Paloma Dooley, Alika Tending, 2023. Courtesy of the Artist.
Private Land Winners
Building Demonstrative Projects on Private Land
We received 30 submissions to our Request for Information on Private Land, demonstrating both the demand for missing middle housing and the depth of housing expertise that exists in Los Angeles. We are proud to recognize the 11 firms highlighted below for their high-quality work. The Holos, Six Peak, and Stayner teams were chosen as winners and they will now receive funding from Genesis LA to begin developing their projects. We expect construction to begin by Summer 2027. The remaining eight teams constitute the bench, and we are actively searching for additional funds to support additional housing projects. Together, this cohort of exceptional housing organizations are uniquely qualified to lead the city’s missing middle revolution. Read the press release here.
Winners
Holos Communities and Assemblage Works
Number of Units: 8-10
Neighborhood(s): East Hollywood
Unique Quality: Pre-fabricated building systems with a focus on sustainable design.
Team Contact: lophelan@holoscommunities.org
Team Summary: Building on decades of affordable housing experience, Holos Communities is partnering with Assemblage Works to propose a scalable small-lot homeownership model that rethinks how Los Angeles builds on standard residential lots. By delivering up to ten fee-simple townhomes per lot, the model spreads land costs to create homeownership at a scale traditional infill cannot match. A standardized, prefabricated design reduces design fees, shortens timelines, and ensures predictability across thousands of citywide sites. Combined with ministerial approvals under the Starter Home Revitalization Act, the model creates a more accessible path to ownership. The result is a Net Zero-ready solution that helps moderate-income families stay in the LA neighborhoods they love, offering an accessible path to homeownership and generational wealth.
Six Peak Capital, Frolic Community, West of West, and Aero Collective
Number of Units: 8
Neighborhood(s): Palms, Mar Vista, West Adams
Unique Quality: Alternative homeownership model that invests in communal spaces.
Team Contact: sfd@sixpeakcapital.com
Team Summary: Six Peak Capital and Frolic Community are a development team united by a shared conviction that missing middle homeownership can be both financially disciplined and design-forward. Six Peak serves as lead developer and general contractor through its subsidiary LV Construction, bringing more than a decade of experience across 100+ projects and 850+ units in Los Angeles. Frolic Community co-develops with deep expertise in cooperative ownership, community land trusts, and creating small multifamily communities rooted in existing neighborhoods – focused on opening access to high-opportunity areas for households priced out of the LA market. West of West (design architect) and Aero Collective (executive architect) complete the team, pairing design ambition with regulatory and construction fluency. Together, the team brings creative entitlement strategies, modular construction experience, and a financial model designed to compress costs and schedules. Their proposed project targets attainable for-sale housing in a dense, transit-connected Los Angeles neighborhood.
Design Competition Winner
Stayner Architects
Number of Units: 5-7
Neighborhood(s): Echo Park
Unique Quality: Local architecture office developing its own land in its own community.
Team Contact: christian@staynerarchitects.com
Team Summary: Stayner Architects is a second-generation Los Angeles practice integrating design, development, and strategic consulting to transform communities across Southern California and beyond. Grounded in research and social purpose, the firm collaborates with civic and community leaders to deliver environmentally and economically impactful projects—often built in-house through its general contracting entity, Sum of All Parts (Lic. 1126180).
Design Competition Winner - Benzi Rodman won special recognition for his submission alongside Kathryn Sonnabend (BR-KS). Benzi is a Junior Associate at Stayner Architects.
Bench
BA Collective
Team Contact: brock@bacollective.com
Team Summary: BA Collective is a Santa Monica-based architecture, interior design, and development firm shaping Los Angeles's built environment since 1997. Our range spans residential, cultural, commercial, and hospitality work, from single-family homes to museums, community centers, restaurants, and hotels. The firm works as both architect and developer, authoring projects and nurturing them end-to-end so design intent carries through to completion. BA Collective is drawn to neighborhood-scale development at the intersection of residential and commercial use, recognizing that life happens within and outside the home. The firm is curious about the emergent forms housing takes as people and neighborhoods grow and evolve: how a building built for one purpose is reclaimed for another, how the needs of people shift over years. Each project is its own novella, a self-contained story, but also a part of the larger ongoing narrative of how Los Angeles neighborhoods change.
