Dive summary:

• The traditional thinking is, when all else fails, depend on the government to keep on going – at least as far as keeping on workers who will want apartments.
• That philosophy turned several developers' focus on the District of Columbia when markets stalled during the recession, which meant work for contractors to build the more than 15,000 apartments expected to hit the market this year.
• It's not clear what the $85 billion sequester program will do to the capital's workforce, but developers are easing off the growth throttle and rent numbers are no longer climbing as they have in recent years.

From the article:

Federal spending accounts for about one-fifth of the economic output of the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia, according to the Pew Center on the States, a nonpartisan research group. ...