Ellen Perrault
As California continues to grapple with its housing shortage and searches for ways to address the crisis, more and more cities and developers are looking beyond new construction to properties that already exist.
This shift is evident across the state. For example, California’s Homekey+ program has allocated $968.4 million to 54 projects and is expected to create more than 2,700 affordable homes, including the conversions of hotels, motels and other existing properties.
The California State Housing Plan (CSHP) notes on its website that the state’s housing crisis was half century in the making. Decades of underproduction —underscored by exclusionary policies—have left the current housing supply far behind need and housing costs are soaring.
“As a result, millions of Californians, who are disproportionately lower income and people of color, must make hard decisions about paying for housing at the expense of food, health care, child care, and transportation—one in three households in the state doesn’t earn enough money to meet their basic needs,” according to CSHP.
Thus, the current shift to repurposing. Vacant medical buildings and retail properties are being repurposed around the state in cities like Stockton and Santa Barbara. Today, even larger underused sites have now entered the housing debate, with advocates pushing for thousands of homes at the soon-to-close Santa Monica Airport, while others are eyeing golf course land in Los Angeles.
Such efforts are also underway in the inland region. In Riverside, for example, the city council gave final approval to its first Adaptive Reuse Ordinance, and is in the process of creating new zoning and building standards designed to make it easier to convert vacant offices, commercial buildings and other underused properties into housing.
In San Bernardino, the county is converting the former Days Inn in the city of San Bernardino into 50 permanent supportive housing units. In addition, county officials have separately proposed repurposing an existing 35,347-square-foot industrial warehouse into a regional navigation and interim housing center with 200 beds/units.
These efforts are underway as California communities are required to plan for approximately 2.5 million additional homes during the current housing cycle. This has certainly increased pressure to find new ways—and new places—to expand housing supplies in communities around the state.
Challenges inherent in the process
Repurposing existing properties for housing is not as easy as it sounds. It brings challenges that go far beyond zoning. This is because hotels, retail centers, medical buildings and other commercial properties were designed for different layouts, loads and occupancy demands, in addition to CEQA.
Importantly, because California is earthquake-prone, those structural considerations become even more important. As the USGS notes, a building’s ability to withstand shaking depends in part on its construction type and the building code in effect when it was built.
“Adaptive reuse is a powerful way to create housing, but developers cannot assume an eligible building is structurally ready for conversion,” stated Kyle Tourjé, Executive Vice President at Alpha Structural, Inc., a Southern California-based engineering and construction firm specializing in foundation repair, seismic retrofitting, hillside stabilization, and structural upgrades.
In an email to Black Voice News, Alpha Structural, Inc. emphasized how California needs to plan for nearly 2.5 million new homes by 2030. To date however, only five jurisdictions statewide are currently on track to meet their housing targets across all income levels. Two of the five cities are located in the inland region. They include Ontario and Fontana, in addition to Irvine, San Diego and Bakersfield.
The company further stressed that as the state falls behind on new construction, hotels, retail properties, medical buildings and other underused sites could play a growing role in expanding the state’s housing supply.