Small Lots, Big Impacts

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.