Boeing decided to leave Chicago and relocate its corporate offices to Arlington, Virginia, in a clear sign of moving closer to the centers of political power in the United States. Arlington is located on the other side of the Potomac River from Washington D.C.
With the idea of reducing costs and idle office space, the manufacturer decided to leave the lavish building it occupies in Chicago, with 36 floors and an approximate value of 200 million dollars, at the same time as it has already disposed of infrastructure in Seattle, the company’s birthplace.
The decision causes controversy from a symbolic point of view, since at a time when the company is being strongly questioned for having moved away from its core business -the engineering of complex machinery-, moving closer to the U.S. political and state center reinforces the negative image that Boeing is trying to shake off.
The Chicago office has been a «ghost town» for quite some time now, as many executives are not using the building: partly because of the pandemic and partly because the focus of the business is elsewhere. Boeing’s CEO has settled for the time being in South Carolina to closely monitor the recovery of 787 production.
In a diametrically opposed way to that of its main rival Airbus, which left the Paris and Frankfurt offices to set up in Toulouse, its base production center.
In October last year, to a Reuters report, a company spokesman said that «Chicago is strategically important for Boeing in the United States and for its global operations».
Shortly thereafter, some of the executives based in Chicago began selling their properties in anticipation of leaving the headquarters.
