Architects Design Small-Lot Homes in Los Angeles

A new competition birthed out of the University of California, Los Angeles, will deliver innovative housing designs on small lots across the city.

CityLab-UCLA, a think-tank based in the school’s architecture department, partnered with the city to create the Small Lots, Big Impacts design competition, aimed at producing dense developments on approximately 24,000 privately owned small vacant lots in the city, Fast Company reported.

In total, 21 winners were chosen, with the best designs offering both single-family and multifamily occupancy on lots that are a quarter-acre or smaller and haven’t been developed.

“We thought that there might be a way to unlock the lots the city owns, but also use that to actually spur private development on the many similar lots that are across the city,” CityLab-UCLA co-director Emmanuel Proussaloglou told Fast Company.

Shared Steps, the design from California-based firms Word and Studio Staggs Kennedy, used what CityLab calls “stealth density.” From the front it looks like it could be a single-family home, but it’s actually three main buildings that each have a larger unit plus an accessory dwelling unit and a junior ADU, for a total of nine units. The ADUs would be used as rentals or storage space by the larger units or sold as homes in their own right.

Long Beach-based Studio One Eleven came up with Lotful, a competing design that proposed six individually owned buildings that each have owner-occupied units and two ground-level ADUs.

MacArthur Park-based firm West of West won for its Ladderblock design, which utilizes flexible designs to allow owners to expand or contract their homes with one- and two-bedroom units over time. A partition wall would also allow for a separate rental or unit to sell.

The goal in conceptualizing these designs, Proussaloglou said, is to assuage neighbors’ concerns about multiple homes popping up on one lot.

“The whole point of what we’re doing here is to try to build a couple so that you can go and actually look at them and say, ‘That doesn’t look as scary as I thought it might,’” he told Fast Company.

The Los Angeles Housing Department will choose from the Small Lots, Big Impacts collection and recruit architects, contractors and financial institutions to build on specific city-owned lots. The city will sell the lots and use the funds to provide down payment assistance for low-income buyers to move into the new homes.

Los Angeles is on the hook for more than 456,000 new homes by 2029, according to the Southern California Association of Governments’ Regional Housing Needs Assessment. Only 17,000 new homes were permitted last year, and in the wake of this year’s wildfires, just 21 rebuilding permits have been issued in the Palisades and Eaton fire burn zones, according to the county’s official permitting tracker. — Chris Malone Méndez