Paradise Lots

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,” innovative infill, and expedient construction. Densifying a population that clings to the idea of a verdant frontier—one’s own yard and the light and water required for it to flourish—is a delicate art of misdirection.

Unlike in New York City’s 2018 Big Ideas for Small Lots competition (no relation), these given sites are not small or odd or especially challenging. We’re talking lots forty-feet wide and a hundred feet deep, interchangeable with thousands across the city. Simply put, these lots are smaller than normal for high density development—multifamily capacity on single-family territory—while accommodating property ownership for thirty residents instead of three.

Architects responded to this call with relish. The catalogue of SLBI submissions reveals a delectable array of material and spatial palettes. Raked rooflines follow platonic clusters speckled with picture windows. Sliding doors connect monochrome kitchens to lush patios. Abutting towerlets alternate in color or shape or texture while surgically composed stairwell cores play footsie with property lines. Zoom into any board online (all 356 submissions are viewable on the SLBI website) and you’ll find puzzle-like plans that reward contemplation. If the entries start to rhyme—there are only so many ways to slice a pie—this is an indication of how seriously architects took the constraints. While previous design exercises organized by cityLAB resulted only in paper architecture, here the submissions leveraged a concrete asset as their basis: four parcels of city-owned land (often misunderstood as city-donated; more on that later). The goal here is to realize, not just imagine, a possible future.

The winning designs are beautiful and eminently buildable, but after a while, browsing through them begets confusion, even bitterness. Why does this necessitate a special competition? It’s easy to imagine these structures appearing tomorrow in any gentri-crisped LA neighborhood. And there’s room aplenty within the city’s vast sprawl, where interstices of immanent potential have been left unbothered for the last hundred years: mangy quadrilaterals, cracked storefronts, lonely warehouses, restricted parking lots. Each a seemingly forbidden territory, worth millions. According to the SLBI brief, there are tens of thousands of empty lots out there, no destruction or displacement required, so why not build?

Turns out our winners already have a bit of competition in the gentle density space. I’ve spotted this new type of “missing middle” housing popping up three stories tall, flanked by low-slung Spanish colonials and Craftsman bungalows, in nearly every zip code, from Crenshaw to Hollywood to Burbank. Ten or so units stacked perfectly into cubic towers, each thirty feet wide by thirty feet deep by thirty feet tall. These little frontiers of multiplication and speculation usually replace one of their centenarian neighbors on lots made eligible for slicing and numbering by a raft of recent pro-density state legislation. Driveways slip by sparsely landscaped front yards, winding around sheer walls and under cantilevered living rooms to feed a regimen of garages. Villa Savoyes for enshittified times.

Not quite what SLBI had in mind. Parking, for one thing, is nearly absent from the entries as it’s no longer required by state law in highly particular and highly significant locations. Instead of paved alleys choking the space between stucco cubes, the winning designs seize every square foot of ground for geometric and programmatic manipulation. This approach is to residents’ benefit: more gardens, sure, but also more clever interventions that rattle upward through floors and units. Slices, offsets, and rotations create light and privacy simultaneously. Flexible grids and cores enable future renovations into smaller or larger units as families grow and contract. Street-facing figurations invite commercial or communal engagement with charisma and transparency. Such variety and nuance of housing offers a vision of what our city could become, perhaps with some more buses.

Left to the market’s speculations, however, these magnanimous projects may only pioneer a new luxury typology. If a cube unit sells for $800,000, surely one of these would fetch a million. But would they cost that much more? I doubt it. Comparing the two types, we see that the gap, say, between finishes is not so wide—industry follows trend quite briskly. The unit layouts are similarly frugal: Closet space is tight, islands become dining rooms, and front doors open directly into the salon. Modernism’s factory-made mass appeal is rightly present in both, but cube buildings are getting built, everywhere, and it’s unlikely that this competition will disrupt their momentum. A cynic would accept the cube as the only possible instantiation of this program. A realist would merely conclude that builders have found no reason to stray from it. Could these renderings do the trick? Unfortunately, the ascendency of the cubes has less to do with design than with financing. The subtractive logic of the pro forma—revenue minus costs, calculated over time (the faster the better)—helps us see these stubby towers less as design tragedies than diagrams of the market. The pro forma is a binary determination in the face of chaos: Does the developer profit or not? (Even collecting less than the maximum possible profit would be interpreted as building at a loss.) Built typologies have the most profitable pro forma, unbuilt typologies don’t.

SLBI is now entering its second phase, but this time contracts are involved. A request for qualifications (RFQ) will be issued by the city for qualified architect-developer teams to secure an exclusive negotiation agreement (ENA) to purchase and build on twelve city-owned lots with support from various city departments. The lots will not be donated per se. To avoid directly involving public funds, the city will transfer cash from the market-rate sale to fund first-time home-buyer loans. The dormant exchange value of public land thus finds a new home with the architect-developer team, filling the gap between costs and “affordable” prices, returning their investment intact.

The brief claims this arrangement will benefit all parties by combining the best of public and private development. Lower the neoliberalism goggles and the bleakness of our situation becomes clear. The best of private development means evading public oversight and prevailing wage requirements. The best of public development means arbitrarily relaxing entitlement hurdles, a feat typically reserved for well-connected, well-counseled builders. Is it so outlandish to maintain that union wages are good and rules should be effective for everyone? Apparently, it is. Especially for a design showcase whose primary aim is to cajole—or perhaps even to educate—private developers into building “at a loss.” Doing so would be a qualified, but unprecedented success in this city.

This whole exercise is a far cry from public housing, but it does push architects toward a more pragmatic, innovative engagement with political economy. Designers can no longer preoccupy themselves solely with the production of housing, leaving developers alone to contemplate its consumption. Small Lots, Big Impacts has produced a kaleidoscopic yet entirely feasible image of housing that—contra the cube—is not produced solely as an investment vehicle. Buildings for living in do need to meet code, they do need to be efficient, but they do not need to provide more ROI than the stock market to be viable. They should be allowed to absorb monies never to be seen again. The value of buildings should be enough, and we can find ways to do it that aren’t gambling on the intentions of investors. As they say, the house always wins.