Residing in Los Angeles and paying $1,000 a month for hire looks as if a fantasy for a lot of cash-strapped tenants, or a rental determine from a long time in the past. However a brand new proposal from structure and design agency Gensler and the Pew Charitable Trusts underscores the concept extra inexpensive city residing could be present in previous, vacant workplace buildings.
The analysis, which was initiated and funded by Pew and nonprofit Arnold Ventures, seems on the potential of a brand new form of constructing conversion in Houston and Los Angeles, two U.S cities the place the sort of conversion would at present be authorized.
The intention is to construct a greater model of single-room occupancy items, or SROs, which have personal rooms, shared loos, and partial kitchens. The low-cost, no-frills housing was prevalent throughout a lot of the twentieth century as a form of housing-of-last-resort. As soon as immensely frequent in cities, their fame for seediness, deserved or not, led to zoning and coverage shifts that made them functionally extinct. An estimated one million such units were closed in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Quite a few studies have blamed their demise on the fashionable rise in homelessness. In recent times, as homelessness and affordability have change into crises, there’s been a push to deliver this idea again: since 2023, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii have all handed legal guidelines to re-legalize them.

“The U.S. is just about 50 years faraway from having little or no homelessness,” mentioned Alex Horowitz, challenge director of the housing coverage initiatives at Pew Charitable Belief and coauthor of the report. “As not too long ago because the mid-’70s, there was little or no homelessness nationally, and most proof factors to SROs as the first driver.”
Gensler’s imaginative and prescient would ring the outer layer of an workplace ground with small, studio-style rooms with microwaves and fridges, roughly the dimensions of a modest lodge room. The plans name for 190-square-foot items in L.A., and as much as 227-square-foot items in Houston, about half the dimensions of a typical studio residence. The middle of every ground would include shared residing rooms, kitchen, and loos. These layouts could be designed with personal keycard entry by ground, and what designers name a extra concerted concentrate on security, privateness, and safety.

It presents a compelling blueprint for increasing the housing inventory in a nation the place 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 enterprise district, in accordance with the report. These upgrades will also be accomplished with comparatively little sponsored public funding, and will create low-cost items renting for roughly half the median hire in each cities: $700 in Houston and $1,000 in Los Angeles. The microunits could possibly be constructed for $240,000 every in L.A., lower than half what it prices to construct a typical studio residence.
There’s at present a post-pandemic growth in office-to-residential conversations nationwide; new RentCafe research discovered 70,700 residential items might be created in 2025 alone by reworking workplaces left partially vacant and undervalued by distant work. Gensler has helped spearhead this push by developing an algorithm that may shortly work out which workplaces made good conversion candidates.

That’s an enormous bounce in exercise, since builders accomplished simply 23,100 in 2022. However regardless of the growth, these conversions nonetheless signify a fraction of the items wanted to bridge the housing scarcity, and such conversions nonetheless stay costly, difficult, and financially infeasible for a lot of workplaces.
Gensler’s new analysis discovered that this SRO-style conversion opens up new alternatives. Conventional office-to-residential conversions, which create particular person items with their very own kitchens and loos, require intensive plumbing and infrastructure work. This new proposal concentrates new plumbing and piping in the course of every ground. As well as, normal conversions imply lengthy, stretched out residences with few home windows and pure gentle. The SRO possibility incorporates large home windows in every of the small studios (though no pure gentle within the shared areas).
Analysis carried out by Gensler and Pew final fall discovered the sort of structure cuts conversion construction costs by up to 35%. Finding the correct constructing, which the authors did utilizing CoStar knowledge, was a problem, because it wanted the right-size ground space and infrastructure, however only a single conversion might add 800-plus items; buildings of 20-plus flooring can match as much as 60 items on every stage.
“Relying on the estimates you have a look at, only a few share factors of the workplace inventory might work for conventional office-to-residential conversions,” mentioned Gensler principal and economist Wes LeBlanc. “However there’s a a lot bigger share of extremely vacant workplace inventory that works on this case, and makes these unlivable ground plates in play in a method they weren’t earlier than.”
Horowitz sees the sort of housing filling a key hole available in the market, giving single, working class renters, equivalent to college students, seniors, and immigrants, an possibility that gained’t go away them cost-burdened. Roughly 40% of U.S. renter households include a single particular person, and these items could possibly be good for individuals making $40,000 to $50,000 a 12 months.
This housing technique additionally presents ancillary advantages for cities. In downtown Los Angeles, for instance, an space boasting 280,000 jobs, simply 1% to 2% of residents who dwell downtown additionally work there. Offering extra housing alternatives in that neighborhood might assist reduce lengthy commutes.
No developer has but signed on to construct such a challenge. Horowitz mentioned he’s been getting optimistic responses from actual property teams, and Gensler and Pew introduced these proposals to metropolis officers in L.A. and Houston on January 31. They imagine they’ll construct momentum for conversions, and cheaper housing, quickly.
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