Los Angeles Enacts Commercial-to-Housing Conversion Law

Housing production in Los Angeles is poised to pick up even more as a new adaptive reuse law goes into effect this month.

The Citywide Adaptive Reuse Ordinance makes it easier for developers to convert vacant commercial buildings into residences by streamlining approvals and increasing the number of properties eligible for conversion, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Last month, the Los Angeles City Council voted in favor of the Citywide Adaptive Reuse Ordinance, which repeals Los Angeles’ existing Adaptive Reuse Incentive Areas Specific Plan, which limited conversions to certain parts of the city including downtown, Chinatown, Hollywood and Koreatown. With the new law, all commercial buildings within Los Angeles city limits can be considered for adaptive reuse.

The new regulations also lower the age of the buildings that can be considered for adaptive reuse to structures that are at least 15 years old, down from only allowing conversion at buildings built before 1975. Under the new law, more projects will also be able to receive approval by right, meaning they will be automatically approved if they comply with existing zoning, building codes and land-use regulations.

Jamison Properties’s president, Garrett Lee, is leading the way. The Koreatown-based firm is behind the three largest office-to-residential projects in the city to date.

“This is monumental for the city,” Lee told the Times of the new ordinance.

Thousands of underutilized commercial structures across the city could be unlocked for housing, Ken Bernstein, a principal city planner in the Los Angeles Department of City Planning, told the Times.

By streamlining conversion approvals for projects that meet city guidelines, developers won’t have to estimate how long before they can start construction. “When you take that risk off the table, it materially improves the feasibility of conversions,” Lee said. “It addresses both the housing shortage and the long-term office vacancy issue.”

There is more than 50 million square feet of vacant office space in Los Angeles, according to the Times. The city ranks second nationwide in adaptive reuse projects with 5,640 apartments in the works, following Manhattan, which has 11,000 such units. In Los Angeles, office-to-residential projects specifically make up a total of 2,843 apartments, or about 50 percent of the city’s adaptive reuse housing pipeline.

— Chris Malone Méndez