Siting of federal offices to prefer transit, mixed use, walkable areas

Seeking location efficiency

Jay Blazek Crossley, Nov 08, 11.

Following an executive order to reduce the federal government’s carbon footprint, the US General Services Administration’s Public Buildings Service is working to site federal building in locations that are transit accessible, mixed use, and walkable, according to DC Streetsblog:

Specifically, the measure calls on federal agencies to ensure “that planning for new Federal facilities or new leases includes consideration of sites that are pedestrian friendly, near existing employment centers, and accessible to public transit, and emphasizes existing central cities and, in rural communities, existing or planned town centers.”

Under Peck, the GSA looked at how space is utilized in white-collar office locations. They found that on any given day, about a third of the employees don’t report to work – they’re either traveling on business, on vacation, away at meetings, or home sick – and then another third are around but aren’t sitting at their desk at any given moment.

This inspired Peck and others at the Public Buildings Service to look into streamlining office space. “This is going to change the way we do real estate,” he speculated. After all, if at any given moment, two-thirds of an office’s employees are away from their desks, why provide so many desks? Smaller spaces can mean less sprawling office complexes and more accommodation of mixed uses.

In fact, Peck says, in the process of modernizing GSA’s headquarters, he “fought security people” and put retail on the bottom floor, instead of following standard federal-building protocol of surrounding the building with bollards and making it unfriendly to the public.