An old McClellan office building wants to become 35 apartments

The building at 3411 Olson Street is two stories of plain office on 2.18 acres inside McClellan Park, the business park that used to be McClellan Air Force Base. On September 8, someone filed to gut it and turn it into 35 apartments.

The Sacramento County building permit, CBNC2026-00277, puts the job at $8,894,465. The county's permit record describes it as an adaptive reuse that will "convert the existing office building to multi-family housing." It is in plan review, and the contractor is listed as "to be determined."

That works out to about $254,000 a home in permit valuation. It is also the largest office-to-apartment conversion in the county's permit file by a wide margin. For anyone watching rents in North Highlands and Antelope, 35 new apartments on an old base is the kind of supply that rarely shows up in this part of the county.

The scope reads like a full rebuild inside an old shell: full interior demolition and structural work, new fire alarms and sprinklers, an accessible entry, new paint, replacement windows throughout, rooftop platforms for air conditioning condensers, new stairs to the basement, a trash enclosure and fresh parking stripes. The county parcel file lists the property as a general office building, two stories, and the zoning as McClellan Park's own special planning area.

The filing does not name the owner, the builder or the rents. We could not find a state environmental filing or any news coverage of it as of October 6. The basement is a hint that this is one of the base's older buildings, but we have not confirmed its age.

A short list, and this is the top of it

Office-to-housing is a downtown San Francisco story most of the time. In suburban Sacramento County it has been a handful of small buildings.

Sources: Sacramento County's permit feed and the state's CEQAnet filings for 2365 El Camino and 4748 Engle Road. One more, a two-story office at 2260 Park Towne Circle off Howe Avenue, has a $3.6 million permit to become apartments but does not list a unit count.

All four together add up to 66 homes. That is a rounding error against the county's housing needs. It is still a shift. Before 2025, the county's office-to-home filings were a few units at a time, and several stalled or were withdrawn.

Why McClellan

McClellan Air Force Base closed on July 13, 2001. The 3,000-acre site is now McClellan Park, which its managers describe as about 10 million square feet of buildings and about 20,000 jobs. People already live there. The park's old enlisted and officer housing was converted to houses, duplexes and apartments for rent, and the McClellan Park area counted 926 residents in the 2020 Census.

Office space is what McClellan has a lot of. CBRE put Sacramento's office vacancy at 18.3 percent in the second quarter of 2026. Kidder Mathews, which tracks a different set of buildings, had the Rio Linda and North Highlands area at 9.2 percent.

Housing is what the area next door needs. North Highlands' median sale price was about $414,700 in July 2026, Redfin reported. Median rent was about $1,795 in October 2026 by Zumper's count, about $1,325 for a one-bedroom and $1,655 for a two-bedroom.

The rules may get easier in November. The county's Housing and Infill Zoning Code Amendment would define adaptive reuse in the code, allow apartments by right in its business-professional zone, loosen setbacks and height limits for conversions, and drop minimum parking for conversions along eight commercial corridors. The county Planning Commission was scheduled to take it up September 28. The Board of Supervisors is scheduled for November 17, according to the county's project page.

There is a state law in play too. AB 507, signed in October 2025, lets many office conversions go through by right if they meet affordability rules. The Olson Street permit does not say which path it is using.

We think this is exactly the right kind of building to convert. An aging office on a former base, with nobody's front yard across the street, is where 35 households cost a neighborhood the least and add the most. The open question is the walk to anything: McClellan is built for cars and trucks, and the project will need parking and a bus line that runs often enough to use.

Sacramento itself is a different market. To compare the city's neighborhoods on schools, safety and price, see Houseberry's Sacramento ranking.

Sources

• Sacramento County building permits feed, CBNC2026-00277
• Sacramento County: Housing and Infill Zoning Code Amendment
• McClellan Park: history and residential leasing
• CBRE: Sacramento office figures, Q2 2026
• Redfin: North Highlands housing market
• California AB 507 (2025), adaptive reuse