The Small Lots, Big Impacts Initiative
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.
The Design Competition
The design competition of the Small Lots, Big Impacts initiative gives designers, architects, and students the opportunity to propose how small vacant lots across Los Angeles should be converted into compelling, community-oriented, resilient housing developments that make better use of land that typically sits empty or accommodates just one housing unit. Expanding homeownership need not equate with further privatization, but can instead present an opportunity to build up inclusive communities.
We call on designers everywhere to bring their ingenuity and compassion to the Small Lots, Big Impacts design competition with proposals that advance Los Angeles’ legacy of multifamily housing design and offer housing ideas rooted in equity, resilience, and sustainability. Submissions to the design competition are expected to demonstrate a variety of innovative housing schemes that help set the course for Los Angeles’ future.
Through the design competition, we ask participants to address one of the City’s fundamental housing challenges. Where one household lived in the past, today we need to increase the number of residents while retaining or even expanding upon the multiple benefits of home: access to the outdoors, comfortable relationships with neighbors, flexibility for changing needs, ample natural light, stability, opportunities for wealth building, a sense of identity, and safety from an increasingly volatile climate. Rather than focus on an isolated house on its own piece of property, Small Lots, Big Impacts asks for demonstrations showing how more households can share space while simultaneously creating more resilient neighborhoods. After the raging fires of early 2025 that expanded the housing crisis, destroyed whole neighborhoods, and destabilized all Angelenos, forecasting a more resilient, equitable, collective, 21st century urbanism in the Southwest and beyond is all the more urgent.
This Design Competition is organized around two site categories, both of which represent housing development opportunities inherent in Los Angeles’ residential fabric. The first site category, called Gentle Density, is aimed at developing small-scale multifamily housing on infill lots that are the by-product of urban sprawl. We include two Gentle Density sites in this competition. The second site category, called Shared Future, is aimed at reviving the missing middle and mid-rise multifamily housing that Los Angeles famously once built but has since forgotten. We include two Shared Future sites in this competition. From these four prototypical sites, applicants will select one.
The four competition sites stand in for hundreds of other similar City-owned properties and thousands of privately-owned infill sites in Los Angeles. All are overdue for much-needed residential construction.
How to Apply
All applicants must register at the Small Lots, Big Impacts website. Teams and individuals are allowed to apply. Both students and professionals are invited to submit to the Small Lots, Big Impacts design competition, though only professional applicants will be eligible to proceed to the RFQ stage of the initiative. Members of the jury, along with their co-workers or professional partners, are not eligible to participate in the design competition. Architecture licensure in California or elsewhere is not required to enter the design competition.
Submissions are to be digital only; no hard copies will be accepted. All submissions must be submitted electronically by 11:59 PM PST on April 20th, 2025.
