Downtown offices are sitting empty. Here’s how San José is turning them into homes. At Tuesday’s City Council meeting, we’ll vote on whether to expand a program that’s working. Downtown office vacancies are high, and so is the demand for housing. We’re changing the rules to make it easier to convert empty commercial buildings into something our state desperately needs — more homes.  San José’s Downtown Residential Incentive Program has already delivered 1,226 homes across three projects: The Graduate, Miro, and The Fay. Now, we’re expanding that same incentive to office-to-housing conversions by removing the financial barriers that make these projects impossible to pencil — including development fees and inclusionary requirements for qualifying projects. One of the most exciting examples is the historic Bank of Italy building. If you’ve been Downtown recently, you may have noticed scaffolding going up. This 100-year-old building helps define our skyline, but for years, it sat empty. Now, it’s poised to become housing — bringing new life, new residents, and new activity to the heart of our city. And on Tuesday, we’ll vote to go further: increasing the program cap to 7,000 units, replacing rigid permit deadlines with a unit-based phasing approach that gives builders certainty, and creating a new “High Road” tier that rewards projects paying prevailing wages and supporting apprenticeship programs. This is how we fix downtown — by turning empty buildings into homes, bringing people back, and making San José safer, more vibrant, and more economically resilient. Check back tomorrow for the final post in the series — where I’ll break down changes to our Inclusionary Housing Ordinance and why getting this right is critical to building any housing at all.