LA’s Idea: Design Contest for Single-Family Infill Sites

Calling all architects! The City of Los Angeles has launched a design contest for how best to squeeze the most for-sale homes inside a small city-owned lot.

The Los Angeles initiative, dubbed Small Lots, Big Impacts, features a design competition for architects to draw up plans for multiple small homes on one lot to cut the cost of starter homes, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The city also aims to show how Los Angeles can pack in more homes without turning into Manhattan.

“Angelenos should be able to buy their first home and raise their families in our city,” Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement. “The launch of Small Lots, Big Impacts is a step toward that future.”

The idea is simple: the winning multiple homes designs would ultimately serve as preapproved templates for all developers to use.

The city intends to sell 10 small lots to allow builders to show what the new designs can do. The city has around 1,000 small lots, which it could sell to developers with City Council approval, the proceeds for which could help residents buy the new homes.

The initiative is a partnership between the city, the public-private LA4LA and UCLA’s cityLAB research center, which found 24,000 vacant lots smaller than a quarter acre where housing is allowed in L.A.

The goal of Small Lots, Big Impacts: to create for-sale homes that are smaller and less expensive than a McMansion, or a 2,000-square-foot townhome.

“That isn’t on the market” today, cityLAB director Dana Cuff told the Times.

What is on the market on most smaller lots are either large single-family houses or between three to five large townhomes.

Or nothing on such lots get built at all because high construction costs mean projects won’t pencil out unless developers can combine adjacent lots to build one large apartment building, Azeen Khanmalek, who formerly worked in the mayor’s office and is now executive director of the advocacy group Abundant Housing, told the newspaper.

Architects are being asked to design for multiple homes on one lot, but contest organizers want the homes to have natural light, access to the outdoors and a “comfortable relationship with neighbors.”

Designers are also encouraged to use innovative construction materials and methods to protect against fire and bring down the cost of construction. Projects are likely to have between four and 20 units, with building heights from one to three stories.

Cuff hopes the design competition and subsequent homes being built on city lots will show developers they can make money doing the same thing on land that’s now privately owned.

She also hopes it will show the general public that L.A. doesn’t have to rely on skyscrapers.

“These projects I think will really demonstrate that living together, with slightly more households on a site, is going to be a pretty nice arrangement,” Cuff told the Times.

— Dana Bartholomew