Bellevra Group and office42 Architecture
Team Contact: deborah@bellevra.com
Team Summary: BELLEVRA Group, in partnership with office42 architecture, is the women-led development team behind THE CARLYLE, a project demonstrating how impactful design strengthens neighborhoods. BELLEVRA Group serves as the lead developer, founded by a Los Angeles-native couple focused on creating places that promote walkability and community, guided by the belief that high-quality design should be accessible in every neighborhood. office42 is a mission-driven B Corp architecture firm serving as design lead, contributing design excellence rooted in community-centered design. LG Creative Equity contributes development and construction expertise, while Self-Help Federal Credit Union, Plant Prefab, Lyon Ideas, and Daughrity Real Estate support project execution. Together, the team is reimagining a long-underutilized property in Hyde Park, a neighborhood that has experienced decades of disinvestment, into a vibrant destination centered around homeownership, neighborhood-serving retail, and inviting public spaces. THE CARLYLE reflects the team's commitment to creating economic opportunity, environmental improvement, and civic pride through design.
Cettie, Hotchandani Holdings, Home Owner LLC, and Corsini Stark Architects
Team Contact: kcettie@cettie.co
Team Summary: Second Story Partners is a multidisciplinary development team bringing together expertise in real estate development, architecture, and finance. Together, its members reimagine underutilized sites to deliver scalable, attainable homeownership models across Los Angeles. The team is led by Cettie, a Los Angeles–based real estate development platform founded by Katie Cettie Steinberg, who identifies overlooked opportunities and defines project vision to create distinctive places with enduring value. Co-GP partner Vishal Hotchandani recently delivered a 31-unit ED1 affordable housing project in South Los Angeles, and co-GP partner Ariel Nassib brings recent experience with fee-simple, small-lot subdivisions that expanded access to homeownership. Architecture partners Richard Corsini and Anthony Stark of Corsini Stark Architects contribute decades of expertise designing award-winning urban infill projects throughout Los Angeles. Together, the team combines creative vision with disciplined execution to deliver financially viable missing middle housing and replicable approaches for expanding homeownership in Los Angeles.
ELACC, Only If Architecture, and BIRBAGROUP
Team Contact: asf@only-if.com
Team Summary: Founded in 1995, the East LA Community Corporation (ELACC) is a nonprofit community development corporation based in Boyle Heights and dedicated to advancing economic and social justice in Boyle Heights and the Eastside. For over 30 years, ELACC has worked to build grassroots leadership, provide community-enriching services, develop affordable housing and neighborhood assets, and expand access to economic opportunity for low-income families and first-time homeowners. Only If is a New York City-based design practice for architecture and urbanism founded in 2013, led by Adam Frampton, AIA and Karolina Czeczek, RA. For over ten years, Only If’s work and research have focused on the potential of narrow, irregular, small, and non-conforming lots and new forms and formats of urban housing. Los-Angeles based BIRBAGROUP, led by Pedro Birba, is an award-winning architectural practice with 35 years of experience working with mission-driven developers and organizations in Los Angeles.
Design Competition Winner
Empire Property Group and EYRC Architects
Team Contact: cberberian@empirepg.com
Team Summary: Los Angeles faces a persistent gap between home prices and what many residents can actually afford, leaving fewer paths to ownership for first-time buyers, young families, and long-time residents alike. The gap has widened in recent years, making the dream of owning a home in the city feel increasingly out of reach for many. Empire Property Group is a Los Angeles-based real estate development company seeking to close that gap through innovative, small-scale infill housing that respects the character of existing neighborhoods. The Empire team is developing an approach to homeownership designed to work within the familiar homebuying landscape, with the goal of bringing more attainable ownership options to underutilized residential parcels across the city. Empire believes that thoughtful, well-designed infill housing plays a meaningful role in building wealth for families and creating stable communities.
