Feds To Vacate, Dispose Of Century-Old Office Building Overlooking Tidal Basin
A federal office building developed to house a World War I-era bond program has “outlived its useful life,” the federal government's real estate arm said, and it is slated for disposition.
The Liberty Loan Building at 401 14th St. SW, built in 1919 as a temporary wartime structure, is the only remaining building of that kind from World War I.
But over a century later, the 141K SF property is being prepared for disposal, with its federal tenant preparing to move, the General Services Administration announced Monday.
The Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which has been housed at the property from the start, is set to relocate downtown to the U.S. Mint Headquarters at 801 Ninth Street NW. The move is scheduled for spring of 2025. With the disposition, the federal government would be looking at saving around $15M in reinvestment costs, it said.
“Moving underutilized and underperforming assets out of the building portfolio allows us to tailor a smaller federal footprint with better buildings — modernized and optimized for federal agency missions,” Melanie Gilbert, the GSA's acting administrator and regional commissioner for the National Capital Region, said in a statement.
The property sits on a piece of prime real estate with views of D.C.’s iconic Tidal Basin and the memorials surrounding the water, which also serves as a top tourist destination for cherry blossom viewing in the springtime. Nearby, Portals I, a 536K SF office building, is slated to be converted into a 421-unit apartment building.
The Liberty Loan Building was renovated in the 1960s and 1980s. But the GSA's release said the building is no longer usable and selling the property would allow the community to "pursue meaningful, continued use of this high-profile real estate."
The federal government has been working to rightsize the federal footprint for over a decade, but the task became more of a dire focus after Covid led to massive changes in workforce habits.
The GSA has recently been slicing agencies’ leased footprints by 20% to 40% as leases come due, Bisnow reported this month, but there have been few dispositions of the largest federal properties in the nation’s capital.
Last year, the federal government unveiled a plan to dispose of 23 properties totaling 3.5M SF across 15 states and D.C. The two D.C. properties poised for disposition are the Department of Homeland Security's former headquarters near American University and the Webster School, a 12-room schoolhouse constructed in 1882 that has been vacant since the 1980s.
The GSA is also deciding on whether it will dispose of the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, with the agency set to relocate to a Greenbelt, Maryland.
Federal agencies use just 12% of their headquarters buildings, a study by the Public Buildings Reform Board, an independent body created by Congress, revealed last month. That board has recommended two rounds of disposals and is poised to release a third round by the end of the year.
Over the last few months, there have been a slew of new efforts across government branches focused on the issue.
In Congress, two bills passed the House last month aimed at speeding up rightsizing of the federal footprint. Meanwhile, in his 2025 budget proposal, President Joe Biden is asking for a new real estate optimization program to make better use of federal space and dispose of unnecessary federal facilities.
The GSA oversees 363M SF of federal office space, with about half of that leased and half owned. The agency says it has cut 14M SF in leases and disposed of nearly 12M SF since 2013.
CORRECTION, MAY 1, 5:40 P.M. ET: A previous version of this story misstated the status of the GSA’s plan around the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover Building. It has been updated.
