Home Design Competition Shows What’s Possible for Small Lots

Finding a starter home in Los Angeles is a major challenge, with median home prices hovering around $1.2 million. To help address the issue, the City of Los Angeles recently teamed up with local think tank CityLab-UCLA on a design competition called Small Lots, Big Impacts, Fast Company reports.

Through the initiative, architects and developers were tasked to design affordable housing solutions on small, underused parcels of land. Currently, there are approximately 24,000 privately-owned residential lots across Los Angeles that are a quarter-acre or smaller and remain undeveloped. The City itself also owns similar lots, and it plans to use about a dozen of them to showcase some of these designs.

The competition named 21 winning designs, along with six honorable mentions and 20 additional projects that earned special recognition. Winners were selected for their ability to create multi-unit housing plans that maximize the use of each lot while still offering outdoor space, natural light, and other desirable features. The winners include: 

Shared Steps (photo below), a design from the California-based firms Word and s_sk, is an example of what CityLab calls stealth density. From the front, it looks like it could be a single-family home. But it’s actually nine units: three main buildings that each have a larger unit plus an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) and a junior accessory dwelling unit. The ADUs could be used as rentals for the larger units, help a family expand when they need more space, or be sold as homes of their own. The front yard, meanwhile connects to a pocket park for the neighborhood.

A project called 4x4x4 (photo below), from the Brooklyn-based firm Light and Air, uses a single 50-by-150-foot lot for four two-story houses. Each home has a ground-floor accessory dwelling unit. The homes, which are each around 1,600 square feet, fit together like Tetris blocks.