The cranes are back in Washington. Are the jobs?
Matt McClain/ The Washington Post - Bernardo Tapia Garcia guides a steal beam at the massive CityCentreDC project, where work began in March.
By Jonathan O'Connell
May 8, 2011
Washington Post
"You could be driving down Reston Parkway in Fairfax County, along Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue Southeast in Anacostia or on K Street downtown, and you would get a glimpse of the same thing out your window, what is jokingly referred to as the official bird of commercial real estate.
The cranes. They’re back.
It isn’t just in one neighborhood or another. Developers are shelling out to build apartments in transit-accessible neighborhoods with gusto, and in the toniest areas a few have financed condominium construction. Others are lucky to be providing space for government agencies. The cranes never really left NoMa, the neighborhood behind Union Station, where construction workers are assembling the very structure that many thought wouldn’t be back so soon: a speculative office building — meaning one built without leases in place — by StonebridgeCarras and Walton Street Capital.
Does having more cranes in the air mean the Washington area’s building industries — the construction, landscape and engineering firms that employ thousands of people — are back from the abyss? It’s encouraging to see dump trucks rumbling down the street, but it’s hard to tell if they indicate a real improvement in business for the area’s top companies, many of which shed hundreds of jobs in the recession. ..."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...sRG_story.html