The results are now in from Los Angeles’s $100,000 open design challenge, which asked architects and landscape architects to propose innovative, sustainable models for low-rise, multi-unit housing. The initiative—launched last November by the mayor’s office, along with the city’s chief design officer, Christopher Hawthorne—drew nearly 400 responses worldwide. Funded by the James Irvine Foundation, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and Citi, this call-for-ideas aimed to open up productive dialogue, as Hawthorne puts it, “to break the logjam for the future of low-rise living in LA.”

The design brief makes the case that the “American Dream” of private home ownership—having become increasingly the realm of the privileged—“needs an update.” With Los Angeles essentially out of space to extend its sprawl into more single-family subdivisions, Hawthorne writes in the introduction to the challenge, “the standalone house has become more a place to protect wealth than to begin building it.” One severe limitation on further spread has been the danger near the wildland-urban interface, where the incidence of massive wildfires has grown exponentially, threatening inhabited communities. With climate change gaining momentum, the need to build sustainably has clearly become more urgent—prompting the call for greater density and growth closer to the urban core. And low-rise fourplexes have been shown to offer particularly high potential for efficiency—in terms of both affordability and environmental costs, from construction through ongoing operations. As the design brief puts it, “An intelligently designed fourplex may well use the same or less energy and water than a large single-family residence on the same lot.”