A New Design Competition Aims to Put Thousands of Empty L.A. Lots to Use

In March, the City of Los Angeles, CityLab-UCLA, and nonprofit LA4LA launched Small Lots, Big Impacts, a new competition aimed to address housing scarcity and affordability. The contest asked firms to suggest dynamic uses for infill units across the city’s thousands of unused small lots—and, potentially, will help them get built. The Los Angeles Times reports there are 24,000 vacant lots citywide, including 1,000 that are city-owned, but in the aftermath of the L.A. fires, which destroyed nearly 11,000 homes, that count will likely increase. Though the competition has presented itself not necessarily as a direct rebuilding endeavor, it’s part of a larger goal to build housing density wherever possible as an existing housing crisis and climate vulnerability has heightened the need for homes that are fire-resistant, affordable, and easy to build across a variety of sites. 

Last week, competition organizers announced winning design ideas in two broad categories: 14 Gentle Density projects (including two runner-up citations) focused on smaller-scale multifamily homes, and eight winning Shared Futures projects (including one citation), which introduce low-rise multifamily developments. The city recently adopted statewide laws that support the competition’s endeavors by adding units to single-family lots: An Accessory Dwelling Unit Ordinance allows for the construction of new granny flats on a single property; another piece of legislation authorizes those ADUs to be sold as condos. And, in July this year, new state legislation will support projects that seek to subdivide individual lots zoned for single-family use only to allow up to 10 units.

It’s why housing design competitions like Small Lots, Big Impacts can at times illustrate what is possible for housing futures, translating complicated legalese from state laws and ordinances into legible images of attractive homes. Further anchoring the competition in real-life conditions, the projects are designed to sit on one of two prototypical sites in each category; these sites, says the brief, are “stand-ins” for the thousands of other vacant spaces that could feasibly host winning proposals. The jurying criteria emphasizes projects that are easily replicable and buildable across the city.

And this is precisely where the competition gets exciting: the winner announcement marks the end of “phase one”; the next step, according to the Architects Newspaper, is the release of a developer RFQ. Per the brief, competition organizers expect to make up to a dozen city-owned small lots available for development, and “based on their collective commitment to constructing demonstration projects, cityLAB-UCLA, the Los Angeles Housing Department, and the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office will support winning Development Team projects through the design, approvals, entitlements, and permitting processes.”

Below we’re highlighting a few of our favorite winning projects.

Growing Together by Outpost Office (Cleveland, OH)

As part of the Gentle Density category, Outpost Office has created a housing prototype that is meant to serve families as they grow and shift over several generations. They create four distinct units that can be strategically contracted through a party wall system, creating an interchangeable set of two, three, or four houses. By dividing the building into two spacious units and adding a convertible attached ADU to one, we can imagine this housing two families comfortably and communally; the ADU can house a live-in childcare or eldercare provider as families grow and age. 

Twin Court by wowowoworkshop (Ann Arbor, MI)

Twin Court preserves the shape and feel of conventional home ownership in the Gentle Density category. Dividing the lot into two separate parcels, the architects proposed two separate vernacular bungalows on each parcel and added a detached ADU to each. Not only do the homes mimic the city’s historic housing style, but they allow for ownership that looks a bit more conventional than a condominium or communal house, where two distinct homeowners occupy the same lot, with a tenant living close by. But they don’t neglect the importance of this dual-homeowner-tenant relationship—the architects have arranged all four units to create a courtyard. The four kitchens across the four homes are pushed toward that courtyard, which could anchor the microcommunity in sharing meals or social space.