Hilton Hotels Corporation relocation to the Washington "region"

Hilton is looking at headquarters sites in suburban Maryland and Northern Virginia. (By Reed Saxon -- Associated Press)

Will asks "why not DC," in response to the article "Hilton to Move Headquarters to D.C. Area: Region Will Gain Hundreds of Jobs, Be Home to 3 of Top 6 Hotel Firms" in the Washington Post, which says that Hilton is considering relocating to suburban Maryland or Virginia.

I thought they probably needed tons of space, like a corporate campus on the scale of Marriott, but according to this article "Hilton Hotels to leave Beverly Hills headquarters," from today's Los Angeles Times, we are talking about 500 employees. And they plan to downsize a bit from that anyway.

Using the standard metric of 200 s.f./employee, this amount of space Hilton requires is relatively miniscule--one office building, and they could be easily accommodated in some of the empty buildings in NoMa (there are two separate buildings on 1st St. NE that have close to this amount of space). (Although companies tend to like campuses where they have room to grow.) Or attracting Hilton could be a way to jump start dead-in-the-water projects such as at the Armed Forces Retirement Home.

(Although for one, I can see the Potomac Yards or space in Crystal City in Arlington or other areas in Alexandria being tough competitors.)

The kind of people likely to work for a company like Hilton may well be interested in living in the city rather than the suburbs, and a location at NoMA, convenient to the subway at New York Avenue and Union Stations, as well as to commuter railroad service, would be useful in any case from a transportation demand management perspective.

The city as well as the DC Economic Partnership and the NoMA Business Improvement District should get on top of this forthwith.

ESPECIALLY BECAUSE COMPANIES BASED IN DC PAY INCOME TAXES IN DC.