Giraffe LA and LOHA
Team Contact: joe@giraffe.la
Team Summary: Giraffe LA and LOHA have joined forces to pursue this opportunity because we share the belief that thoughtfully designed infill housing can play a transformative role in addressing Los Angeles’ evolving housing needs. Our team brings together the complementary expertise required to deliver creative, feasible, and impactful solutions for underutilized urban sites. Giraffe LA is a licensed general contractor and real estate development practice dedicated to enhancing the livability of high-density neighborhoods. LOHA contributes extensive experience in housing innovation & thoughtful urban infill design with a track record of delivering projects that respond creatively to demanding constraints. Our proposal reimagines the small lot subdivision as a higher-density model for attainable homeownership in Los Angeles. Compact tower homes increase the number of ownership opportunities while preserving the qualities typically associated with a single-family residence: privacy, natural light, fresh air, and access to outdoor space.
Hestia Partners, s_sk, WORD, and Opticos Design
Team Contact: jaychang@hestia-capital.com
Team Summary: Hestia Communities brings together lead developer Hestia Partners in architectural collaboration with Small Lots, Big Impacts design competition winners S_SK + WORD along with urban design innovators Opticos Design. With a combined track record of over 40 completed projects ($1.8B+ in value), the team specializes in gentle density, cost discipline, and dignified starter homeownership for Los Angeles’s working families. Driven by a mission to build homes that connect with neighborhood character while unlocking wealth-building opportunities, Hestia Communities leverages innovative homeownership models and ministerial entitlement pathways. By combining award-winning design ingenuity with proven local development capacity and strong fiscal execution, the team delivers high-quality, attainable housing models that can be replicated across underutilized infill sites throughout the city.
Design Competition Winner
Olten Development and Standard Architecture + Design
Team Contact: silvia@standardarchitecture.com
Team Summary: Olten Standard—a partnership between Olten Development and Standard Architecture | Design—was formed to advance Missing Middle Housing and expand affordable homeownership across Los Angeles. Olten Development brings proven expertise in delivering thoughtful, community-focused residential projects, with a commitment to creating housing that strengthens neighborhoods and remains accessible to working families. Standard Architecture | Design contributes a strong track record of innovative, contextually grounded design solutions, shaping projects that respond thoughtfully to their surrounding communities while pushing creative boundaries. Together, Olten Standard combines development know-how with design excellence to translate the Small Lots, Big Impacts vision into housing that is both attainable and architecturally distinctive. The team is committed to demonstrating how small, underutilized lots can be transformed into meaningful homeownership opportunities—proving that thoughtful design and smart development can work hand in hand to address Los Angeles's housing needs.
Design Competition Winner
Design Competition Winners
Making More L.A.
All of the 350+ submissions we received for the Small Lots, Big Impacts competition demonstrate ideas for designing and building a type of housing that is sorely needed in Los Angeles today: new starter homes for the 21st century. The last time the housing industry produced small, compact homes that were attainable for everyday people was just following WWII. In this competition, the submissions update that old approach by re-introducing smaller, affordable homes but doing so on infill lots that utilize recent legislation to hold multiple units, make better use of our limited urban land, and still fit into their residential surroundings.
The jury selected winners in two broad categories: Gentle Density and Shared Future. The winners below had strong schemes that deploy some of the best ideas for turning Los Angeles’ infill lots into small-scale multifamily housing developments. This is Los Angeles making more of itself.
Gentle Density
Site A: Professional
Accordion House
Firm: SNDBOX
Location: Kelowna, Canada
Team: Aaron Whelan
Jury Feedback: Accordion House smartly intersperses ADUs among the primary units, eroding the socioeconomic hierarchy on site. The simple formal move of cracking open the building mass creates natural unit entrances while allowing the building to adjust the specifics of a given site.
Growing Together
Firm: Outpost Office
Location: Columbus, Ohio
Team: Ashley Bigham and Erik Herrmann
Jury Feedback: Growing Together is handsome, well-thought out, and buildable. The aggregation of spaces is successful at creating unique outdoor courtyards that are usable, differentiated, private, and intimate, but as a whole the building manages to read consistently across the site.
Little Sister
Firm: Studio Even Odd Architecture
Location: Portland, Oregon
Team: Heather McGinn-Girón and Emily Vogler. Vuki Backonja (Images).
Jury Feedback: Little Sister’s strength is its flexibility. While a number of submissions include retail space, this proposal elegantly balances construction economics with the promise of small-scale retail. Similar to the way ADUs have formalized housing that was already happening informally, the flexible space in this project could support the kind of commerce already happening in residential neighborhoods.
