Winning designs for the City of LA's Low-Rise Design Challenge explore new opportunities for housing through research and community engagement

To improve and explore housing solutions in the city of Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti and the Chief Design Officer for the City of Los Angeles, Christopher Hawthorne, organized the "Low-Rise: Housing Ideas for Los Angeles." While the design challenge is "not a competition" in the traditional sense, explains its organizers, "this design challenge is part of a larger research initiative [...] to explore new paths to homeownership and new models of affordability in low-rise neighborhoods across Los Angeles." In support from sponsors and partners such as the James Irvine Foundation and Urban Institute, to name a few, Low-Rise offers an expanded version of housing discourse for the city. What makes this particular challenge different is by "engaging community experts in housing and asking them, in a series of listening sessions organized by theme, how they and their fellow residents would like to see their neighborhoods evolve," shares Low-Rise in their competition overview. The resul...