Los Angeles is under a state mandate to add 250,000 new housing units by the end of the decade. To help speed up progress during the remaining five years, UCLA’s urban think tank cityLAB has launched a design competition. Contestants can submit proposals for low-cost, easy-to-build starter homes on vacant city-owned lots, which are smaller than a quarter acre. The deadline to enter is April 7.
Working with the city, particularly the mayor’s office, CityLab has identified 12 lots that are scattered across LA, and each would have three to 20 units, says Dana Cuff, a professor of architecture at UCLA and the director of cityLAB.
However, a few factors have prevented development in general, she explains: “We don't really have models now for development at the zoning capacities that are available to us. So it's hard to make the economics work for a single house, given construction costs and land costs, unless you're doing luxury housing now. And not that many people are trying to develop single luxury units any longer. What we really need are more compact, more affordable units, and that's not a development recipe that we have for ‘for sale’ housing. Banks don't know how to lend on it.”
She adds, “The development industry is so conservative that it has to go where the risk is least, until we've shown that there's really a much better model, especially for ‘for sale’ housing.”
108 Paloma Avenue, Venice Beach, is a representative site for the “Small Lots, Big Impacts” initiative. Credit: Adam Bartos/cityLAB.
Cuff has high expectations for designers to show new concepts of starter homes, then the competition winners will be paired with developers.
What about current residents who fear the new units might drive down property values of their neighborhood?
“The NIMBY [not in my backyard] interests are around larger developments than this. We're really looking at gentle density,” Cuff says. “And … it's not as if people don't want two units on their site or four units next door. They want some stability, in a sense that people have an ownership role in their neighborhoods. Frankly, most neighborhoods now have multiple ADUs [accessory dwelling units], so there's already gentle density getting added. … I'm always optimistic about these things, but I'm hoping that these models that we're doing through the Small Lots, Big Impacts initiative will really remove the fear that people have of more neighbors on the sites next door to them.”
Huntington Drive is a representative site for the “Small Lots, Big Impacts” initiative. Credit: Melina Cruz Bautista/cityLAB.
CityLab’s initiative is also about preventing more people from moving out of LA, largely due to high costs of living: “If the whole idea of Los Angeles has always been about mobility, freeways, sprawl, really, what we're all saying now is: How can we afford to stay here? What's the model for putting down roots in Los Angeles? We can't do it when we get old. Our kids can't do it when they're young. So the idea of actually making home ownership an affordable option, and leading the way with lenders and developers, seems like a really valuable contribution. It's not the whole solution.”