examining strategies to reverse Los Angeles’s critical housing shortage found repurposing commercial buildings, such as hotels, motels and vacant offices, could greatly increase available units.
Researchers at the RAND Corporation, which published the report, said that such adaptive reuse could provide 9% to 14% of the housing L.A. County needs to build over the next eight years. Of the available options, hotels and motels would be the most feasible, said Jason Ward, the study's lead author and an economist at RAND, in a statement. Existing rooms could simply be converted into housing units.
The availability and usability of vacant office space, however, depends largely on local real estate prices and developers’s plans for the units.“The economics and logistics of such projects are complex,” said Ward. “Significant incentives for the conversion of these properties to both market-rate and affordable housing may be needed.”