As the specter of half-empty office buildings looms and its shortage of housing that residents can afford persists, Los Angeles, like many cities, is hard at work on a possible two-birds-one-stone solution: adaptive reuse.

The city's planning department unveiled this week a draft of an updated ordinance that would apply citywide and make conversions of existing buildings into housing more attractive. Urbanize LA was the first to report the draft's release.

"Los Angeles needs more housing that Angelenos can afford," Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement. "Adaptive reuse development can help bring much needed housing online throughout the City."

The new draft ordinance aims to further incentivize converting commercial buildings to housing by establishing a by-right approval process for these reuse projects on buildings that are at least 15 years old, a change from current rules that only apply to buildings built before July 1974.

An adaptive reuse ordinance targeted at reuse of older buildings has been in effect in Downtown since 1999. The regulation, which allowed for the conversion of warehouses in the Arts District and office buildings dating back as far as 1900 in the Historic Core into lofts, is credited with changing Downtown's reputation as merely a 9-to-5 neighborhood. The ordinance resulted in the creation of more than 12,000 housing units in its first 15 years in effect, according to a release from the Department of City Planning.

A 2022 study by Rand Corp. suggested that conversions of obsolete and underused commercial structures including hotels and offices in LA could create between 72,000 and 113,000 units of housing, depending on unit size.