Agency / Organization:
City of Los Angeles, Planning Department

Status:
Complete

Intent:
Los Angeles’ original adaptive reuse ordinance, implemented in 1999 was highly successful creating 12,000 dwelling units, mostly in the first 10 years. Omgivning’s founder, Karin Liljegren led the first batch of these, converting 12 high rises to housing while employed at KFA. As Los Angeles began to rewrite their municipal code, they decided to start with Downtown and as a part of the new code, they would rewrite the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance. In addition the Regional Needs Housing Allocation (RHNA) provided encouragement to find new housing policy and the City of LA decided to craft a new ordinance that would span the entirety of the City of Los Angeles.

Omgivning worked with Los Angeles City Planning, AIA, Central City Association (CCA) and Los Angeles Office of Historic Resources on how to update and expand the current Adaptive Reuse Ordinance to be citywide. Omgivning applied the Planning Department’s Adaptive Reuse incentives to many case study buildings to understand the impacts of the code and if the incentives were adequate or needed to be enhanced. They also provided additional recommendations, created comparison data to the current Adaptive Reuse Ordinance code, and disseminated the information to leading advocacy groups, building owners and brokers.

Here's the current draft, set to be implemented in 2025: https://planning.lacity.gov/odocument/6725f347-7fdb-42fa-aa6e-44c37f8fa999/Fact_Sheet_-_Adaptive_Reuse_Ordinance.pdf