Los Angeles launches effort to encourage starter homes on city-owned vacant lots
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The city of Los Angeles is launching a new initiative to encourage the construction of starter homes on small lots, an effort to provide relatively lower-cost for-sale housing and show how Los Angeles can densify without turning into Manhattan.
The initiative, called Small Lots, Big Impacts, kicked off Wednesday with a design competition for architects and others to craft innovative plans for multiple small homes on one lot, with the hope those units will be less expensive than larger options being built by developers today.
Winning designs are meant to eventually serve as preapproved city templates that all developers could use. Government officials also plan to start selling off a handful of small, city-owned lots to builders to demonstrate — in real life — what is possible with the designs.
“Angelenos should be able to buy their first home and raise their families in our city,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement. “The launch of Small Lots, Big Impacts is a step toward that future.”
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The initiative is a partnership between the city, the public-private program LA4LA and UCLA’s cityLAB research center, which found that there are roughly 24,000 vacant lots in Los Angeles smaller than a quarter of an acre where housing is currently allowed. The city owns about 1,000 of these lots and plans to sell off about 10 of them as part of its demonstration project.
Today, depending on the neighborhood, builders on lots of this size often construct large single-family houses or three to five large townhomes.
Other times, nothing is built, because high construction costs mean developers won’t make enough money unless they combine adjacent lots to build one large apartment building, said Azeen Khanmalek, who formerly worked in the mayor’s office and is now executive director of the advocacy group Abundant Housing.
The goal of Small Lots, Big Impacts is to provide another option: for-sale homes that are smaller and less expensive than a McMansion or a 2,000-square-foot townhome.
“That isn’t on the market” today, cityLAB director Dana Cuff said.
To get there, designers are encouraged to use innovative construction materials and methods that would protect against fire and bring down the cost of overall construction.
Officials said such designs could help Pacific Palisades build back after January’s infernos.
The City Council must ultimately approve the plan to sell off city lots, so details could change. For now, officials hope to sell them to developers who could use the winning architectural designs to build for-sale homes.
The city would use proceeds from the lot sales to fund down payment assistance for home buyers who would purchase the new units.
According to the city housing department, eventual projects are likely to be between four and 20 units, with building heights ranging mostly from one to three stories.
Architects are being asked to design for multiple homes on one lot, but competition organizers want them to do so while giving eventual homeowners access to the outdoors, natural light and a “comfortable relationship with neighbors.”
Cuff said she hopes the design competition and subsequent building on city lots will show developers they can make money doing the same thing on land that’s now privately owned. She also hopes it will show the general public that Los Angeles doesn’t have to rely on skyscrapers to grow.
“These projects I think will really demonstrate that living together, with slightly more households on a site, is going to be a pretty nice arrangement,” Cuff said.
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