Disused office properties on Garden Road are finally turning into something useful: homes.

On a recent morning, the whirs of construction carry through the air at 2300 Garden Road in Monterey, and Brad Slama, a developer, leads the way through a massive former office building that he’s converting into 64 apartments.

It’s the type of building that’s become a dinosaur in this digital age, and Garden Road is full of them. Slama currently has three active projects to turn offices into housing on the road, and a fourth in the pipeline, if things work out.

As he walks through the site, he draws attention to a quirky feature. In office buildings, there’s dead space in the middle, and apartments need to have windows to the outside. That means creating units within these bones can be complicated. In this case, Slama has decided to create a community room for the residents, and in another dead space, a laundry room.

All throughout the building, walls have been knocked out and pillars of fresh 2-by-4s reveal its future layout, rectangular units that Slama thinks will hit the market in the $1,700-$2,400 per month range.

As a developer, Slama has to respect his bottom line, but he also seems genuine in his desire to mitigate the housing crisis. “We’ve got to find a way to build more,” he says.

His Garden Road projects are a way to do that, and unlike so much development on the Monterey Peninsula, they’re not facing heated opposition. Notably, 13 of the units – 20 percent – will be deed-restricted for low income residents.

Slama is also working on a development that would combine both 2560 and 2600 Garden Road by demolishing the structures and building anew, and another at 2000 Garden Road on a site that’s already been cleared of trees.

Kim Cole, Monterey’s community development director, credits Slama with helping to change the city’s zoning overlay so as to allow multifamily development on the road.

“He saw that development opportunity, he approached the city, and in response we changed a lot of the codes,” Cole says.

It’s a win-win for the city, which is compelled to meet the state’s regional housing allocation requirements to zone for at least 3,600 more housing units by 2031. Elected officials in many cities statewide have bristled at those requirements, but Monterey officials and residents have largely been receptive, recognizing that the hospitality workforce that fuels its economy could benefit from a home closer to work.

The City of Monterey tried to give Slama water credits to upsize his plans at 2600 and 2000 Garden Road, but the state refused, as the cease-and-desist order against Cal Am prohibits intensification of water use.

Slama says the project at 2300 Garden Road is expected to be done in the first three months of 2025, and he expects it to fill up quickly; in 2022, he completed a conversion of the Rabobank building in downtown Salinas into 50 apartments that filled up within five months.

He grew up in San Benancio Canyon, and hopes this project – and others he has in the works on Garden Road – helps reduce traffic on Highway 68, which he’s long seen go both ways.

“The middle class is getting crushed, and we just need more units,” he says. “Until we get the shackles off of the supply, we’re going to be at an imbalance.”