I'm still digesting the news on yesterday's WaPo, "Pentagon Plans to Close 180 Sites, Shift Area Jobs to Outer Suburbs" and its impact on the local real estate market.
Here's how DC stand to lose with the closure of base and office space.
- More than 4 million square feet of leased office space in Arlington and Alexandria, proposing a massive shift of defense workers and economic investment toward communities outside the Capital Beltway.
- The Pentagon's plan would move more than 18,000 jobs to Fort Belvoir in southeastern Fairfax County, 5,361 to Fort Meade in Anne Arundel County and 3,013 to the Marine Corps base at Quantico.
- While Bethesda is poised to add nearly 1,900 jobs near the Metro with the expansion of the military hospital there, most of the jobs would move from urban centers with easy access to rail, such as Crystal City and Rosslyn in Arlington County, to locations miles away from commuter lines.
- Regardless, the BRAC process probably will disrupt the lives of thousands of Defense employees and the contractors who do business with them. In the Washington area, for example, the Pentagon plan calls for a net loss of jobs inside the Beltway and a net gain outside the Beltway. For instance, Arlington County, Alexandria, Falls Church and Fairfax County would lose nearly 23,000 jobs in leased office buildings, with 15,754 of them from the civil service.
- On a statewide basis, Maryland would reap a net gain of more than 6,000 civil service jobs. The District would have a net loss of nearly 3,000 civil service jobs. The picture is less clear in Virginia, because some civil service and contract support jobs were not counted separately. Still, it appears the state could lose several hundred civil service jobs.
With the shifts - gone are all the work of decade urban planning that's been designed to slow urban sprawl and focus jobs and housing around transportation centers.
The real estate market would not be spared, either. Although officials said it is too early to predict how housing prices would be affected, the increase in vacant urban office space in Arlington and Alexandria would have repercussions across the region, economists said.
Arlington alone would have 3.9 million square feet of leased office space emptied in the Pentagon's six-year realignment plan. Connolly said he is worried that those commercial losses in the inner counties would depress the market for office space all over, forcing jurisdictions to rely more on residential property taxes to balance their budgets.
For Northern Virginian, especially Arlingtonian, it would disrupt its
local economies as well as its housing market, hopefully just temporarily. With this realignment plan many people will put
off home buying until they have a clear picture what's going to happen
to their job.
