Posted on 09/26/2020 8:45:45 AM PDT by dennisw
WASHINGTON – It’s evening rush hour in the nation’s capital, and the McPherson Square Metro station on a September Tuesday is all but empty. Thousands once squeezed at this time onto the trains departing from the heart of downtown Washington, two blocks north of the White House. Now, the descending escalator steps carry only the shards of a broken bottle of Power Malt.
Above ground the scene is no less eerie: No honking horns or screams from sprinting commuters trying to flag down the Circulator bus. In what seven months ago would have seemed a suspension of the laws of physics and urban planning, jaywalking is possible at the corner of New York Avenue and 15th Street Northwest.
fear is rising that a long-term collapse of downtown economies could soon become irreversible.
In downtown Washington, formerly a textbook case of a reborn city center, the coronavirus has flatlined almost every measure of vitality. About 95 percent of downtown’s 167,000 office workers – a mix of federal employees, lawyers, lobbyists, consultants, advocates and journalists – were working from home this summer, according to a recent report from the DowntownDC Business Improvement District.
The neighborhood’s overall economic activity was less than 13 percent of what it was a year earlier. Hotels were only 8 percent full. About 1,000 people would enter the McPherson Square Metro station throughout the Tuesday after Labor Day, compared with 15,000 on a weekday before the pandemic.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.com ...
You ain't seen nothing yet.
The only permanent thing in this world is the love of Jesus Christ, everything else is as variable as the phases of the moon.
You can apply that to several Democrat run states as well.
I don’t believe all this work from home propaganda. Especially when it is Gov’t workers. Now the porn surfing can be done at home instead of the office.These Federal workers are working maybe 5-10 hours per week working from home. In a busy week maybe 25 hours. Lots of “work” is piling up into a backlog while other “work” will be tossed down the memory hole.
They can all “thank” their local democrats in the voting booth at the next election.
Its time to dismantle the place.
Disperse government agencies around the country. All this concentrated power of deep-staters, rule-making, money, and various intelligence and federal law enforcement is a very dangerous thing for the Republic.
Mmmmm Power Malt.
On the bright side, a d.c. empty of citizens will be difficult to legislate for statehood.
But all these Fed workers are getting paid for 80 hours every two weeks...
Not burning vacation time, etc...
Time for some permanent Furloughs...
Agreed—the center of government should be in the center of the country.
Most of the federal employees will retire or quit rather than move there—win win.
Not the pandemic. There is no pandemic. This devastation was man-made and driven by spite.
Sure hope the Trump Hotel (DC) is surviving.
You can just imagine, how devastated businesses which deal with all these office workers are. Fast food places, restaurants, other retailers which have done a lot of business from the small city of office worker customers who were there every weekday, are suddenly not there. The customer base for many businesses is just gone.
I’m sure this is happening in many other cities besides Washington.
Let's go with that.
Washington DC is the real world manifestation of the "Hunger Games" District One, populated by the ruling class and its parasitic servants. Has nothing to do with the rest of America. Damn near all paychecks come directly or second hand from Uncle Sugar. I grew up in DC before JFK and LBJ inflated the Federal government when there were still remnants of WWII Quonset huts on the mall and redbrick townhouses with peach trees in the front yards could be encountered on K Street instead of row upon row of Lobbyist lawyer office buildings. Emptying that permanenly would be a good start to restoration of the Republic.
But DC is a Utopian bastien of Democrat Policies
You are correct about dispersing government offices around the country. One thing this pandemic has shown is that face to face meetings are not essential. Meetings can be held virtually while the participants are located anywhere around the globe. This holds true for government employees as well as businesses. We will see what happens as time goes on.
The coronavirus did not “flatten” anything. The leftist GLobalist Mayor did.
I don’t know what your government experience is, but our agency firewalls are tight. If there’s any surfing being done, it’s on personal phones and not government computers.
I seriously get much more done at home in one day than I get done in a week at the RRB.
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