St. Elizabeths Hospital, perhaps best known as the psychiatric facility in which the poet Ezra Pound was held for thirteen years after having been convicted of treason, and where would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley has been confined since June 1982, is choice real estate. Occupying more than 180 acres of federal property with a sweeping […]
Rep. Lou Barletta (R-Pa.) held his first hearing as chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure’s Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management yesterday (Wednesday, March 13). The hearing examined the proposal to…
In November 2013, I published a brief analysis looking at the cap rate trend for FBI field office sales tracked from the end of the Global Financial Collapse. FBI field offices are a good subject for this type of analysis because they are mostly build-to-suits, generally homogenous and there are enough sales of long-term (15+ year) leased […]
The Bannister Federal Complex, located at 1500 and 2000 E. Bannister Road in south Kansas City, Mo., 13 miles south of downtown, will be largely shut down within the next two years, according to a GSA…
With the recent surge in congressional activity towards infrastructure spending it is worth noting a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report released in June entitled Federal Investment, 1962 to 2018. That report provides a great overview of…
In written testimony on March 7th before the House, Dr. Dorothy Robyn, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, Installations and Environment, confirmed that DoD has embarked upon a formal initiative to review the Department’s anti-terrorism/force protection (ATFP)…
The hall was packed on Monday, August 26, to hear energy secretary Ernest Moniz deliver his first major policy address at Columbia University’s Center for Global Energy Policy. Just three months on the job, Secretary Moniz elaborated on President Obama’s Climate Action Plan in his remarks, emphasizing energy efficiency as the most cost effective approach toward reducing […]
“Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right, here I am, Stuck in the middle with you.” Once you get a song in your head it’s hard to get it back out. These Stealers Wheel lyrics certainly resonated when listening to the opening of today’s congressional mark-up hearing. Of course, we don’t really regard […]
The interagency Federal Real Property Council (FRPC) was created by provisions in Executive Order 13327, “Federal Real Property Asset Management,” which President George W. Bush signed on February 4, 2004. Executive Order 13327 states: “The policy of the United States is to promote efficient and economical use of America’s real property assets and to assure […]
Since 1990, the Government Accountability Office has been reporting on federal government operations that it identifies as “high risk” because of their greater vulnerabilities to fraud, waste and mismanagement; its biennial reports aim to help the federal government identify problems that keep it from operating economically, efficiently and effectively. “Managing Federal Real Property” was added […]
This chart of the Government Real Estate Index is provided courtesy of its creator, Dr. Dennis Eisen. At last week’s National Federal Development Association conference, Dr. Dennis Eisen presented his new Government Real Estate Index, which he bills as the “Dow Jones Index for Government Real Estate”. Dr. Eisen, one of the true students of […]
The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) leases private property at a cost of billions of dollars—$5.7 billion annually, to be precise, spread out over more than 8,000 leases. Every year, the agency claims, it saves taxpayers…
Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest On this Field of the Grounded Arms, Where foes no more molest, Nor sentry’s shot alarms! Ye have slept on the ground before, And started to your feet At the cannon’s sudden roar, Or the drum’s redoubling beat. But in this camp of Death No sound your slumber breaks; Here […]
A century and a half ago, after the Civil War had ended, the federal government began an ambitious program of building national hospitals for wounded veterans—a few at first, and then, as those veterans became elderly,…
