Owners of the 24-story Landmark Square office tower in downtown Long Beach — long known as the Wells Fargo Building — plan to convert it into 391 apartments as part of a multi-million dollar renovation.
The 460,000-square-foot structure features a spine of floor-to-ceiling windows down the middle of the exterior, a nine-story underground parking deck and a grand granite entryway leading to the lobby at 111 W. Ocean Blvd.
The historic tower opened in 1990. It was sold in 2013 to Manulife Financial Corporation, and this fall, it was purchased for $50 million by the Shomof Group. Months later, the firm filed an application with the city planning bureau to allow the conversion into housing.
Designs are slated to go before the city Planning Commission either by the end of this summer or early fall.
City officials say the historic building will likely be a design challenge given its size and need for new electrical and plumbing lines throughout.
“It’s going from one water meter to hundreds of water meters,” said Community Development Director Christopher Koontz as an example.
Koontz said early designs required revisions to include large mail and storage rooms, considering people’s growing dependence on home-delivery goods like Amazon.
It also has tenants still renting office space there.
It’s the city’s fifth high-profile complex to see conversion from office spaces to housing, as part of a post-COVID trend, according to Koontz.
Previous projects include the six-story First National Bank building on Pine Avenue, the Security Pacific National Bank Building just across the street and the plan to convert Park Tower near Recreation Park into student housing.
The city’s downtown, Koontz said, clearly has more office space than what is needed, but the pace of conversions is likely to slow in the coming years.
“Because I think at some point we’ll have sucked up that extra capacity, and then we’ll be back into sort of an equilibrium,” he said.
About 93% of apartments in downtown Long Beach are occupied, according to a quarterly report published in December by the Downtown Long Beach Alliance. It’s tougher to find an open one here than in downtown Los Angeles, Culver City, Santa Monica and San Pedro, according to its findings.
A separate Alliance study found that nearly a quarter of downtown office space remains vacant, with more than 14% of the nearly 53,000 downtown employees working from home.
Downtown Long Beach has some of the lowest on-average rent for office space in Los Angeles County, with rates ($2.94 per square foot) lower than Santa Monica, Los Angeles, El Segundo and Torrance.
Of those who do go into the office, they average a 29-minute commute time and most likely work in real estate, health care, hotels and public administration.
Office spaces outside downtown, such as the Kilroy Aero Center near Long Beach Airport, are doing very well to fill space, Koontz said, explaining that trends move in different directions depending on where in Long Beach you’re looking.
“We built a lot of housing, but we still need a lot more,” Koontz said. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t also need places to work.”