The Small Lots, Big Impacts initiative is a collaboration between cityLAB-UCLA, LA4LA, and the City of Los Angeles. The winners of its inaugural design competition were announced in May.
Everyone’s a star in Los Angeles. The first phase of Small Lots, Big Impacts (SLBI) has whittled nearly four-hundred entries down to twenty-one winners. Plus thirty student winners. And fifteen honorable mentions. Awarding so many projects was an intentional choice and a smart move, yielding a constellation of new knowledge rather than a supernova. The brief—to propose “well-designed demonstration projects of infill-scale housing on vacant or underutilized publicly-owned lots”—was simple enough, the realism of its ambitions betraying a bubbling discontent regarding the state of housing in Los Angeles as rents skyrocket, vacancies abound, neighborhoods burn, police trash encampments, and the dogma of supply and demand lands like a sick joke. Avoiding head-on confrontation with supply-side orthodoxy, the organizers tread lightly with talk of “gentle density,” …
