Downtown Los Angeles features a vast amount of buildings with vacant ground floors. Empty ground floors have disadvantageous effects on public space: with no daily activities connected to a public-oriented ground floor use, the sidewalks in front of the buildings are often not taken care of, littered, or vandalized. The combination of vacant commercial spaces, unusable and unattractive sidewalks impairs a street's overall liveliness, walkability, and presence of people, which – in turn – negatively affects the entire neighborhood, its retailers, renters, homeowners and property values.

Waiting Buildings proposes a strategy to temporarily activate vacant ground floor spaces for a diversity of purposes serving the community’s and the property owner’s needs alike. Learning from processes and projects of organizing temporary uses in other American and European cities, such strategies can create a win-win situation for both owners and the community. While the community benefits from a safer and more lively urban environment. To prevent negative results of upgrading processes, Waiting Buildings simultaneously negotiates agreements between owners, tennants, and city authorities tp share resulting benefits across all stakeholders.

Located on 5th Street between Spring St and Main St, the ground floor space of the Apartment Building ‘Rowan’ follows the same pattern as all but two (Buzz Wine & Beer and Yuko Kitchen) ground floor spaces along this segment of 5th Street: it is closed and vacant. Collaborating with all relevant stakeholders (property owner, homeowner association, retailers, neighbors, community, etc.) Waiting Buildings seeks to develop a program for temporary events and community activities (organize common coffee and cake meetings, cleaning the street and façade together, providing co-working spaces, promoting local pop-up business events, reading sessions with the neighboring bookstore, etc.) and ultimately use the Rowan’s empty space as the starting point for reactivating and reinvigorating this part of 5th street.