Vacant Office Buildings Converted into Apartments While Sacramento Tries to Grab Palisades

While Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom continue their obsession with turning fire-ravaged Pacific Palisades into another taxpayer-funded affordable housing experiment, a far more practical solution is quietly gaining traction across the city. Developers are already beginning to convert a staggering 50 million square feet of vacant office space into thousands of much-needed apartments.

Los Angeles has enacted a new Citywide Adaptive Reuse Ordinance, a sweeping overhaul that dramatically expands where and how empty commercial buildings can be transformed into housing. The measure streamlines approvals, cuts through endless red tape, and bypasses lengthy public hearings and environmental reviews that have strangled development for years. And developers are not waiting around and looking a gift horse in the mouth. They have begun moving before LA politicians change their minds and reverse a rare good idea.

Jamison Properties is redesigning a modern office tower near downtown into nearly 700 apartments. Developer Garrett Lee, president of Jamison Designs, called the change “monumental for the city,” noting the streamlined process finally gives builders a clear path forward instead of years of uncertainty. In Sherman Oaks, IMT Residential is converting the iconic former Sunkist Growers headquarters — that brutalist inverted-pyramid eyesore visible from the 101 Freeway — into 95 apartments after post-pandemic office demand collapsed. Similar projects are now viable in Westwood, along Ventura Boulevard, South LA, and the Harbor area.

For once, the city of Los Angeles is merging market reality and need with common sense. During the height of the pandemic, people were forced to work from home. When things began to open back up, instead of paying exorbitant prices to rent office buildings, many companies have kept the work-from-home model. Now many of the downtown and mid-Wilshire office buildings remain vacant. Rather than let these buildings sit as expensive ghosts draining property values and city tax rolls, private developers are stepping in to repurpose existing structures into housing — no new concrete jungles required, no massive subsidies demanded, and no displacement of homeowners.

In comparison, the approach to rebuilding in Pacific Palisades reeks of idiocy and power-hunger. After the catastrophic 2025 Palisades Fire, Sacramento’s solution wasn’t to let property owners rebuild or encourage private investment. It was to push legislation (SB 549 and related efforts) allowing the government to buy up scorched lots at “fair market” prices for land banking and affordable housing development. Newsom tossed another $101 million at “accelerating” multifamily rental projects in the fire zones, with priority for low-income units. Residents rightly called it a land grab. The bill faced such fierce backlash it was shelved until later this year, but the appetite in Sacramento remains.

Think about the priorities here. California has billions in unfunded liabilities, a homelessness crisis that worsens yearly, and a housing shortage exacerbated by decades of restrictive zoning and sky-high construction costs. Yet instead of embracing proven, low-cost conversions of vacant offices that already have plumbing, electrical, and foundations in place, the same administration that botched the fire response now wants to spend public dollars acquiring prime coastal real estate that burned. This is land that private owners are perfectly qualified and, more importantly, willing to rebuild on themselves.

Converting empty high-rises costs a fraction of new construction and creates available much-needed housing faster. It revitalizes commercial corridors without displacing established neighborhoods. It requires no new taxes, no massive state bureaucracy, and no “resilient rebuilding authorities” picking winners and losers. Best of all, it’s driven by private capital responding to actual market demand for housing, not political mandates for “affordable” units that often cost taxpayers more in the long run.

The contrast could not be starker. One path respects property rights, leverages existing infrastructure, and actually adds supply without picking the pockets of working Californians. The other path treats fire victims as obstacles to a larger social-engineering agenda. Politicians are shamefully using tragedy as an excuse to expand government control over land use in one of the most desirable zip codes in America.

Los Angeles doesn’t need more top-down schemes from Bass and Newsom. It needs more adaptive reuse ordinances, fewer barriers for private developers, and leaders who understand that the fastest, cheapest way to create housing is to stop power-grabbing, micro-managing, and standing in the way of people who already know how to build it. The deserted office buildings are screaming opportunity, but Sacramento is screaming for more control. Californians, especially those still waiting to rebuild in Pacific Palisades, deserve better than another round of government land banking at their expense, and hopefully they will cast their vote for governor in November accordingly.