Mayor Bass: Adaptive Reuse Key to Revitalizing Downtown LA

Along with crime and homelessness, the challenge of affordability—both in rents and in development—was a key issue for Los Angeles when Mayor Karen Bass was running for election three-and-a-half ago. “Everybody told me when I was running that you can’t get anything built here; people prefer to build in another city,” Bass recalled in a one-on-one interview with CBRE’s Lew Horne at Connect CRE Los Angeles 2026. “And so I really tackled that immediately as well, because it’s all interconnected.”  

The result has been an uptick in affordable supply. Bass cited a pipeline of 42,000 units fast-tracked through ED1, 6,000 of which are currently under construction. The mayor has also made adaptive reuse a citywide program, rather than an option limited to just one part of town. 

Driving through Koreatown, Bass said, “You might not know this, but those office towers are now turning into housing. You can’t really tell that from the outside. But we were told a couple of years ago, ‘you can’t do that. It’s too difficult to change from an office space to a housing.’ But a couple of developers have figured out the magic and are making it happen. And I think that’s going to be one of the real keys to revitalizing downtown.” 

Horne, who serves as president, Greater LA, OC and Inland Empire at CBRE, concurred that the city faced “overlapping crises” as Bass was campaigning. Asked what needed to change at City Hall to gain traction on these issues, Bass responded that “tackling the culture” was key, and that entailed “really having to be disruptive, up to and including a lot of leadership and changes at the general manager level.” 

With all the progress the Bass administration has made, “we have much more that we need to do because I really want to reorganize,” said Bass. “I mean, we have 12 different city departments. And anybody that’s built [in LA], and I know there’s plenty of you here, you go to one department, they tell you one thing, another department tells you something else, then you get toward the end and [the Department of Water and Power] stops everything. All of that has to change. And it needs to be centralized.”