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Posted Sep 14, 2022, 4:17 PM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 6,461
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I recall several yrs ago reading an article about dtla by a british writer....I think it was in the guardian newspaper. She described how streets like broadway had a variety of classic beaux arts bldgs that had become largely abandoned & rundown. Her readers in the UK would learn that & get a negative impression of LA....not to mention all the publicity through the yrs about dt's skid row.  That's why the restoration of bldgs like the Meritt is not coming a second too soon.
although dtla in 2022 is coming closer to punching at LA's weight class, things like Covid have slowed down the pace. But if city hall & devlprs can learn to work together...instead of being at each other's throats, no thanks to nimbys...that will help. Right now, local govnt is wobbling in at least keeping things clean & safe.  The way city hall is managed over the next 5 to 10 yrs can either help or hurt dtla.
Quote:
Jaime Lee, left, chief executive of Jamison Realty Inc., and her brother Garrett Lee, president of Jamison Properties, are reflected in the facade of the Crosby apartments in L.A.'s Koreatown
neighborhood. A growing number of Los Angeles-area office buildings are being converted to residential use as demand for offices stalls. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
The former Texaco high-rise is part of a national push to convert aging office buildings to residential use as demand for housing surpasses the need for offices in many locations. Turning old office buildings into apartments or condos is hardly new, but expected cutbacks in office rentals as companies’ permanently adapt to remote work prompted by the pandemic have spurred new interest among landlords in switching the uses of their buildings in the years ahead.
Think tank Rand Corp. identified in a March study 2,300 underutilized office and hotel properties in Los Angeles County that could be converted to housing. Most of them are older office buildings with big chunks of unrented space. If all the underused buildings were converted to housing it would add as many as 113,000 units, Rand said, about 9% to 14% of the housing Los Angeles County needs to produce over the next eight years to meet demand.
Some neighborhoods such as downtown L.A. and Koreatown, where the Crosby stands, have concentrations of tall, aging office towers suitable for housing but many other candidates are less obvious, architect Karin Liljegren said.
Among those who’ve taken on conversions at a large scale are Jaime and Garrett Lee, two leaders of the Jamison real estate empire founded by their father, David Lee. The elder Lee is an internist and immigrant from South Korea who bought up struggling office high-rises in Koreatown after the 1992 Los Angeles civil uprising depressed their values. He went on to acquire many other large commercial buildings in the Los Angeles area and became one of the region’s largest commercial landlords, later expanding into developing new residential projects including the luxury Circa apartments downtown and Kurve on Wilshire near Koreatown.
It was, however, also designed by Welton Becket and located across the boulevard from the Art Deco landmark Bullocks Wilshire department store building now occupied by Southwestern Law School. Jamison turned the former Borax building into 127 apartments. “Much to our surprise,” Jaime Lee said, “we leased them all in three months.”.
So far, Jamison has converted seven office buildings to residential use with a combined total of more than 1,200 units, nearly all of which are leased. More makeovers are in the works. “We’re maybe halfway through” converting adaptable Jamison buildings, Jaime Lee said.
Liljegren, founder of architecture firm Omgivning, is more skeptical about office landlords’ prospects as businesses adapt to remote work. “Vacancy is only going up,” she said. “We’re just beginning to see it.”
Converting an existing building to a new use is more environmentally sustainable than building a new one, but the price of acquiring office buildings can be a barrier to conversion, Rand said. In neighborhoods with high property values such as West Los Angeles, it’s difficult for housing developers to afford to buy an office building, pay to convert it to housing and then collect high enough rents to turn a profit.
Downtown Los Angeles, the city’s oldest office market, presents more opportunities. Nearly a third of the 37,000 new housing units created since downtown’s residential renaissance kicked off in 2000 were created through adaptive reuse of mostly old office buildings. “Adaptive reuse reshaped downtown,” said Nick Griffin, executive director of the Los Angeles Downtown Center Business Improvement District.
The arrival of thousands of residents changed the character of downtown L.A., which existed in the latter 20th century primarily as a 9-to-5 office district with scarce nightlife, few noteworthy restaurants and no grocery stores. Since the pandemic began, downtown’s population dynamic has shifted again. Occupancy in downtown’s residential buildings has held steady and even grown as new units came to market, but the big office towers built to serve white-collar businesses have remained stubbornly underpopulated.
The disappearance of hundreds of thousands of daily office workers has been a blow to restaurants and other businesses that cater to them. Average Los Angeles office population is hovering at about 43% of what it was before COVID-19, according to Kastle Systems, which provides key-card entry systems used by many companies and tracks patterns of workers’ card swipes.
If more office buildings are converted to residential use, it wouldn’t be a bad thing for downtown, Griffin said. A higher ratio of residents and the activity they bring could make remaining offices more desirable if downtown’s financial core comes to feel more like a neighborhood with energy and active street life.
Even though thousands of apartments have been added in recent years, downtown’s units are consistently about 95% occupied and many more can be added without oversaturating the market, he said. The Los Angeles area is “vastly undersupplied” with housing, he said, and there are few areas outside of downtown where developers can build on a large scale.
“That dynamic is not shifting anytime soon,” he said. “It would be hard to overbuild downtown given those factors.”
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