Interesting projects exist, but in high-cost regions the conversions rarely become condos you can buy, because rentals pay the developer better. You do see individual adaptive-reuse projects: a dead department store turned into ground-floor retail with apartments above, or a mall site rumored for redevelopment. What you rarely see in a region like Southern California is that conversion reaching the market as for-sale units. The reason is economics rather than design. A developer maximizes return by building luxury rental apartments and holding them, versus carving a converted building into individual condos to sell. Even where affordable-housing mandates apply, they typically cover only a portion of the units, so the rest still gets built to the highest-return use. Most of this space ends up as another large apartment complex. If you're hoping to buy into a converted-factory condo, you're shopping a thin, uneven slice of the market that depends heavily on your city and its incentives. Judge any specific project on the usual fundamentals: quality of the conversion, the HOA and its reserves, financing (some lenders are cautious on unusual or mixed-use condo structures), and location. The cool-building factor is a bonus on top of a property that pencils on its own, never a substitute for it.