Small Lots, Big Impacts is a two-stage initiative to build a path to a better future for Los Angeles—one where a new generation of homeowners has the chance to thrive in more resilient neighborhoods. The recent fires have highlighted the importance of combining public resources with creative ingenuity to address the city’s housing crisis. Thus, in Small Lots, Big Impacts, the City of Los Angeles is leading the way, hosting demonstration projects on its own land that will offer new visions for building housing that can translate to thousands of similar, privately-held lots. First, a design competition asks designers, architects, and students to propose homeownership models on a selection of the City’s small, overlooked, and forgotten lots. Participants will imagine a sustainable urban future that updates the Los Angeles residential imaginary for a postsuburban world where infill, shared amenities, and compact communities present viable alternatives to the detached house. To address the city’s housing shortage and support fire recovery, proposals will consider architectural and community resilience, strategies for expedient construction, and cost-effective development approaches. Second, through a Request for Qualifications (RFQ), the City of Los Angeles will award small, underutilized parcels of City-owned land to nimble, innovative, and high-quality architect-developer partners (“Development Teams”) to construct housing prototypes. The initiative will be “open source,” sharing development lessons, design approaches, policy implications, and strategies for practice to build the capacity of the city’s housing development community.
The Small Lots, Big Impacts initiative is the outcome of a collaboration between cityLAB-UCLA, LA4LA, and the City of Los Angeles, including the Office of Mayor Karen Bass, the Housing Department, and City Council.
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Across Los Angeles, tens of thousands of privately-owned lots are under a quarter acre, underutilized, zoned for residential construction, and by any common sense measure, ripe for construction. Through this initiative, the City is providing a unique opportunity to design new models for living together on publicly-owned lots that have these same characteristics. In so doing, Small Lots, Big Impacts will highlight the larger opportunity that lies in leveraging these prototypes to build sustainably on the rest of Los Angeles’ residential land.
Since the first day of her administration, Mayor Karen Bass has been focused on building a stronger, more resilient Los Angeles by addressing the city’s multifaceted housing crisis. Today, City Councilmembers are anxious to deploy land in their districts to create resilient demonstrations of homeownership opportunities. City-owned land already plays an outsized role in facilitating new housing demonstrations, but until now, larger sites for multifamily apartments have received the most attention. Small Lots, Big Impacts instead pursues pilot projects on underutilized residential parcels that are less than a quarter acre—the very DNA of housing in Los Angeles. Each individual site and each individual project may be small, but the scale of the opportunity is vast.