Los Angeles Roundtable: Architecture and the Right to Housing

What does the right to housing mean in practice, and how can architects and other urban professionals contribute? Architecture and the Right to Housing, a Pan-American program series organized by the University of Toronto’s Architecture and Housing Justice Lab from 2023 to 2025, convened leaders in the field for daylong roundtables in various cities so that they could share their responses.

Below is an excerpt from the gathering in Los Angeles, which was convened by cityLAB UCLA, UCLA Architecture and Urban Design, and the Architecture and Housing Justice Lab. It took place in Perloff Hall at UCLA’s Architecture and Urban Design school this past October.

Around the table were writer Frances Anderton; Seyron Foo, chief engagement and intergovernmental relations officer of the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency; Alfred Fraijo, founder and partner of the Somos Group; Azeen Khanmalek, executive director of Abundant Housing L.A.; Michael Lens, professor at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs; and Mohamed Sharif, associate adjunct professor and director of UCLA’s Architecture and Urban Design undergraduate program.

They were joined by architects Julie Eizenberg, Nerin Kadribegovic, and Rayne Laborde Ruiz, along with Dana Cuff and Emmanuel Proussaloglou of cityLAB UCLA, and Karen Kubey and Cassandra Santaguida of the Architecture and Housing Justice Lab.

Untapped will publish edited transcripts from the program’s other roundtables in the coming months.


DANA CUFF: Depending on who you’re reading, California has the worst housing crisis of the entire fifty states. We have the highest poverty rate of the fifty states, caused by the city’s bifurcated income, and are currently at the lowest homeownership rate: thirty-four percent, even forty-six percent [according to some reports].

That’s a shocking number, but not at all surprising. Every one of us knows that young people have no way of affording a home here, let alone rent. We don’t have financing, and housing costs too much, and we have more than seventy five thousand people living unsheltered.

L.A. is never short of crises. That’s the last reason to throw up your hands and say, “There’s nothing we can do.” This is the site where action is most needed.

CityLAB approaches this almost ethnographically. Though we collect a lot of data, we also spend a lot of time working in the trenches, where housing may or may not get through the pipeline, and trying to understand [what’s really happening]—from going to public meetings with rabid homeowners against affordable housing that’s not even near their homes, to working in planning departments that tell us that it’s going to be a year before a prefab unit can be approved.

Somewhere between that and when you watch these things in action, it’s almost like a cultural study. How do we begin to understand that, and then transform it somehow?

People around this table have the insights to define how we can start making changes. Like sociologist Ruha Benjamin, I believe in viral justice: You start with something small, and that can have ripple effects that work its way outward. That’s a [way] to put one foot in front of the other as we look at these otherwise intractable problems.

ALFRED FRAIJO: Whenever you give a lawyer a mic, it’s a struggle to stay within time—but I wanted to provide context to my work at the Somos Group.

I started it almost two and a half years ago, after twenty-plus years in big law, building teams for the largest multinational corporations in the world that were doing these large-scale developments. I realized that I needed to do something more representative of my values, and of the people we’re serving.

We’re not a nonprofit. We’re a team of more than fifty professionals, focused on building cities more equitably and designed in a way that creates resiliency and opportunity for the people who need it most.

We start with the basic tenet of housing as a human right. We think of it as an opportunity for integrating remembrance. Meaning, we have to remember the extraordinary struggle of the past, of our civic leaders, of our community leaders, of ordinary people, fighting the system to create a space of opportunity for them.

We also recognize [that tenet] as a form of resilience, an opportunity for renewal. Not just as an abstract, lofty term, but as a challenge and a mandate to reimagine the policies that are creating these systemic barriers.

I grew up in [the neighborhood of] Boyle Heights. The area has been the victim of all the urban renewal policies of the sixties and seventies. Thirty percent of our community is freeway and infrastructure. Kids like me have a lung capacity that’s reduced by some fifteen percent by the time they’re teenagers—not by choice, but by circumstance, and intentional policies that were embedded with racism.

Today, my husband and I, in addition to our work at Somos, have fourteen properties we’ve acquired in Boyle Heights with different topologies: single-family homes, multifamily apartment buildings, commercial lots with vacant parking lots. We’re using each one to build housing at a scale that is responsible and appropriate for the community. We’re imagining the possibility of housing for each of our tenants, and giving them the license to live there for as long as they want, no matter what.

This needs to be a multidimensional battle. It’s not just about bringing practitioners who have expertise in law, design, and planning together. We have to fight this in different forms.

RAYNE LABORDE RUIZ: I’m an associate at Koning Eizenberg Architecture. I used to work with Dana, and I teach at the School of Architecture at USC.

So often we say “right to housing” and move on. But right to what, actually, and for whom? Are we talking about housing as a bundle of rights, associated with property and ownership—meaning to possess, to use, to enjoy, to exchange, and to transfer? As the right and ability to build equity? Architects need to stop beautifying substandard shelter conditions and instead be part of creating a definition for what housing is in this “right to housing.”

