October 2026

What We Already Have

On counting what stands, before we decide what to tear down

From Ana

I was at a report launch this summer when a room full of housing researchers applauded a fact that, on its face, should have depressed everyone in it: the median home in Los Angeles County was built in 1966. I found myself sitting with Cameron Yap, Data and Systems Manager at USC's Neighborhood Data for Social Change, and instead of hearing that number as bad news, I heard it as the argument I've been making all year, just with real data behind it for once. The greenest building is the one already built, and it turns out it's often the most affordable one too.

What Cameron's team measured this year, in the State of Los Angeles County Housing and Neighborhoods report, SOLACHAN 2026, gives real numbers to something I've felt in every adaptive reuse deal I've worked: our region's oldest buildings aren't liabilities waiting to be cleared. They're the infrastructure of affordability we already paid to build.

Los Angeles has never cleanly measured naturally occurring affordable housing, or NOAH: older rental buildings that stay affordable simply because of their age and size, with no government subsidy attached. Here is what NDSC's team found this year:

• 809,000 NOAH units exist across the county, about three quarters of the multifamily rental stock in buildings of five units or more.
• Core NOAH, the most affordable tier, buildings built before 2000 with five to nineteen units, accounts on its own for nearly a quarter of the county's entire rental stock, exactly the kind of small, older, overlooked property that rarely gets a second look from anyone but a demolition permit.
• These buildings house a more diverse, more long tenured population than newer stock, and rent for several hundred dollars less than comparable post 2000 buildings.
• New housing in the City of Los Angeles now takes 19 months on average from permit to Certificate of Occupancy, the final sign off that lets people legally move in, nearly four times the national average. Multifamily buildings average 37 months, nearly three years, on paper, to legally open the door.
• Meanwhile, demolitions are climbing: California accounted for 13 percent of the nation's demolition permits in 2025, and roughly 14 percent of owner occupied properties in the county reported tearing down at least one unit.

When we lose a NOAH building, we are not just losing square footage. We are losing housing stability that no amount of new construction replaces quickly, or cheaply, especially not in a county this slow to build.

This is the case I keep making to Pasadena's City Council as the Climate Action Plan, or CAP, moves toward finalization: a carbon ledger that tracks what demolition costs us against what retrofit and reuse preserve isn't an abstraction, it's the difference between a three year permitting slog and a building that's already standing and already zoned.

A Case in Point

Parsons Tower

I've made this argument before to City Council using Parsons' Old Pasadena campus as the example, and honestly, it's the building I keep coming back to when people ask me what adaptive reuse actually looks like at scale. This summer it stopped being hypothetical. Here's where things stand:

• The 403,468 square foot tower at 100 West Walnut was built for Parsons in 1974 and served as their headquarters until 2019.
• Parsons' lease ran out June 30, 2026. Roughly two thirds of the building, 268,054 square feet, was already sitting vacant and marketed for sublease before that date even arrived, at rents as low as $1.50 a square foot.
• On the investment side, the 9.74 acre site is being pitched to buyers as a blank canvas, fully entitled for another 402,500 square feet of new office construction, with hotel, data center, lab, and residential all floated as possible future uses.

That's one way to read an aging, underused campus with 660 parking stalls and its own specific plan, a custom zoning designation written just for this site. I'd offer another. Parsons itself is 52, younger than the county's median home, and it already has entitlements and parking a from scratch project would spend years fighting for. Self storage and other dark space uses are still worth exploring for the tower's large floor plates. But given what this month's housing data shows about how badly this region needs supply, adaptive reuse into residential deserves a serious look too.

If the CAP is going to build a real carbon ledger, Parsons is the building to test it on. What would it actually cost, in embodied carbon, the emissions already locked into the materials and construction of a standing building, and in dollars, to reuse four existing structures instead of clearing the site for new ones? Nobody's answered that yet. The building is just sitting there, empty, waiting to find out which way this goes.

Civic Spotlight

Neighborhood Data for Social Change

USC's data engine for a county that has never had one

NDSC is a USC affiliated research group that has spent years building the public data infrastructure LA never had, a free, block level map of housing, health, and economic conditions across the county. Their SOLACHAN report is the closest thing this region has to an annual physical for its housing stock, and it is free to explore.

Thank you to Cameron Yap and the whole NDSC and USC Lusk Center for Real Estate team for the work behind these numbers, and for the conversation that started this piece.

Explore SOLACHAN 2026 →

On the Ground

The most affordable apartment in Los Angeles County is the one nobody tore down.

Pasadena's Adaptive Reuse Ordinance gave us the policy. The CAP is the chance to give it implementation muscle: a carbon ledger, a real deconstruction program, and labeling standards that hold our supply chain accountable. Parsons Tower's empty floors are sitting proof we're not short on buildings, just on the will to count what they're already worth. What we count, we can change.

Current Listings

For Lease in Southern California

The built environment is only as strong as the communities it serves.

For Lease · Pasadena 488 S. Fair Oaks Ave Steps from Huntington Health and the medical corridor, with strong daytime traffic across the San Gabriel Valley. View Listing →

For Lease · Los Angeles 3300 W. Washington Blvd Brand new West Adams development, 84 residential units and a single ground floor retail space, one retailer becomes the go to destination for the whole block. View Listing →

For Lease · Pasadena 232 N. Lake Ave Office space on Pasadena's most active commercial corridor, strong foot traffic and transit access. View Listing →

For Lease · Pasadena · New 16 N. Marengo Ave Suites 615 & 616, 336 to 399 SF at $3.50/SF/month full service. Sublease through July 2030. View Listing →

In Practice

The greenest building is the one already built.

My approach to commercial real estate is the same as my approach to everything else in this newsletter. Think long. Account for what you cannot immediately see. Value what compounds over time, relationships, locations, buildings, land, community. What I do not know, I will find out. What my clients need, I will work to understand before they have to ask twice.

If you are looking for space, representing a tenant, or simply want a broker who thinks about the built environment the way you do, I would love to connect.

I start with, "How can I help you?"

Get in Touch

Ana Soulriver

Senior Associate, NAI Capital Commercial

225 S. Lake Ave., Suite M270, Pasadena, CA 91101

asoulriver@naicapital.com | 626.399.5283 | Cal DRE #02042495

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