Porous Infill Habitat
Firm: TEAM Mixⁿ
Location: Phoenix, Arizona; Tokyo, Japan; and Taichung, Taiwan
Team: Michelle Su, Hsiung-I Yao, and Mao-Sen Weng
Jury Feedback: Porous Infill Habitat successfully introduces a degree of indeterminacy through its open skeletal framework. Its grid also supports the kind of expansion important for Angeleno families that change over time.
Shared Steps
Firm: WORD and SSK
Location: Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
Team: Sean Kennedy, Maxine Skaggs, Mikyung Lee, Hans Papke, and Chris Warren (Advisor)
Jury Feedback: Shared Steps proposes small, graceful towers that effectively add density while also providing ample outdoor space. The larger ground floor doubles as terraces for the spaces above, maximizing the utility of the small site. This tower scheme can easily be adapted to hold fewer larger units or more smaller ones.
Twin Court
Firm: wowowoworkshop
Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan
Team: Jiao Yibo and Yusi Zha
Jury Feedback: The site plan of Twin Court impressively balances a desire for greater density while maintaining owner individuality. Though the project includes multiple units, each has the privacy and outdoor space normally associated with a single-family home. The generous open space, landscaping, and form of the units themselves, push back against the linear nature of the site.
CITATION
Mini Tower Collective
Firm: Ginzok Architecture P.C. and Studio B.A.D
Location: New York City, New York
Team: Zhaoqi Chen, Yuchen Zhao, and Qiuyi Bian
Jury Feedback: The distinctive arrangement of three small towers on this site could provide an architectural solution for myriad other infill parcels across L.A., adding density while leaving a surprising amount of space around each building. In Mini Tower Collective, the stair actively participates in the house as it gives occupants rotating views while weaving from one major room per floor to another.
Site B: Professional
4x4x4
Firm: Light and Air
Location: Brooklyn, New York
Team: Shane Neufeld
Jury Feedback: 4x4x4 demonstrates a unique tetris-like subdivision of the site to create both ground floor landscaped space and elevated shared areas. There is a strong relationship between unit interiors and the shared circulation that weaves throughout the building. The facade material and fenestration create a handsome street presence.
Households
Firm: Spinagu
Location: Los Angeles, California
Team: Maxi Spina, Jia Yi Gu, and Leo Zhang
Jury Feedback: Households’ material quality and focus on interior-exterior relationships are especially successful. The building already feels like it's from Los Angeles, and the narrative outlines a compelling argument for how the single family home and concepts of sharing spaces and resources can co-exist.
Overwalk
Firm: West of West
Location: Los Angeles, California
Team: Clayton Taylor, Jai Kumaran, Jonathan Rieke, Angela Lufkin, Sam Sherman, Jess Hadley, EJ Del Rosario, Emma Gabriel, and Nick Hodge
Jury Feedback: Overwalk presents a buildable and liveable scheme that balances internal domestic space, exterior shared space and circulation, and a handful of parking spots. By wrestling with some of the thorny realities of development in Los Angeles, this project feels like it could easily fit into the city’s residential fabric while introducing a new housing model that gently adds density.
Share A Lot
Firm: Figure; MAZi Architects; and Temporary Office
Location: San Francisco, California; Newcastle, England; and New York City, New York
Team: Jennifer Ly, James Leng, Despoina Papadopoulou, and Vincent Yee Foo Lai
Jury Feedback: Share A Lot introduces a different visual vocabulary for L.A., but one that incorporates some decidedly Angeleno qualities like the portico and the gardens associated with each home. The potential cooperative ownership of the fifth parcel offers a new model for sharing resources that still ensures at least eight units on this small site. The repetition of parts and rigor of the scheme produce a project that seems equal parts refined, buildable, and replicable.
Soft Infill
Firm: AUYON BACHAR - ABLA
Location: Los Angeles, California
Team: Luz Auyon and Dylan Bachar
Jury Feedback: Since more than 75% of L.A.’s residential land is zoned single family, Soft Infill’s compelling idea of reuse, building upon existing single-family homes, sets this proposal apart. So too do the offset site plan and the continuous second floor plinth that offers spacious outdoor living.
