For General Manager Moses Lee, the Memorial Day rush at Le Pain Quotidien off 17th Street downtown was welcome. It was actually unusually busy, he said.<\/p>\n
Lee said the caf\u00e9 had steady business every day before 2020, with many federal and bank employees stopping for coffee and lunch.<\/p>\n
Since then, he\u2019s seen a dramatic shift.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith the pandemic over, we were expecting it to get better, but we\u2019re still struggling,\u201d Lee said. \u201cI don\u2019t see the sales that we used to have. People are working at home, the rent is still going up and while some of the places and businesses are still here, the people are not here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Federal and municipal leaders have pushed to end remote work for government employees in the District. In March, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser mandated that municipal employees<\/a> could only work remotely twice per week.<\/p>\n President Joe Biden last August urged his cabinet to \u201caggressively\u201d end remote work<\/a> for the city\u2019s about 160,000 federal employees. A study last fall found that over two-thirds of all federal employees were still opting to work remotely<\/a> some of the time, affecting real estate and restaurants<\/a> in the downtown D.C. area.<\/p>\n But Lee said the combination of fewer government and private sector workers \u2014 a third worked from home<\/a> in 2022 \u2014 has made the struggle worse. Nearly half of the city\u2019s workers are from private companies as of 2022.<\/p>\n \u201cTraffic may have picked up on the streets and on the Metro, but we haven\u2019t seen the bank employees return to these buildings around us,\u201d Lee said.<\/p>\n