Small Lots, Big Impacts
This design competition 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.
| Category | Project Competition / Idea Competition / Open to Students |
| Type | International, Project, Open, Single-Stage, Anonymous |
| Genre | Community, Housing, Redevelopment |
| Country | Los Angeles, United States |
| RegDeadline | 7 April 2025 GoogleCal iCal |
| 4 May 2025 (via Online) GoogleCal | |
| Eligibility | All (only professional applicants will be eligible to proceed to the RFQ stage of the initiative. ) |
Description
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.
Jury
Dr. Dana Cuff, cityLAB-UCLA Director; Professor of Architecture + Urban Design. Jury Chair
Christopher Hawthorne, Senior Critic at Yale School of Architecture; Former Los Angeles Chief Design Officer
Hilary Sample, Co-Founder of MOS; IDC Foundation Professor of Housing Design at Columbia GSAPP
Jonathan Tate, Principal of OJT; Professor of Practice at Tulane School of Architecture
Kevin Keller, Executive Officer, Los Angeles City Planning; Former Deputy Mayor for Housing, City of Los Angeles
Maurice Cox, Emma Bloomberg Professor in Residence of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard Graduate School of Design; Former Chicago Planning and Development Commissioner
Phoebe Yee, Executive Vice President of Design for Related California
Prize
Student winners:
First ($1,500), second ($1000), and third ($500) place
Professional winners (up to ten winners from each site category (20 total) ):
The winners will have the opportunity to join or form Development Teams in the second phase and will have access to expert consultants to assist with crafting a competitive proposal.
Entry Fee
None
Timetable
Design Competition winners announced: May 27th
Celebratory event and Development Team matchmaking: June 2025
Development Team RFQ: Summer 2025
Organizer
UCLA cityLAB and City of Los Angeles