A new bill authored by Assemblyman Matt Haney would prevent cities from stalling or killing the conversion of empty office space into housing in an effort to utilize the state’s emptying downtowns.
Assembly Bill 1532 would categorize office conversion projects as “by right” developments, relaxing the permitting and review process for housing projects by preventing a city or county from requiring certain permits to convert a vacant office into housing.
The bill is partially spurred by the hundreds of empty offices in downtown San Francisco, which has seen one of the slowest pandemic recoveries in the country among major metro areas.
According to the commercial real estate firm CBRE, some 27 percent of San Francisco’s offices were vacant at the end of 2022.
“How people work was permanently changed by the pandemic and the downtowns that relied on commuters are starting to look like ghost towns,” said Haney, D-San Francisco. “Turning empty offices into housing is one of the only paths forward to saving our downtowns.”
In addition to preventing local governments from stalling office conversions via the permitting and review process, AB 1352 would also make office conversion projects allowed in any area of a city regardless of local zoning laws.
The bill requires that at least 10 percent of units in an office-to-housing conversion must be reserved for low- and moderate-income families.
AB 1352 would also create a grant program to partially subsidize office-to-housing conversion in an effort to further incentivize new projects.
“This bill stops the bureaucracy and will allow us to move fast to build desperately needed housing and bring life back to our downtowns,” Haney said.
State lawmakers have yet to refer AB 1352 to a committee in the Assembly. The bill will be eligible for a committee hearing as soon as March 20, its 31st day in print.
21 comments
How does one convert an office into housing? Do they all share the showerless bathrooms? You would have to gut the building, add plumbing, bathrooms, electrical, individual heating and cooling for each unit.
Are they expecting some kind of communal living space?
Maybe the cities should entice businesses to come back. Difficult to do if the cities are run by leftists who won’t do anything about crime.
Plus the fire sprinkler and alarm requirements are much stiffer for residential compared with commercial. I suspect the fire stairs and elevators also need to be re-done.
The only thing that makes sense is to bulldoze the building to the ground and then to rebuild to residential building codes. I suspect developers would be more interested in tearing down tilt-up slab style buildings rather than multi-story office buildings. Nearly all retail and industrial parks use tilt-up slab construction.
How do they do it? They get taxpayers to fund it all.
Remember, the California democrat politicians do whatever they want. They answer to no one, and work exclusively to promote their public image and to fatten their bank accounts.
Sounds great. City’s full of people and no businesses. What do they call that again?
A ghetto. My thoughts exactly.
In needle town across the bay, where do new residents of converted office space park their vehicles.
Turns out he thought about parking,
“(d) A local government shall not impose either of the following on an office conversion project:
(1) Any new parking requirements that were not imposed on the original office use.”
Now that should work . . . . . . righttttt. https://tinyurl.com/4pphw35d
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Another thought, there would not be a housing shortage IF foreign buyers were discouraged from buying properties as Canada has done.
https://tinyurl.com/5czyet3z
Also wouldn’t be a crisis if immigration laws were being enforced.
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Ah what the heck, CA tax payers don’t mind providing free benefits to those MILLIONS of non citizens. Right?
newsom and company are so good at it CA now has a deficit approaching $29 BILLION.
Once again, little g, you forget history:
January 3rd, 2011. From the Atlantic. I’d be happy to pull up other sources, but you will likely do what you always do, and take only the “convenient truth”
“A year after being sworn-in as California’s governor in 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s popularity was so great there was talk of a constitutional amendment so the GOP’s Austrian-born action hero could run for president. The movement failed, which might have been just as well; Schwarzenegger leaves office today with an approval rating of 22 percent and a state budget deficit of $28 billion”
S
@RUSS SAYIN: Do you know what a straw man is? Because you are really, really good at it.
This makes sense in principle. We have too much commercial zoned real estate and not enough residential. Make it easier to convert the former to the latter. But turning an office building into housing is not just a matter of slapping some walls and doors in. Plumbing, electrical, sound and heat insulation, individual HVAC; these things can’t be easily retrofitted, and will cost a lot of money to install into an existing, finished structure.
The bill’s author needs to be careful they don’t lower the permitting process so low that they end up erecting slum skyscrapers.
To tax paying citizens they are slum skyscrapers.
To Politicians, they are Transit Villages. However the term is a misnomer, as it suggests inhabitants will be people who actually have jobs and want to go to work. Practically speaking these will be the former: Slum Skyscrapers.
The winners will be the carpet companies. I hear all that freebasing really shortens the life of carpet. Somewhere in the murky waters of Gavin Newsom affiliates there are likely carpet contractors on his payroll.
Way to go C.A. Turn empty commercial buildings into low income and homeless apartments. We lost all the tax revenue those businesses paid to the state. What ever you do don’t try to get business to stay and contribute to the tax base. Just help the homeless come from far and wide to suck us try. Only in California, Time to leave.
Who needs walls, just bring your sleeping bags, shopping carts and you’re good to go. Most of these offices have bathrooms on every floor. Some even have cafes and a gym. And a great view to boot. Just kidding of course.
It would be cost prohibitive to convert an office building into residential living space.Especially
plumbing,electrical and HVAC. Doze it and start over.
Before the Wall came down in Germany, I lived in West Berlin. On occasion, I went to East Berlin. The public house was much like what CA is attempting to do to people.
The walls of the building had open holes so that people could see in from the street. There were 8 to 10 apartments in a common area. Each apartment held 4 to 10 people, with a sleeping room for four only. Everyone shared the main room which had tables, a shared stove, one TV, shared restrooms, and showers.
Generally a cramped and unhealthy environment.
That’s what CA wants to do to its citizens.
This guy is a piece of work
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Haney
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https://ballotpedia.org/Matt_Haney
Check out who his labor contributors are.
Campaign contributions are given for a reason,
who benefits from this bill ? ? ? ? ?
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Is it becoming clearer now ? ? ?
Good stuff
Working on a “national nonprofit designed to end mass incarceration”, whatever that is…
authored the nation’s first ‘Overpaid CEO Tax’
Haney supported opening a safe injection site in his district
Flip flopped on a couple apartment votes
Has a non-profit with his sister.
Politics is flooded with nimrods who have never held an actual paying job. They can only pay lip service to working Americans.
Well, I say to first try these ‘interesting’ ideas from liberal lawmakers in their own districts first. Dont push it on the entire state until it could be proved and that it worked in their areas. So let San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland be the petri dishes for these social experiments.
I’m still in shock from the one Oakland -Berkeley state Assembly woman who proposed to remove penalties for assault / robbery of another person as long as less than $950 was taken and ‘severe’ injury was not done to the victim. Every ATM location would be a bloodbath if that were passed. I’m very leery of anything these liberal left loonies propose
Does anyone happen to know if the office building on Sunset Boulevard in downtown Concord is currently being converted into residential units? The building sits on a triangular lot across the street from the AT&T building, it’s also bordered by East Street and Clayton Road. After it was first constructed 25-30 years ago it was the home of Giovanni’s Bar & Grill and had an outdoor waterfall that was later converted into planter boxes. This building has been undergoing construction for several months with windows being added on the upper floors.
I wish someone could update us on this building. It has turned into an eyesore.
I thought a key to success was creating jobs. Plenty of available commercial and office space leads to lowering of the rates landlords will charge which attracts businesses which hire people. Businesses pay sales tax which goes to the city. Walnut Creek is regarded as a successful city because it was attractive to businesses. The reason it was attractive was that it was at the intersection of two major “highways.” (the original nae of the settlement was “The Corners”) That lead to a train station and the walnut packing warehouses.
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