Onni’s Hollywood Offices to Partially Switch to Housing

Onni Group is tweaking its plans for an office development in Hollywood to include housing.

The Vancouver-based firm is looking to add a new 14-story building to the historic Howard Hughes Headquarters Building site at 7000 West Romaine Street, Urbanize Los Angeles reported. The new structure would feature 195,000 square feet of offices, 6,393 square feet of ground-floor retail and an 809-car garage next door.

Construction was set to begin as early as this year but the developer has yet to complete the entitlement process. City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez introduced a motion to begin a general plan amendment and zone change for the site that would allow high-rise housing units in at least a portion of the proposed office space.

It wouldn’t be Onni Group’s first rodeo trying to turn an office-dominant project into a partial residential development.

In April, the firm filed plans to build an all-residential tower complex in the Arts District in place of a project that previously included nearly 200,000 square feet of offices. In 2023, it sought a similar conversion in Glendale to turn a proposed hotel project into housing.

Elsewhere in downtown, Jamison Properties is preparing to begin the redevelopment of the nearly 610,000-square-foot L.A. Care building at 1055 West 7th Street into 691 luxury residences.

Onni Group’s new development comes as the Los Angeles office market faces an uphill battle toward recovery post-pandemic. Office vacancy in the Greater L.A. area ticked up to 24.4 percent last quarter, according to Colliers’ Q2 report.

Earlier this year, the Los Angeles City Council aimed to boost office-to-residential conversions in the city by overhauling zoning and adaptive reuse regulations and providing incentives for developers to create 43,000 new housing units.

Across the country, office-to-residential conversions have never been more popular. As of this year, there are nearly 71,000 units set to be redeveloped from offices, according to RentCafe. It’s a new record and represents a tripling of the number of units in the works three years ago. Office-to-residential plans nationwide make up 42 percent of future conversion projects, up from 38 percent last year.

— Chris Malone Méndez