On March 15, 2024, D.C. Policy Center Executive Director Yesim Sayin was quoted in the Washington Post:
Overall, downtown’s retail vacancy rate is 22 percent, a bit more than double what it was in 2019, the year before the pandemic, according to the DowntownDC BID. As for office space, the downtown vacancy rate is just over 21 percent, though one forecast estimates it could reach 27 percent in three years, potentially costing the city hundreds of millions in tax revenue.
“It’s like you wake up one morning and there’s no more oil — that’s the state of downtown,” said Yesim Sayin, executive director of the DC Policy Center, a nonpartisan research group. “Things that were valuable are not worth what they were.”
Read More: As downtown D.C. seeks rebound, empty offices, fear of crime cast shadow
Additional reading: The future of Downtown and the future of D.C. are inseparable