LOS ANGELES — Two aging office buildings on Hollywood Boulevard could be converted into apartments under an ordinance that cleared a City Council committee on Tuesday.
The measure updates the city’s adaptive-reuse rules, first written in 1999, to cover newer buildings and to smooth the path for turning half-empty offices into housing. It advances to the full council next month.
City planners named two Boulevard properties as early candidates, though neither owner has filed to convert: a twelve-story 1962 office tower near Hollywood and Vine, roughly half vacant since its anchor tenant left, and a smaller 1928 building near Wilcox that has sat mostly empty above its ground-floor retail for years.
“The bones are already there — the location, the transit, the structure,” said Devon Marchetti, a city planner who worked on the rewrite. “What’s there now is offices nobody’s renting. What we need is housing. The ordinance is about removing the reasons it’s currently easier to leave a building empty than to fix it.”
The updated rules would let qualifying conversions skip some of the review and parking requirements that apply to new construction, and would extend eligibility to buildings finished as recently as 1990.
Citywide, office vacancy has hovered near a quarter since the shift to remote work, and the Boulevard’s older stock has fared worse than the towers downtown. The two named buildings have carried their “For Lease” banners long enough that neighbors treat them as fixtures.
Housing advocates welcomed the measure while cautioning that eligibility is not the same as apartments. “An ordinance doesn’t pour a single foundation,” said Renata Bassey of a tenants’ coalition that testified in support. “It just stops the city from being the reason nothing happens. Whether these become homes people can afford is the next fight, and a harder one.”
Developers were supportive and wary in the same breath. Office towers are often the wrong shape for housing: floor plates too deep for windows to reach the middle, plumbing designed for a few restrooms per floor rather than a bathroom in every unit. Those are expensive problems.
“On paper it pencils. In the field, that 1962 tower is a hundred feet deep, and every unit needs light and a stack of pipe that doesn’t exist yet,” said Aaron Prewitt, a developer who has looked at two Boulevard buildings and passed on both. “Change the rules and I’ll run the numbers again. But the rules were never the only thing standing in the way. The plumbing doesn’t care what the council votes.”