Thirty-two U.S. Senators stayed up all night on March 10, speaking non-stop to stir Congressional colleagues into action on climate change. Overnight talking points emphasized state-by-state economic damage such as crop losses from California droughts, coastal destruction from extreme storm surges in New Jersey, and shrinking lobster harvests in Connecticut’s warming Long Island Sound. Senator […]
Inside one of the current National Targeting Centers (Photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP File Photo) Two days after planting a car bomb in Times Square, Faisal Shahzad boarded a plane for Dubai at JFK International Airport. But a routine post-boarding check discovered Shahzad on the no-fly list, and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents […]
In 2012, the Obama administration’s Freeze the Footprint policy order mandated that the federal government reduce its real estate footprint and curb its accumulation of unused or underused properties. The following year, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued guidance on how these reductions should be planned. Since then, the federal government reduced its real-estate […]
Moody’s website reports U.S. debt rating remains Aaa…for now It was widely reported yesterday (Tuesday, September 11) that the United States is in danger of another credit downgrade, this time by Moodys. In its press release the credit rating agency said that it would likely downgrade the U.S. government’s debt rating from Aaa to Aa1 […]
It’s clear that cap rates for long-term, GSA-leased properties have fallen steadily since the end of the 2008 recession. Yet, we’ve been challenged to demonstrate that in a meaningful way. The problem is that merely reporting government-leased property sales doesn’t show much correlation between cap rates and the march of time. This is largely because […]
GSA’s lease selection process has made it a perpetual pioneer – pushing it to the fringe submarkets where office space is more generally available in abundant cheap supply. In the early 1990s the “fringe” was the East End, an area that thrives today but was once home to the city’s “red light” district. In the 2000s […]
The federal leased property inventory has been getting smaller since the end of 2012 and indications are that the trend will continue. One need only look at prospectus approvals to be certain of this because, while there are slightly more than 200 leases with annual rent large enough to exceed the prospectus threshold, those leases comprise about […]
Even as construction began on a long-awaited, 600,000 SF courthouse in Los Angeles this fall, efforts to downsize or close federal court facilities picked up in pace. Last week, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts…
The massive Building 10 sits in the center of NIH’s Bethesda campus. Which federal agency began in 1887 as the one-room “Laboratory of Hygiene” and has since grown to encompass 27 separate institutes and centers that occupy almost 16 million gross square feet of government-owned space and nearly 4 million rentable square feet of leased […]
Welcome to our third year tracking the largest property investors in the federal space. For those of you who have reviewed the 2013 and 2014 editions of our “top 10” list, you know that we limited those lists to owners of GSA-leased properties. While GSA is the primary lessee of space on behalf of federal […]
View Larger Map Barrow, Alaska proudly names itself “The Farthest North American City” so it’s no surprise that it would also be home to the northernmost federal lease. If you’ve ever visited Alaska you know that it’s lifeblood is a series of airports that connect cities throughout the state. Where there are commercial airports there […]
President Obama has said that immigration reform is the most important domestic policy agenda of his second term, and hope springs that Congress will pass legislation acceptable to both parties. But in the meantime, it’s worthwhile to consider the offices that support immigration policies in place today. A key agency within the Department of Justice […]
On Friday, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Acting Director, Jeffrey Zients, issued a memorandum effectively freezing the federal inventory of leased space. The memorandum entitled “Promoting Efficient Spending to Support Agency Operations” addressed a wide…
Photo: Carol M. Highsmith (Wikimedia Commons) As a candidate for the presidency, Donald Trump famously pledged to “drain the swamp” by, among other things, reducing the size of the federal government. This would be accomplished in part by workforce attrition and in part by relocating federal employees from the nation’s capital. It’s this latter method […]
