Practical ideas aren’t often the stuff of architecture contests. Right off the bat, that set Los Angeles’s Low-Rise design challenge apart.

A project led by the mayor’s office and the city’s chief design officer, Christopher Hawthorne, Low-Rise asked entrants to reimagine what an L.A. urban landscape with abundant housing could look like in the years to come. The organizers wanted the participating designers to think about their submissions the way they might approach a project for a local client or community. The results, which were unveiled this week, don’t look like future-forward science fiction, but rather doable local solutions to a thorny problem: the stubborn lack of affordable options across the city.

Across four categories, the winning architects offered modest, inclusive possibilities for homes that look like places you’d want to live — and, critically, like housing that could easily already exist in Southern California. Take the first-place winner in the “Subdivision” category, for example, a concept called “Green Alley Housing” designed by Louisa Van Leer, Antonio Castillo and others. The team proposes lining the city’s many public alleys with duplexes and turning these now-underused stretches of asphalt into communal pedestrian spaces.

The winner of the “ Corners” category, which looks at how to densify corner lots in low-rise residential neighborhoods,  is Vonn Weisenberger’s “Branch-style” home, a play on the California Ranch that joins two lots with a community center for multi-generational living.

Chief among the goals of the $100,000 design challenge was to yield new ideas not just for how low-density housing should look and feel, but a process that might lead to housing that actually gets built. That’s been a huge obstacle in a sprawling city dominated by single-family homes, where efforts to generate more housing are lagging. Such efforts often trigger pitched battles between Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) partisans and their pro-development counterparts in the Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) movement. Meanwhile, home prices continue to skyrocket and the number of unhoused residents has surged.

“There’s simply no way we will meet our climate goals without reimagining our single-family neighborhoods. There had been very little incentive for any elected officials to step into that territory,” says Hawthorne, former architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times. “The result had been that we had a long-standing bargain that supported ADUs [accessory dwelling units] on one end of the spectrum in terms of scale and larger multi-family projects near transit in particular at the other end of the scale, without anything much in the middle happening in between.”

Three of the four categories in the challenge span the so-called “missing middle” gamut. In addition to the Subdivision and Corners categories (for duplex homes and joined lots, respectively), Low-Rise called for proposals for “ Fourplex” housing. All three could be built in the low-density districts that comprise more than three-quarters of the residential land area in L.A., with some 400,000 lots now occupied by a single-family home. Changing this configuration is at the intersection of issues affecting the economy, the environment and social justice. Quadrupling the possibilities for new homes would be transformative for L.A. But even the suggestion of change can spark a backlash — not only from homeowners who benefit from the status quo, but from communities who fear displacement.

The winning Fourplex entry doesn’t scream gentrification, however. The entry by the L.A.–based firms Omgivning and Studio-MLA features interlocking apartments for households of different sizes (e.g., a single with a dog, parents with two children). The complex shares public and private gardens, parking spots, another green alley and a community easement or parklet. No luxe dog parks or “ horizontal articulation” so commonly seen in big multi-family buildings associated with luxury development.

Hawthorne says that the city structured Low-Rise to disrupt the “developer pro forma” feel that comes with so many architectural renderings for housing. Too often, these plans can make communities feel as though they’re “being designed from without.” For this design competition, the city turned the process inside out, asking Angelenos what they might like to see in housing (and what they dread, too). Hawthorne credits Alejandro Gonzalez, a fellow in the city’s design office, for spearheading five conversations — with designers, leaders, sustainability experts, residents and others — which served to fill out the design brief for the contest. This approach puts the community input hearing before the project design, instead of after the fact, a potential savings of time and money if replicated widely. The competition’s 28-member-strong jury, too, brought a full convention of thinkers to the task, compared to the three-to-five figures who typically decide the outcomes for these contests.

Low-Rise aimed to give physical form to discussions that are dominated by abstractions. Most Angelenos aren’t pure NIMBY or YIMBY but fall somewhere in between, often in response to cloudy principles rather than concrete proposals. The city’s politics don’t reflect this fact. The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously, twice, to oppose a state bill from Sacramento that would have lifted restrictions on new housing near transit. To preempt the ominous-sounding prospect of upzoning embodied by the desk of California State Senator Scott Wiener — as well as the knee-jerk opposition to any construction based on whispers of gentrification or “community character” — the city looked to put together a portfolio of possibilities that respond in advance to what residents and policymakers want to see.

“We wanted to try to change the temperature and tenor of conversations about the future of low-rise neighborhoods,” Hawthorne says. “Instead of looking at Senator Wiener’s most extreme proposal, we asked, ‘How would you like to see your neighborhood evolve?’”

The results were revealing. People understand the legacy of redlining and patterns of disinvestment better today, Hawthorne says; Angelenos are more appreciative of what rigid zoning and land-use codes mean for their neighborhoods. The Covid-19 pandemic and California wildfires have changed both what people want to see and what they believe land-use policy can achieve. Corner stores and small-scale retail operations were unanimous favorites across all five of the community conversations, for example.

If the community’s approach to conversations about land is starting to change, so is the city’s. The Low-Rise challenge resembles L.A.’s earlier effort to cut the red tape for accessory dwelling units, making these backyard apartments easier to build by pre-approving a suite of standardized and attractive templates. Low-Rise yielded some 380 submissions from around the world; of the 12 winners who placed in the contest, half are based in the city of Los Angeles, pointing to an engaged design community. And the challenge isn’t over. Next, the city will ask for feedback on the winning entries from the community panels, in hopes of yielding tangible policies for change.

Ultimately, Low-Rise is a design contest, and it offered room for designers to think out loud. A purely speculative fourth category, “(Re)Distribution,” gave architects the chance to put their hands on some of L.A.’s most celebrated homes, including West Hollywood’s iconic Schindler House, an unconventional Modernist vision for communal living. The U.K.–based firm Arts and Creative Designs Ltd. proposed turning it into a multi-family apartment building with sustainable urban farming. For the South Seas House, a witchy 1902 home in the West Adams district, the New York firm Roart submitted a poem, along with a map of the historic neighborhood Tetrised by colorful shapes. 

That stuff is magic — and it’s never going to happen. But so many other Low-Rise winners really could be just around the corner.