How abandoned office buildings in L.A. could be transformed into $1,000 a month studio apartments

[ResidentialBusiness]

Living in Los Angeles and paying $1,000 a month for rent seems like a fantasy for many cash-strapped tenants, or a rental figure from decades ago. But a new proposal from architecture and design firm Gensler and the Pew Charitable Trust underscores the idea that more affordable urban living can be found in old, vacant office buildings. 

The analysis, which was initiated and funded by Pew and nonprofit Arnold Ventures, looks at the potential of a new kind of building conversion in Houston and Los Angeles, two U.S cities where this type of conversion would currently be legal. 

The aim is to build a better version of single-room occupancy units, or SROs, that have private rooms, shared bathrooms, and partial kitchens. The low-cost, no-frills housing was prevalent during most of the 20th century as a kind of housing-of-last-resort. Once immensely common in cities, their reputation for seediness, deserved or not, led to zoning and policy shifts that made them functionally extinct. An estimated one million such units were closed in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Numerous studies have blamed their demise on the modern rise in homelessness. In recent years, as homelessness and affordability have become crises, there’s been a push to bring this concept back: since 2023, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii have all passed laws to re-legalize them.

Los Angeles floor plan. [Image: Gensler/The Pew Charitable Trusts]

“The U.S. is only about 50 years removed from having very little homelessness,” said Alex Horowitz, project director of the housing policy initiatives at Pew Charitable Trust and coauthor of the report. “As recently as the mid-’70s, there was very little homelessness nationally, and most evidence points to SROs as the primary driver.” 

Gensler’s vision would ring the outer layer of an office floor with small, studio-style rooms with microwaves and fridges, roughly the size of a modest hotel room. The plans call for 190-square-foot units in L.A., and up to 227-square-foot units in Houston, about half the size of a typical studio apartment. The center of each floor would contain shared living rooms, kitchen, and bathrooms. These layouts would be designed with private keycard entry by floor, and what designers call a more concerted focus on safety, privacy, and security.

Los Angeles unit sample [Image: Gensler/The Pew Charitable Trusts]

It offers a compelling blueprint for expanding the housing stock in a nation where office vacancy is above 20% in most cities—29% in LA and 32% in Houston—and homelessness nationwide just reached a record 770,000 people. Such conversions make sense for dozens of buildings, 88 in downtown Houston and 42 in L.A.’s central business district, according to the report. These upgrades can also be done with relatively little subsidized public funding, and could create low-cost units renting for roughly half the median rent in both cities: $700 in Houston and $1,000 in Los Angeles. The microunits could be built for $240,000 each in L.A., less than half what it costs to build a typical studio apartment. 

There’s currently a post-pandemic boom in office-to-residential conversations nationwide; new RentCafe research found 70,700 residential units will be created in 2025 alone by transforming offices left partially vacant and undervalued by remote work. Gensler has helped spearhead this push by developing an algorithm that can quickly figure out which offices made good conversion candidates. 

Houston floor plan [Image: Gensler/The Pew Charitable Trusts]

That’s a huge jump in activity, since developers completed just 23,100 in 2022. But despite the boom, these conversions still represent a fraction of the units needed to bridge the housing shortage, and such conversions still remain expensive, complicated, and financially infeasible for many offices. 

Gensler’s new research found that this SRO-style conversion opens up new opportunities. Traditional office-to-residential conversions, which create individual units with their own kitchens and bathrooms, require extensive plumbing and infrastructure work. This new proposal concentrates new plumbing and piping in the middle of each floor. In addition, standard conversions mean long, stretched out apartments with few windows and natural light. The SRO option contains big windows in each of the small studios (although no natural light in the shared spaces). 

Research conducted by Gensler and Pew last fall found this type of layout cuts conversion construction costs by up to 35%. Locating the right building, which the authors did using CoStar data, was a challenge, since it needed the right-size floor area and infrastructure, but just a single conversion could add 800-plus units; buildings of 20-plus floors can fit up to 60 units on each level. 

“Depending on the estimates you look at, just a few percentage points of the office stock could work for traditional office-to-residential conversions,” said Gensler principal and economist Wes Le Blanc. “But there’s a much larger percentage of highly vacant office stock that works in this case, and makes those unlivable floor plates in play in a way they weren’t before.”

Horowitz sees this type of housing filling a key gap in the market, giving single, working class renters, such as students, seniors, and immigrants, an option that won’t leave them cost-burdened. Approximately 40% of U.S. renter households consist of a single person, and these units could be perfect for people making $40,000 to $50,000 a year.

This housing strategy also offers ancillary benefits for cities. In downtown Los Angeles, for example, an area boasting 280,000 jobs, just 1% to 2% of residents who live downtown also work there. Providing more housing opportunities in that neighborhood could help lessen long commutes.

No developer has yet signed on to build such a project. Horowitz said he’s been getting positive responses from real estate groups, and Gensler and Pew presented these proposals to city officials in L.A. and Houston on January 31. They believe they can build momentum for conversions, and cheaper housing, soon. 

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