Finally, a smart solution for downtown L.A.’s empty skyscrapers

Los Angeles faces two land use crises. On one hand, L.A. is beset by a desperate housing shortage in the hundreds of thousands of units, borne mostly by beleaguered low-income and moderate-income Angelenos for whom renting and homeownership is increasingly out of reach.

Meanwhile, our downtown is afflicted by increasing emptiness, with 28% of office space sitting vacant due to pandemic-era changes in the structure of work, and flight to Culver City and Century City. Angelenos may want to come home to downtown, but too few want to work there.

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A second act for empty office space? How skyscrapers in downtown L.A. could ease the housing crisis

With downtown’s office rental market mired in high vacancies and falling values, stakeholders are clamoring for more city support to convert high-rises to housing that would help address the city’s persistent housing shortage.

Aug. 11, 2025

These twin challenges may dovetail, conveniently, into one solution: convert those empty towers into housing. Indeed, a recent report from BAE Urban Economics makes the case that vacant offices should be redeveloped to create a new generation of apartments and condos.

The conditions are particularly ripe for these in conversions in L.A. The city already has a nation-leading “adaptive reuse” ordinance that smooths the path for conversions like these, state and local leaders are eagerly reviewing other regulatory changes to further support these conversions, and a growing fiscal crisis could be ameliorated by breathing life into downtown.

Not so fast. While authors from Downtown Works LA — a nonprofit that aims to expand the city’s economic opportunities and “uplift its reputation as a dynamic, inclusive and welcoming urban center” — correctly point out the considerable fiscal benefits of stabilizing property values and bringing new foot traffic to the area, they don’t fully understand the cost. Without public subsidy, “conversion projects are largely financially infeasible,” the group concedes, calling for additional research into the size of subsidy needed.

It’s likely that a sizable share of the steep costs would come from the city and state to ultimately make these projects pencil, raising the question of whether they’re the best use of finite public funds. And in an odd twist, prices for the higher-end and luxury units that these conversions would most often produce have actually fallen by 15% downtown since the onset of the pandemic, undermining the private investment case as well.

There’s a better way, one that offers significantly greater bang for the city’s buck. According to a February report by the architecture firm Gensler and Pew Charitable Trusts, “co-living” conversions can outcompete apartments and condos by about a third of the cost per square foot while producing about three times as many units. These co-living spaces, sometimes referred to as “dorms for adults,” are made up of small studio apartments featuring single beds, desks and closets, with tenants sharing communal kitchens and bathrooms. That means they’re significantly more affordable to the renter. Under Pew’s design, dwellings would clock in at just $1,000 per month, putting them within reach for any Angeleno making at least $40,000 annually.

Under this plan, the public and private sector would split a more modest cost of about $225,000 per unit, a steal compared to the average affordable studio.

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These savings originate from some boring but fairly consistent facts about tall office buildings. The bathrooms and kitchens of these towers tend to be concentrated in the center of each floor; extending plumbing to the dozens of new bathrooms and kitchens needed across each floor of the building is increasingly expensive. Additionally, the depth of these buildings’ floor plates (in other words, the distance from the elevator to the window) makes them awkward to divvy up into apartments, further driving up costs. Co-living solves both problems, keeping plumbing in the middle of the floor and using deep floor plates to create common space.

These new homes would be small, with little to no frills. Each floor would be designed to host up to 48 beds, and each would include four kitchens, two central bathrooms with six toilets and four showers each, and two shared community rooms for lounging and entertainment. But they offer something precious: an affordable, private resting space in the heart of our city’s walkable, jobs-rich center. And the low sticker price even includes some amenities, like multiple laundry rooms on each floor, a gym, utilities and basic furnishings.

Especially for recent immigrants, college students or young grads, service workers, and those who have fallen on hard times — often, unfortunately, including veterans and seniors — these homes could be a valuable stepping stone or safety net. In fact, the eradication of such cheap and small options, starting in the 1970s, is speculated by experts to have contributed to the rise of modern homelessness.

To be sure, these types of conversion projects aren’t without challenges. Relative to the residential alternatives, they’re less tested and can be expensive to manage — developers prefer to take on lower-risk, cookie-cutter projects. Converting just a few floors thus might be a good start to prove the model. But leaders across the city should step in to help and broaden the horizons of our ambition; philanthropy, universities, nonprofits and city government can all help make these projects less risky, whether by facilitating property purchase, serving as anchor tenants or offering loan guarantees. Indeed, this could be a reenergizing moment for L.A.’s civic life in a painful and deflating year.

Of course, the tens of thousands of new homes that could be unlocked by this work, while life-changing for many of their tenants, will still be a drop in the bucket of what’s needed. Wonky reforms on whether city building codes still serve our needs must follow, as must difficult conversations around the strictness of L.A.’s residential zoning. But at the present juncture, downtown’s moment of land use crisis calls for a straightforward and potentially unifying answer: co-living over condos.

Joshua Seawell is the head of policy at the Inclusive Abundance Initiative and lives in Los Feliz.