In case you haven’t been paying attention, which clearly you haven’t, the mayor has been lobbying the president to force suburban commuters to return to the office. And I live in northwest and your muthas house.

“Being a person who residents blame when they have to start commuting again — let alone being a blue-city Democrat who makes strange bedfellows with GOP ultras — is the sort of thing usually avoided by a pol skilled enough to win a landslide third term as mayor, as Bowser just did.

But the way the local government sees it, something has to give or else the city is in deep trouble.

There are days when downtowns in other American towns can almost look like they did before 2020. In the 9-to-5 core of Washington, though, there’s no mistaking the 2023 reality with the pre-Covid world. Streets are noticeably emptier and businesses scarcer. Crime has ticked up. The city’s remarkable quarter-century run of population growth and economic dynamism and robust tax revenues seems in danger.

Officials now privately worry about a return to the bad old days when the District, unable to pay its bills, was forced to throw itself on the mercy of Newt Gingrich’s Congress. And while some of the broad factors that caused the whipsaw change from municipal optimism to civic anxiety are beyond any local pol’s control, bringing Uncle Sam’s workers back is something denizens of D.C.’s government think mayoral cajoling might affect.

According to census data, Washington has the highest work-from-home rate in the country. Week-to-week numbers from the security firm Kastle Systems back this up: The company, whose key fobs are used in office buildings around the country (including the one that houses POLITICO), compiles real-time occupancy data based on card swipes in its 10 largest markets. D.C. is perennially dead last.

“It is a challenge to have a quarter of the economy sitting on the sidelines,” Falcicchio says. The total number of jobs has dropped significantly, notably in hospitality. “We think that’s because those jobs are really kind of indirect jobs that are somewhat dependent on the vibrancy that the federal government being in the office offers.”

“Or another way to look at it is Metro,” the regional transit system, he says. “It’s about a third of what it used to be.” When rider revenue plunges, the local jurisdictions have to make up for it out of their general funds — money that could otherwise go to schools or public safety. It’s a dangerous cycle for any municipality.

In the local nightmare scenario, a downtown that’s perpetually short of workers has disastrous knock-on effects: Taxes on retail sales and commercial real estate don’t come in, public services get cut back, transit gets slower, empty streets feel increasingly scary, and the capital regains its 1980s-era image as a place people flee.”