirement for "ground floor retail space flexible enough to satisfy basic needs", as well as one for "second floor admin and amenities" like gyms and rental offices. Postal workers would get first dibs on rental units in these towers, and then the rest of the units would be put up on the local market.
The next phase is where it REALLY kicks in. The legislation would direct the Post Office that as soon as a Postal Tower gets completed, if local market rents were still too high for the average postal worker to reasonably afford, then they'd have to build ANOTHER tower. Once the new one's completed, the previous one gets sold onto the private market, and the cycle repeats! The sale of each tower helps capitalize the next round of construction, all without the interference of meddlesome local zoning boards.
Two more little "extras" we could do to sweeten the pot:
1. Each building's deed could carry a "rent to own" provision. Some portion of rent paid builds up as a sort of credit that can be cashed in towards a down payment to purchase one's apartment.
2. Retail spaces would lease on shorter, more reasonable terms than the private market -- 1-2 year "prove it" deals. Right now, the private market is deathly dysfunctional, and private commercial landlords keep spaces vacant because they'd rather eat the cost than sink 5-10 years into a bad tenant. This hurts flexibility; so instead, we make the retail leasing more flexible for both sides.
4. Bonus points if we create a Postal Tower Construction Service, a workforce who would require even MORE housing!
3. Similar to the "rent to own" thing, we could require some percentage of sales to be to housing co-op corporations. Both are good strategies for building wealth.
+1
Check the "extras". The Postal Tower Construction Service would be an incredible accelerator lol. I'd make one hell of a Postmaster General.
I would have hit "like", but you've blocked me for some reason. hence the +1
Unblocked.
When you mentioned secondary centers I thought you were talking about places like Rosslyn and McLean. It's true that there are no normal skyscrapers in DC but there are in the Virginia parts of the DC urban area (and Rosslyn in particular deserves to be considered part of the urban core).
Always thought of Rosslyn as the La Défense of Washington.
Agglomerating government offices into DC does not increase the tax base. Government-owned offices do not pay property tax.
The long standing dispersion of offices works well for employees. There is no room to move the Pentagon from Virginia into DC. People who work at the FBI Academy are not commuting through DC, they largely live in Stafford and Spotsylvania. People who work at NIH are not commuting through DC, they live in Maryland.
Two points:
(1) There’s no property tax on government buildings, yes, but highly paid government employees do pay local income taxes.
(2) In a space-constrained city like DC, if you consolidate government functions into taller buildings with smaller footprints, the parcels they vacate become available for private use and therefore become taxable.
"Agglomerating government offices into DC" it does to the extent that federal jobs in DC typically are much higher paying than the US median and therefore you are bringing in people with more money to spend into the city. If you think about a state or city giving tax breaks to an employer so long as that employer creates new high paying jobs, same idea here.
Federal workers are not at the top tier of its metro salaries, and generally do not live in DC if they can avoid it. The big salaries in the area are with private employers and contractors.
The average annual pay for a Federal employee in DC is around 130k. (Couldn't find median, but given that federal salaries don't have as extreme outliers, would expect the average and median to not that far apart). Which is not top tier among metro salaries, but is WAY above the median salary even in large metros. For comparison, the median salary in NYC is about 70k.
I was offered 54k as an entry level civil engineer at a federal job in DC and turned it down because there was no way i was going to be able to make that work.
Putting aside everyone else's points, the federal government does actually make 'Payments in Lieu of Taxes' on property it owns (see https://www.doi.gov/pilt) and frequently (though presumably much less in DC than elsewhere) leases standard commercial property, rather than owning the real estate themselves.
Yeah, and at every level too! You’d be surprised at how many post offices are actually on leased land, especially in urban areas. (And I’m not talking about post offices in a large building, I’m talking about a building that’s just a post office where the owner of the parcel is a private entity and USPS has a ground lease.)
For DC, it shows under 25k for FY 2024.
It’s politically counterproductive for Democrats to make it easier to build more housing within DC proper. Every extra person living in DC proper loses a vote for House and Senate, and DC will have 3 electoral college votes regardless of its population size under the 23rd Amendment.
Instead, Democrats should do everything in their power to upzone northern Virginia until everything from Alexandria to Tysons Corner is an actual city, with high rises and mid rises predominating in place of today’s dominant single family housing. Make Virginia a safe blue state with more representatives and electoral college votes after 2030.
Note that this is a direct trade off—people have to live somewhere, so if the population of the greater DC area remains constant, we should want to reduce the population of DC and increase the population of Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax, and Loudoun.
Paris doesn't have tall buildings (yes, yes, I know there are tall buildings in La Defense, but that is not the central business district) and it is held up as an urbanist paradise. So is the urbanist paradise Paris or Manhattan (or Manila)?
Well if you want to rip all the single family homes out of dc and replace them with single stair 6 story apartment buildings with no parking, I am good with that.
You can do very high density with height caps as long as everyone accepts 1850s levels of living space and car access. Although even then the Tokyo pattern is better
I thought the standard answer was Tokyo.
I don't know to what degree it is true, but some people are starting to call Paris a 'museum city', or warning that it's on the way there.
On the topic of what the federal government could do to spur housing construction, could Congress exempt colleges and universities from having to comply with local zoning laws and require that colleges that receive federal funds (i.e. basically all of them) offer on campus housing to 100% of students? There are a lot of college and graduate students in the US and a decent fraction of them don’t live on campus, and many colleges don’t have sufficient on campus housing for the students they do have.
How would you adjust that for the substantial percentage of students who don’t want to live on campus? Do the universities build for 100% and leave the excess vacant?
So colleges might overbuild on campus housing a little, that doesn’t seem like the worst thing. If colleges had excess supply, perhaps that would translate to lower prices, which might induce more students to choose on-campus living. When I was a grad student I would have chosen the cheapest option, full stop.
There’s already too much college capacity for the number of likely students. Birth rates declined a decent bit in 2008 and never really recovered, so we’re already in for a wave of college closures and painful adjusting over the next decade. This is probably the one of the worst possible times for a massive capital expansion.
Yes, a college near me closed in June. They kept their buildings in excellent shape, and the city and county are trying to figure out if some could be used for housing in some way. This is just one of dozens of colleges that have closed in the last decade, so it may end up being the opposite - colleges end up providing housing for others.
Probably not a little. Could be north of 50% for many universities.
Many graduate students are married. Many have kids. Decent number own houses. It’s not just “traditional” students, especially for women.
There is married student housing in many universities—it’s not just dorms.
You have to look at the situation for different colleges and universities. I was teaching at Texas A&M for 9 years, and there the majority of students live in big private apartment complexes a few miles from campus. There has definitely been some really tall student housing construction near campus, though I don’t recall how much was privately owned and how much was done by the university. But at any rate, given the huge existing amount of privately owned student housing, the university constructing enough for all students would create a huge glut. Maybe there’s a way for the university to buy up the big apartments - but there’s also a construction type they call the “Aggie shack” that consists of a four bedroom home with four parking spots in the driveway, aimed at students, that is problematic in many ways, but there are hundreds or maybe thousands of them around town. I don’t think the university wants to take over all of those.
College towns are the one place where it feels like housing gets built in a big way and i don't really think they need the policy attention. Certainly, the schools don't need to be forced into more capital expenditures.
I would say Boston is a big exception—lots of students living off campus and a serious housing shortage. Any blue city with a housing shortage probably has at least a few universities and building more student housing on college campuses would seem a way to help.
More single rooms!
I don't see how Congress has the authority to exempt colleges and universities from complying with local zoning laws. Something a state government could probably do, though.