CITATION
Front Row
Firm: DOMM
Location: Pasadena, California
Team: Raffy Mardirossian and Paul Matevosyan
Jury Feedback: DOMM’s checkerboard site plan of open space and building footprint turns every facade into a main entrance, with enough variety to ensure that each detached, three-story home has its own identity. It rigorously creates a footprint with 50% interior and 50% exterior space. Front Row introduces a unique subdivision strategy where four long, skinny lots each hold 3 units.
Shared Future
Site C: Professional
2B1B
Firm: Po-Yu Chung - Solo Practitioner
Location: New York City, New York
Team: Po-Yu Chung
Jury Feedback: 2B1B is a single-stair proposal, and it highlights the myriad benefits of that development model. Most directly, the building holds a variety of unit types that all have access to natural light and ventilation from multiple orientations. Furthermore, the building supports numerous large two and three-bedroom units which helps convincingly make the case for family living even in this taller structure.
Common Grounds
Firm: Austin Sandy Architects
Location: Alamo, California
Team: Joseph Sandy, Mathew Coyle, Pete Austin, Yoanna Cortez
Jury Feedback: Common Grounds has a familiar stackable quality which lends itself to buildability, but the project avoids monotony through the provision of well-appointed horizontal shared spaces. The central core also ensures all units have multiple solar exposures and ample access to natural light and air.
Ladderblock
Firm: West of West
Location: Los Angeles, California
Team: Clayton Taylor, Jai Kumaran, Jonathan Rieke, Angela Lufkin, Sam Sherman, Jess Hadley, EJ Del Rosario, Emma Gabriel, and Nick Hodge
Jury Feedback: Ladderblock’s mass is well disguised as its multiple thin vertical forms cleverly have different heights and setbacks. Furthermore, the circulation is efficient, combining lower-level point access entries with open air double-loaded corridors above, and visually engaging, as the circulation itself gives the building its primary character. Also noteworthy are the distribution and flexibility of units throughout.
Lotful
Firm: Studio One Eleven
Location: Long Beach, California
Team: Alan Pullman, Michael Bohn, David Nicholson, Raj Kachalia, Michael Brentlinger, Scott Parker
Jury Feedback: Lotful takes a different, more neighborhood-scale approach to Site C while still providing an ample number units. The building’s mass is effectively broken down into multiple smaller structures, and by subdividing the site the building offers an ownership model that is not reliant on condominiums.
Terrace Ways
Firm: Jonah Coe-Scharff and Kaitlin Faherty
Location: Boston, Massachusetts and New York City, New York
Team: Jonah Coe-Scharff and Kaitlin Faherty
Jury Feedback: Terrace Ways includes a variety of unit types that offer different, and flexible types of homeownership models for future tenants. Furthermore, the building’s dynamic building section is especially effective at bringing some of the elements of traditional single family homes skyward, an essential precondition for densifying Angeleno living on our boulevards.
Site D: Professional
Living Together in the Plains of Id
Firm: Only If
Location: New York City, New York
Team: Adam Frampton and Ava Violich Kennedy. Primary rendering by Tegmark.
Jury Feedback: Only If’s project is eminently buildable and provides a number of liveable features for future tenants: parking is addressed; there are a variety of unit types, some of which span between stories; there are multiple discrete shared social spaces; and the model can easily expand to hold more units or shrink to hold fewer. Furthermore, the stepping back in two directions is a subtle but controlled strategy for providing exterior space and helping the building fit into its context.
Small Lots Big Hangout
Firm: Olson Kundig
Location: Seattle, Washington
Team: Dylan Corr, David Alf, Adriana Carlos, Mitch Lorberau, and Corbin Cook
Jury Feedback: Small Lots, Big Hangout successfully leverages CLT technology, a construction approach we expect to see used more readily in Los Angeles in the coming decades, to stitch three smaller buildings together into a larger whole. The project also takes advantage of L.A.’s temperate climate by creating a particularly open, porous, and passively regulated structure.
CITATION
High Lots
Firm: Fah Vangtook and Peak Bamroongsuk - Solo Practitioners
Location: Los Angeles, California and Bangkok, Thailand
Team: Fah Vangtook and Peak Bamroongsuk
Jury Feedback: This modular project pushes the idea of expansion and changing over the time to a productive extreme: its flexible CLT grid holds a great variety of unit types, and the spaces left over for backyards, private gardens, and public green areas are compelling. The building idea is also applicable at a variety of scales, creating a system that could be replicated on different types of lots in Los Angeles.
