Absolutely. Low-income housing is the perfect use for all this extra office space. San Francisco has a problem where the low-income people who work to serve high-income people can't afford to live in the city that they work in.
Converting office space into affordable housing is a win for everyone, except the landlords, but I won't shed a tear for them ;-)
Permits to build, permits to remodel, taxes for simply existing year-over-year, taxes for having too few people living in the house... is there a limit to how far government will go to control what people can and cannot do with their own property?
In college, I had a pretty based statistics professor who said: "a skilled statistician can make the data tell whatever story his employers want". I chose not to pursue statistics as a career after that.