The old suburban office park is the new American ghost town
By Dan Zak July 20
Yellow paint is chipping off the curbs.
A single orange traffic cone sits in the revolving door that no longer revolves, at the front of an office building that’s no longer an office building.
The building in North Bethesda has eight floors. It is 98.7?percent vacant. There is one life form within its nearly 210,000 square feet — not counting the lobby fern on life support — and she wears a security uniform, sits at the front desk and listens to the muffled whine of a faulty alarm for hours at a time, every day between 6 a.m. and 2 p.m.
“It’s quite annoying,” say Lum Tumentang, the guard. The building engineer sometimes stops by and turns it off, but it inevitably trips again. There’s one or two IT people who do IT stuff one flight up, but they’re not here right now. The building was built in 1989, and it shows: a mountain of tinted glass and beige concrete in commercial dullsville. Over the past decade, its value dropped by 64?percent. The largest tenant, the National Institutes of Health and its contractors, started packing up two years ago as leases expired. By 2014, the owner reported cash-flow problems, foreclosure arrived this past January, and that was it for 6116 Executive Blvd.
Across the empty parking lot, over the islets of mulch, past security gates that no longer have gates, in a near-identical building that is actually 100 percent vacant, a man named Duane pushes a broom over the renovated floor of another lobby that isn’t being used.
“Keep it up, spruce it up,” he says. “In case somebody wants to buy it.”
There are 71.5?million square feet of vacant office space in the Washington region, much of it piled in office parks. That’s enough emptiness to fill the Mall four times over, with just enough left to fill most of the Pentagon, the granddaddy of office buildings. If office space was a commodity, we would make a killing by selling our excess in bulk to San Francisco, where it’s so scarce and costly, according to Quartz, that start-up employees are starting to work in shopping malls.
Another 1?million square feet of office space will flow onto the market over the next seven years, as Marriott International moves out of its Bethesda office park at 10400 Fernwood Rd., which was built in 1978 and is leased until 2022.
“I think, as with many other things, our younger folks are more inclined to be Metro-accessible and more urban,” Marriott chief executive Arne Sorenson told The Washington Post in March, after announcing the plans to move.
If tastes keep trending away from office parks, buildings like 6116 Executive Blvd. and 10400 Fernwood Rd. may soon be hollow, oversize memorials to the Way We Worked.
Misty water-colored memories
The American ghost town has assumed different forms: the abandoned gold-rush towns out West, the silent Floridian subdivisions of underwater McMansions. Now, we have fiefdoms of mid-Atlantic office space, on streets named Research Boulevard and Professional Drive, thinning out in the sprawl. They are hobbled by changing work styles and government shrinkage. People telecommute. People move into the city or into faux-urban areas that are friendlier to pedestrians, that aren’t barnacled on a highway. Younger generations don’t want to be stranded in a “Dilbert” cartoon. They want cozy nooks and nap spaces, walkable commutes, the tastes and conveniences of the city.
There are 71.5 million square feet of vacant office space in the D.C. region, much of it piled in office parks. (Joshua Yospyn/For The Washington Post)
How did we get here? Why do we work in office parks, and why are we now souring on them?
Let’s blame Thomas Jefferson.
“I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America,” Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1787. “When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.”
“In some kind of really bizarre way, there’s a line from Thomas Jefferson to the office park,” says Louise A. Mozingo, chair of the department of landscape architecture and environmental planning at the University of California at Berkeley, who wrote the book “ Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes.” Office parks “are very symbolic of American distrust of the center city. .?.?. The ideal American, in [Jefferson’s] political writing, is a small farmer. We’re no longer on farms, but we work in this tended green environment.”
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