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Downtown L.A. Tower Slated for Office-to-Resi Conversion

Jamison Properties, a prolific converter of mid-sized, older office properties into apartment buildings in Los Angeles, is preparing to convert a 32-story office tower in downtown L.A. into 686 apartments.

The Los Angeles-based company, with a portfolio that includes 10 adaptive reuse developments in Southern California, says its plan to convert the L.A. Care tower at 1055 W. 7th Street will be a “game changer” because it will involve “very little structural retrofit.”

Jamison said the ability to convert the Care tower, built in 1987, without going through a full structural retrofit will reduce construction costs by about 10% and save a lot of time compared to the company’s previous conversions of mid-century office buildings, which required significant structural improvements to meet L.A.’s seismic codes, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Avoiding a full structural retrofit also enables the developer to leave rent-paying office tenants in place while empty floors are converted to apartments, instead of having to empty the whole building for a retrofit.

“You can skip a floor or go around them,” Garrett Lee, Jamison’s president, told the Times. “That really opens things up for converting 30-year-old buildings.”

Office towers like 1055 W. 7th Street are attractive conversion candidates because “the bones are so much better” than older buildings, Lee said, noting that the tower has floor-to-ceiling windows with panoramic views. Much of the mechanical, electrical and plumbing system in the Care tower can be reused “because it’s still very adequate to today’s standard,” he said.

Floor-by-floor, the building will get a complete makeover, with office fixtures removed and floors stripped down to concrete before being rebuilt as apartments.

Lee said Jamison is close to securing city approval for the conversion project and expects to begin work on it later this year. Jamison also has tentative plans for a residential conversion of another downtown L.A. office building, the World Trade Center at Figueroa and Third Streets, a 10-story building that opened in 1975.

Los Angeles is planning to modify its building code to expedite the permitting process for the conversion of office buildings constructed after 1975 into residential housing.

While it’s not certain how many downtown office towers are good candidates for apartment conversions, the combination of a housing crisis exacerbated by the L.A. wildfires and record-high availability of office space in downtown Los Angeles is expected to create momentum for large-scale adaptive reuse projects.

Downtown Los Angeles ended the fourth quarter with an overall office vacancy rate of 33.3%, according to CBRE’s latest market report. The overall availability rate in the 32M square foot downtown submarket ended the year at 36.8%.

Negative net absorption in downtown L.A. was minus 296K square feet in Q4, with total negative absorption of minus 1.5M square feet in 2024.

Reprinted with permission from the Monday, 27 January 2025 06:01:08 EST online edition of GlobeSt © 2025 ALM Media Properties, LLC. All rights reserved. Further duplication without permission is prohibited, contact 877-256-2472 or reprints@alm.com.