An obvious way to quickly add lots of housing to LA

Los Angeles is in the midst of an un-precedented housing shortage.

All over the city, there are vacant, obsolete commercial buildings.

City law prevents these buildings from being easily re-purposed for residential use, due mostly to parking and set-back requirements.

Yet the city waived these requirements for re-purposing of obsolete commercial buildings in specific Adaptive Reuse zones beginning in the mid-1990s. The result has been the creation of thousands of desperately residential units in, for example, downtown.

So… why aren’t we rolling the Adaptive Reuse zones out across the entire city?