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Can LA Turn Empty Offices into Housing? You would think that with empty offices throughout the city (because of Covid), and California’s mounting housing crisis, we could adapt some of these office buildings into housing. You would think, right? After all, many Californians have been working from home throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and some companies plan to let their workers stay fully remote. So what happens to all those empty offices? With Los Angeles in the midst of a severe housing crisis, some clever investors see promise in turning dormant office buildings into apartments through “adaptive reuse.” Unfortunately, converting commercial spaces into housing is often easier said than done. And some naysayers say the potential gains may not be enough to significantly address the region’s housing needs. Still, L.A.’s track record shows the city already has a leg-up on other parts of California when it comes to transforming commercial properties into homes. And with so many office buildings facing an uncertain future, those conversions could become more common. In 1999, the L.A. City Council passed an ordinance to streamline adaptive reuse projects in distressed downtown buildings. By the 2000s, residents lured by new housing options, walkable neighborhoods, and proximity to transit started pouring back into L.A.’s urban core. A recent paper from UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation found that from 2014 to 2019, Los Angeles created 28,000 housing units on commercially-zoned land, far more than any other metro area in California. Earlier this year, the Central City Association (a downtown business advocacy group) released a paper estimating that by converting a mere 10% of L.A.’s existing office space into housing, the city could create about 16,000 new homes. The report said even more homes could result if conversions expand to under-used retail spaces, industrial properties, hotels and parking lots. So let’s get going! In March, the city council voted to begin exploring a plan that would expand L.A.'s 1999 adaptive reuse ordinance citywide. And those old office buildings in Downtown L.A. are great candidates for reuse, because they were built relatively narrow. Why narrow? Because they went up before air conditioning existed, so each room needed plenty of windows to bring in fresh air and natural light. As a result, they are ideal for conversion to living spaces. But after the rise of air conditioning, L.A.’s office buildings got fatter, with lots of windowless, climate-controlled interior space. So with those “fat” buildings the costs of those fixes can add up and may not make conversion viable. But with some creativity, many office buildings, strip malls, and even churches can be turned into housing (especially as demand for those spaces dries up).
L.A. Just Ended the Biggest Free-Transit Experiment in U.S. History. In March 2020, Los Angeles’ public-transit agency, Metro, stopped collecting fares on its buses as a COVID-19 safety precaution. For the next 22 months, Metro waived fares for anyone who wanted to keep riding its buses, anywhere they wanted to go (as long as they wore a mask, of course). And people did keep riding. Outside of the initial stay-at-home order in the spring of 2020, Metro’s ridership never dipped below 50 percent of before-times ridership, with buses eventually recovering to within 10 t 15 percent of pre-pandemic numbers. Metro estimates current ridership is averaging over 515,415 per day. But, in truth, Metro doesn’t know exactly how many people were riding fare-free buses during the pandemic (because fare collection is one of the ways to track ridership). A Metro spokesperson says that from April 2020 to December 2021, it’s safe to estimate Metro’s buses provided about 281 million fare-free boardings. This means the agency has inadvertently been conducting the biggest free-transit experiment in U.S. history. Unfortunately, fare collection restarted last week after two unprecedented years in which transit agencies learned a lot about how people moved (or didn’t) around our county, and now Metro is using some of this information to game out improvements and pilot other free and reduced-fare programs. The unofficial pilot program has helped Metro take some baby steps toward universal fare-less future for L.A., something advocates have demanded for decades. L.A.’s Metro is unique among large U.S. transit agencies in that its budget doesn’t rely on fares, which made the decision to temporarily waive fares a bit easier in the first place. For example, a ride costs only $1.75, and the total fares collected make up only 6 percent of total revenue — about a third of which goes right back into fare enforcement (although that doesn’t include contracts with law-enforcement agencies). Endowing Metro’s relatively comfortable financial situation is a local sales tax, Measure M, which was approved by voters in 2016 to generate $120 billion for the system over 40 years. So the heck with fares! But keeping buses free is good for other reasons as well. For example, ridership is overwhelmingly low-income, making $18,000 a year or less, for half of the riders on the buses. So free rides would help these workers the most. Plus, universal fare-less transit would also have an outsize climate impact. According to a Metro report that surveyed which regional transportation investments can most reduce vehicle miles traveled (a priority of the agency), waiving fares would result in both fewer miles driven on freeways and surface streets, and thus, fewer greenhouse-gas emissions, more than any other intervention (including congestion pricing or charging drivers a mileage-based fee). And that alone makes a very good case for keeping buses free.
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