As the state’s downtown areas emptied of workers during the pandemic, leaders to the north and south posed the idea of turning empty office space into desperately needed housing.
Now, a state lawmaker in San Francisco is introducing a bill that would make it faster and easier to convert office buildings into new apartments and condos — and provide money to jumpstart the process in California’s slowly recovering urban cores.
“It makes no sense for people to be paying exorbitant amounts in rent and struggling to find adequate housing to live in when we have all of these buildings sitting empty,” said Democratic Assemblymember Matt Haney, until recently a San Francisco supervisor.
Developers are often reticent to pursue such projects in large part because of high costs and the bureaucratic process of seeking approvals to change a property’s use from commercial to residential.
Alex Stettinski, chief executive of the San Jose Downtown Association, said more office-to-housing conversions could help cities revitalize downtowns from a 9-to-5 office hub into a more balanced mix of offices, housing, entertainment, retail and other amenities.
With the bill’s help, it’s not just downtowns that could see more office conversions. Property owners throughout the entire state would be able to take advantage of the proposed rules. That means even low-rise office buildings in suburban communities — places that have long resisted building more homes — could be more quickly converted into new housing.
The legislation would also prevent local officials from blocking an office-to-housing project so long as 10% of the units are affordable and they doesn’t exceed basic height and density limits. Such projects would also be exempt from the state’s strict environment review process, officials said.
Michael Lane, a state policy director with SPUR, an urban planning group that has helped make recommendations for the bill, acknowledged that redeveloping an office…
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