The right to housing must also implicate the right to implement new forms of making home together. The housing crisis not only is a crisis of economics and of supply, but also one of imagination.

A few examples: The 3 Generation House by the firm Beta, in Rotterdam, envisions two [households or generations of the same family] living together in one housing structure, using the stair as a method for organization and splitting communal and private spaces. That enables shifting of floors over time to create more space for different families. Essentially, you can expand and contract, allowing for longevity over time.

The German Baugruppen model [self-developed urban co-housing] lets families come together to get funding to build small developments. This is a model where two, or potentially more, families could share space and rooms that they are able to redefine over time.

Architecture can have huge implications on equity in how we live—meaning labor equity, thinking of all of the work that we do at home, which is so often the work of women, and so often made invisible and non-economically productive. Some of that labor can be shared by living more communally, and therefore, become more efficient and more supported.

FRANCES ANDERTON: I’ve spent thirty-five-years reporting and commenting on architecture and design. I long produced [the public radio program] Which Way, L.A.?, and really thought I understood the city.

Around ten years ago, I had a wake-up moment having to do with housing. Mass transit was emerging, and with it, more dense development, more residential development, more mixed-use development. We saw that homelessness was starting to creep up. We also saw an incredibly aggressive anti-density movement.

At the same time, my daughter entered her teens, and woke up to the fact that she lived in an apartment, while her friends all lived in rather generously sized single-family homes north of Wilshire. She became bound up in the cultural conversation around what kind of home you live in.

Those things converged, and I thought: I want to start focusing on this. I want to understand why we have such conflict around housing, and why the seemingly obvious idea to build more housing is actually not obvious.

This led to my doing research for a 2022 book Common Ground. The goal: Do a coffee-table book that sexed up multifamily housing. To make the case for the legacy of great multifamily housing that Los Angeles had, to show that it could be as appealing as the single-family home.

With essentially every example in the book, I talked to a resident. And over and over again, like my daughter, they’d say they were embarrassed to tell their friends where they lived.

Then—this is the bizarre part—many of those people would then express this counter position, that they actually loved where they lived. They loved their little bungalow court, their dingbat with a courtyard with a little pool in the middle and [its sense of community]. And yet, that was coming up against this feeling of being less-than.

The book got quite a reaction. The fact that people were even interested in it showed that there’s something about the L.A. messaging around housing that is not getting out there.

AZEEN KHANMALEK: I’m the executive director of Abundant Housing L.A. We’re a nonprofit dedicated to solving our housing affordability crisis by advocating for more housing at all levels of affordability throughout L.A. County.

Our vision is for everyone to be able to afford a home in the neighborhood of their choice without the need to rely on a car. So we’re primarily housing advocates, but we’re also urbanists, thinking about the interconnected nature of housing and infrastructure throughout Southern California.

We do our work through four primary avenues. We do policy research and advocacy. We host a wide variety of educational programming to get people excited about housing, and a lot of community organizing. We have an affiliated Political Action Committee, and endorse pro-housing candidates for local elected office.

It’s illegal to build an apartment building on seventy-nine percent of the zoned land in L.A. County. This has always been a tool of racist and classist exclusion, and must be reformed if we hope to tackle a housing crisis at any point in the future. The single-family home cannot continue to dominate our cultural imagination for what it is to live a home, or own a home, in Southern California.

MICHAEL LENS: I’m a professor of urban planning and public policy [at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs]. I study housing, housing affordability, and segregation by income and race.

I must admit: I haven’t thought a ton about housing as a human right, or a basic right, or a right, so much in this country. Except for only occasionally, and I used to be pretty skeptical about what a rights conception would actually deliver, practically speaking.

A book that changed my mind on this is called Just Housing. It’s by Casey Dawkins, one of my counterparts at the University of Maryland.

He goes pretty deep into American history, legal history, and political philosophy. His central argument is that housing is necessary to perform the actions of social citizenship in this country. I think we need to justify why there is a right to housing, or there should be a right to housing, and I think that he makes a very good case that convinced a skeptic like me.

So what do we do with it? What’s the threshold of a right to housing? Is it basic shelter? Is it something else? Is it something bigger? How much housing is a right?

Basic shelter is insufficient. We need adequate housing, safe housing, housing in neighborhoods where your lung capacity is not going to decline by fifteen percent by the time you’re an adult. It’s a bundle of rights, this thing called “housing.”

SEYRON FOO: I oversee our engagement and intergovernmental relations work at the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency (LACAHSA).

We’re an agency that was created by Our Future L.A. coalition, which advocated to the state legislature and said, “What we’re doing in Los Angeles when it comes to housing financing and homelessness prevention is broken.”

As a person who started his career in government in the state legislature, our cities, and some of our smaller cities, are essentially one person trying to do a lot—and they’ve not been resourced to do it.

So one thing I’m proud to do at LACAHSA and in our department is to offer a technical assistance program that is fairly flexible for our eighty-eight cities and one-hundred forty unincorporated areas in L.A. County.

