Federal Buildings Board Calls For Disposing Of 7M SF Of Properties

The congressionally created entity tasked with recommending federal property disposals has unveiled the next round of buildings it says the government should get rid of.

The Public Buildings Reform Board is recommending that the government offload a dozen properties across eight states that it estimates would save $5.4B over 30 years and generate $346M in sale proceeds.

Though most of the buildings on the list have already been announced for sale by the General Services Administration, the PBRB’s recommended dispositions can be fast-tracked, if approved by the Trump administration.

“This is the fastest way to bring a property to disposal,” Dan Mathews, a PBRB member who served as the GSA's public buildings commissioner during President Donald Trump’s first term, said on a call with reporters Thursday.

“It jumps over all of those processes that are otherwise required, and it can go straight to sale,” he added.

The PBRB recommended 10 federally owned properties for disposition: 

• 4700 River Road in Riverdale, Maryland.
• Regional Office Building at 301 Seventh St. SW in Washington, D.C.
• James V. Forrestal Building at 1000 Independence Ave. SW in D.C.
• Wilbur J. Cohen Building at 330 Independence Ave. SW in D.C.
• Brickell Plaza at 900 Brickell Plaza in Miami.
• Capt. John F. Williams Coast Guard Building at 408 Atlantic Ave. in Boston.
• Estes Kefauver Federal Building at 801 Broadway in Nashville.
• La Branch Federal Building at 2320 La Branch St. in Houston.
• Peachtree Summit Federal Building at 401 W. Peachtree St. in Atlanta.
• William O. Lipinski Federal Building at 844 N. Rush St. in Chicago.

It also recommended that a trio of offices the federal government leases in Albuquerque, New Mexico, be consolidated into one space. 

On Thursday's call, members of the PBRB said they prioritized properties that have the highest deferred maintenance, are underutilized and are in strong real estate markets so they can achieve high values.

The most notable building on the list is the Department of Energy’s 1.7M SF Forrestal Building on Independence Avenue, which has long been eyed and studied for its redevelopment potential but never explicitly listed by the government. An Urban Land Institute panel studied the building and released a report on it Thursday outlining recommendations for redeveloping it to alternative uses. 

It is one of the list’s three properties in D.C.’s federal cluster south of the National Mall, an area that the board has previously signaled would be a priority for disposition due to its development potential. 

“The Forrestal Building is a building that's been of a key interest for the Washington, D.C., market for quite some time, of both congressional interest and from the local community,” Mathews said. “And I just can't overstate the significance that the Forrestal Building is on this list.” 

The low-rise, Brutalist-style building was constructed in the 1960s and spans nearly two full city blocks, covering the L’Enfant Plaza throughway that runs from the National Mall to the Southwest waterfront.

PBRB members indicated that they see the building as a necessary domino to fall to unlock the development potential of Southwest D.C.

Two other Southwest D.C. properties were on the list: the U.S. Agency for Global Media's 1.2M SF Wilbur J. Cohen Building on Independence Avenue and the GSA’s 845K SF Regional Office Building at Seventh and D streets southwest.

Congress had mandated that the GSA dispose of the Cohen Building in January, and it was added to the GSA’s accelerated disposition list last week. The Biden administration’s GSA in December announced it was slating the Regional Office Building for disposition.

Although not on the PBRB’s list, the GSA announced last month that it is planning to offload the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Southwest headquarters, the 1.1M SF Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, across from the Regional Office Building. 

Members of the PBRB said they had been in communication with officials from Mayor Muriel Bowser's administration, the National Capital Planning Commission and the Federal City Council.

“There seems to be a lot of interest, particularly in L’Enfant Plaza and some of the Southwest buildings,” said David Winstead, a Ballard Spahr attorney who serves on the PBRB.

The mayor said earlier this month that her 2026 budget proposal will include $1.5M to develop a master plan for Southwest D.C. Mathews said the mayor's proposal indicates her administration is “positioning themselves to take the most advantage of it.” 

Other properties on the PBRB’s list include the Williams Coast Guard Building on the Boston Harbor, Atlanta’s 1970s-era Peachtree Summit skyscraper, and Miami’s nine-story Brickell Plaza, all of which had been previously identified for disposition.

Mathews called the Boston property, a 160K SF warehouse that was built in 1918 and redeveloped into an office building in the 1990s, an “incredibly valuable location for the community.”

“It can be developed with private funds, which will generate tax revenue and be a great economic benefit to the city of Boston,” he said. 

The Office of Management and Budget would need to sign off on the list for it to be acted upon. PBRB members said the board had “tremendous cooperation with OMB” throughout the process and expressed optimism that the OMB would support the recommendations.  

After approval, the GSA would run the disposition process. 

Mathews said he believes the agency will be “pretty aggressive” in its efforts to widely market the properties and generate competition to elicit the highest values and ensure the properties can be put to their best use. 

To offload the properties, the board estimates the government would incur $459M in one-time expenditures to prepare them for disposal.

The PBRB was created through an act of Congress in 2016 to advise on how to shrink the federal government’s footprint, and it consists of six private sector executives. 

Thursday’s submission marks the board’s third round of recommendations. It plans to unveil one more round before it sunsets at the end of 2026.

Its first High Value Asset Report in 2020 recommended 12 properties for disposal. Ten of those have been sold for $193M. Its second round in 2021 recommended 15 dispositions worth $275M, but the OMB rejected it. 

As the board has been reviewing its third round over the past few months, the GSA has simultaneously been looking into disposition potential in its 180M SF owned portfolio.

In early March, the GSA released a list of 443 “non-core” properties spanning nearly 80M SF that it said it was considering for disposition. Less than 24 hours later, the list was removed from the site, and the GSA has since started adding a handful of properties on a weekly basis to a list of assets “identified for accelerated disposition.”

The PBRB's Thursday report identifies 58 other sites totaling 25.9M SF that it says it is investigating for its next round. It names nine others in D.C. totaling 11.5M SF, including the GSA building at 1800 F St. NW, the Department of Agriculture's South Building, the FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue, and the Federal Aviation Administration's Orville Wright Federal Building at 800 Independence Ave. SW.