Winning Student
FIRST PLACE
Core to Commons
Site Category: Site B
Team: Leonardo Haglmueller and Ruben Mahler
Location: Vienna, Austria
SECOND PLACE
Infill Village
Site Category: Site B
Team: Connor Kramer
Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts
THIRD PLACE
Lots to Locales
Site Category: Site A
Team: Brandt Rentel, Sydney Patterson, Remi Messier, Hollis Potts, and Ames Cassell Loji
Location: Los Angeles, California
CITATION
Inside Out, Upside Down
Site Category: Site B
Team: Tara Mehta and Zione Grosshuesch
Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan
CITATION
Interlocked Living
Site Category: Site B
Team: Shirui Zhu, Yige Cai, and Sixie Hu
Location: Los Angeles, California
CITATION
Vertical Bungalow
Site Category: Site C
Team: Yuqi Duan and Qilingli Zhang
Location: Syracuse, New York
Special Recognition
Braiding Futures
Site Category: Site A
Firm: Design Camp + Collective UNBound
Location: Long Beach & Los Angeles, California
Team: Jonathan Sharp, Shanna Whelan, Christopher Locke, Lauren Mae Sugay, and Brian Wisnewski
Cien Anos
Site Category: Site A
Firm: Mara Lookabaugh, Cecilia Huber, and Gideon Finck
Location: Brooklyn, New York & Los Angeles, California
Team: Maria Lookabaugh, Cecilia Huber, and Gideon Finck
Echo Yards
Site Category: Site A
Firm: Shin Shin
Location: Los Angeles, California
Team: Melissa Shin, Tara Mehta, Michelle Tham, and Ben Warwas
Slim Gim
Site Category: Site A
Firm: Forma + Studio Zimm
Location: Los Angeles, California
Team: Miroslava Brooks, Daniel Markiewicz, and Michael Zimmerman
Step Plex
Site Category: Site A
Firm: BR-KS
Location: Los Angeles, California
Team: Kathryn Sonnabend and Benzi Rodman
Thirsty City
Site Category: Site A
Firm: AMADOR
Location: Los Angeles, California
Team: Lucas Amador, Bradley Silling, Nicholas Lynch of Soft Systems Studio, Cecilia Huber, Gideon Finck, and Shimahara Visual
Well Connected
Site Category: Site A
Firm: Open Office
Location: Culver City, California
Team: Edward Cronin, Reed Webster, Judson Moore, Lucy O’Sullivan, Meaghan Bullard, Randi Riggs, Mason Boling, Gisela Salazar, Axel Olson, and Christian Castiblanco
2 BUY 4
Site Category: Site B
Firm: GROffice
Location: Los Angeles, California
Team: Garrett Ricciardi and Chris Rancourt
Blurry Boundaries
Site Category: Site B
Firm: Silcrow
Location: Los Angeles & San Francisco, California
Team: Jono Coles
Sunset Scaffold
Site Category: Site B
Firm: Perezic Vargas Studio, Hiroshi Kaneko, Klelia Siska
Location: Los Angeles, California
Team: Arta Perezic, Ever Vargas, Klelia Siska, and Hiroshi Kaneko
Superflex
Site Category: Site B
Firm: Speedboat
Location: Los Angeles, California
Team: Chad Karty, Jack Belter, Evan Bruetsch, and Ben Derlan
Three by Five
Site Category: Site B
Firm: Balcony Studio
Location: Los Angeles, California
Team: Priscila Villalpando and Arsenios Zachariadis. Graphics: Leslie Guidez-Marjanovic. Visualizations: LightandMatter
Co-op Towers
Site Category: Site D
Firm: Standard Architecture | Design
Location: Los Angeles, California
Team: Silvia Kuhle, Jeffrey Allsbrook, Christopher Andras, Thomas Pompeani, Madelyn Rosen, and James Skarsenski
The Space Between Us
Site Category: Site D
Firm: Warren Techentin
Location: Los Angeles, California
Team: Danny Saenz, Warren Techentin, Dana Lydon, Yuzhu Wang