It’s to help all of our jurisdictions think through the question of, what are the possibilities? That’s important because when we’re stressed, when we’re backed into a corner, and when given a lot of resources, we often do what’s familiar. We’ll turn to what is easy to do.

With our technical assistance program, I hope to bring our cities and eligible jurisdictions together to do exactly that: to embrace innovation, to think creatively, and to explore the possibilities deeply with community stakeholders.

EMMANUEL PROUSSALOGLOU: I work at cityLAB. We have several big focuses in our office that are relevant to this discussion.

One is trying to find underutilized opportunities in both L.A. and in California writ large. [An example] is the ADU [Accessory Dwelling Unit] work that was at the forefront of cityLAB in the mid-2010s. It ended in a piece of legislation that allowed people to start the ADU revolution and build in their backyards. We understood that backyard land was land that was sitting there, fallow, ready to be built on—but it took a lot of work to unlock and make it developable.

We see Education Workforce Housing as the second project in this continuum. There are K–12 public school districts all over the state. They’re in every town, every community, and a lot of them actually have excess land. At the same time, school districts in California are facing huge challenges recruiting and retaining staff.

The idea is: Why not use this underutilized school district land to build housing for teachers and staff of the school districts? We’ve been doing this work for a number of years. We’re also finding opportunities to build on underutilized city-owned parcels of land via the Small Lots, Big Impacts project.

It requires, and it will always require, shifting the ways in which the organizations we work with work to deliver their projects. With Small Lots, for example, we had a design competition and produced a lot of amazing work. In order to get some of those projects to be the ones that work on the real parcels of land in the next stage, we’ve had to basically rewrite the city’s request for qualifications process.

The way that it normally assigns land to development entities is almost always based on financial capacity and the number of big projects they’ve done in the past. But when working at scale, looking at home ownership and at smaller buildings, those two things just don’t jibe. [We’ve had to] deeply engage with the city and shift their programs. We don’t know for sure yet what’ll be built. But in and of itself, it has been a really useful effort to shift the city in the way that they do things.

NERIN KADRIBEGOVIC: I am a founder and principal of Kadre Architects. We are an architecture studio based in Eagle Rock, and we’re about fifteen people, and we work mostly with mission-driven organizations and governmental organizations to provide design solutions for social causes.

We are implementers. We are architects, and we deal with problems that are put before us. That’s really important because most of the conversations we’ve talked about revolved around the ideal.

While it’s absolutely necessary to describe and strive for the ideal, given the crisis that we are all experiencing and given the parameters that we have to work within to create solutions, whether they be permanent or temporary, we have to work within that system.

That’s what our practice is focusing on: hacking the system to help the city, and the county, help itself.

MOHAMED SHARIF: I’m a faculty member at UCLA, and I have an architecture practice with a colleague and friend, Todd Lynch.

In 2025, I was asked to co-chair the AIA Los Angeles’s Wildfire Task Force. It came at a moment in our office where our biggest internal push was to move away from the single-family house and to work on housing at the scale of beautiful work. But January 2025 brought ill winds.

So in my role at the AIA along with a UCLA graduate, Greg Kochanowski, a survivor of the Woolsey Fire and also a landscape architect, we were asked to help educate our professional community and the public in terms of wildfire matters.

One of the things that we learned along the way: Making use of new ADU laws allowed us to put more units on small sites and then create the house-to-housing pendulum. But now this comes with an added caution: Conflagrations are primarily due to radiant ignition between houses that are typically spaced, let’s say, on a fifty-foot-wide lot, with five-foot side yards. That was kindling. So if there was a fuel, it was actually buildings.

Since then, we’ve been thinking about the space between buildings, safer distances, side yards—which are horribly underutilized—long, narrow buildings on sites that could comprise ADUs and JADUs, and about how to learn from the wildland-urban interface.

JULIE EIZENBERG: I’m the owner and founding partner of Koning Eizenberg Architecture. There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what architecture can do. I don’t know that not-for-profit housing providers or the people in policy actually understand the stuff that undercuts what architecture can do.

We’re in the primary business of a physical space that supports quality of life. That’s what I think we do within the housing staff. So, for me, my biggest complaint is losing sight of quality of life for residents in the scramble to produce units fast and cheaply.

We have to keep challenging codes and interpretations. We have to keep avenues for experimentation and exploration [open]—and not just in the future, but now. There’s got to be some sort of shortcut to test our ideas. Otherwise, it’s really hard for developers to be worrying about whether they are possible or not. They can’t take the risk, and we have nowhere to go to assure them that we can do something different.


This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. It is part of Untapped’s collaboration with Architecture and the Right to Housing, in which transcripts from the program’s roundtable discussions will be published to offer insights and candid conversations for your consideration.

The roundtable was organized by Kubey, founding director of the Architecture and Housing Justice Lab; Cuff, founding director of cityLAB; and Proussalogou, cityLAB co-director. Eizenberg and Ananya Roy, UCLA Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography, gave keynote lectures in a related public program moderated by Cuff and Kubey.