Silver Spring's Once-Vibrant Downtown Is Stuck In The Past

In late October, Denizens Brewing in Silver Spring poured its last beer of the night for the final time.

The suburban Maryland staple had served craft brews for a decade, but when its lease came due, founder Julie Verratti decided she wasn’t willing to commit to another 10 years.

She says her decision to close was fueled by uncertainty — about the neighborhood, about the economy and about consumer behavior. Her uncertainty is a symptom of a larger plague spreading across Silver Spring, where a once-vibrant downtown commercial district is now lined with vacant storefronts and half-empty office buildings. 

“There's nobody there,” Verratti said. “It's crazy.”

Silver Spring, a dense suburb abutting D.C.’s northern border, has around 6M SF of offices and 3M SF of retail space, but those sectors have been stuck in a downward spiral. With its office stock averaging 50 years old and featuring no new buildings in the last two decades, Silver Spring…

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The Power To Define Appraisal Rules For U.S. Real Estate Belongs To TAF. It’s Desperate Not To Lose It

Tucked away in a nondescript office building in downtown Washington, D.C., is a 13-person nonprofit that writes the rules for how trillions of dollars of residential and commercial real estate is valued in America.

The Appraisal Foundation, the governing body for appraisers across the U.S., has overseen the way property values are determined for more than 30 years. But in recent years it has come under heightened scrutiny about its influence and effectiveness, both from within the ranks of the appraisal industry and among the federal officials who monitor it.

Since 2020, TAF has been the subject of a federal fair housing probe, doubled its financial assets and sought to exert more control over — and extract more revenue from — appraisal certification materials, a Bisnow investigation found. 

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