Decentralized American Cooperative Housing: Addressing The ‘Missing Middle’ And Collective Living
UCLA CityLab Small Lots Big Impact Design Competition — Shared Futures Category
As part of the first phase of the 2025 Small Lots Big Impact Design Competition, participants were tasked with proposing innovative homeownership models for the City’s small, overlooked, and forgotten lots. The designs imagine a sustainable urban future that redefines the Los Angeles residential landscape through infill, shared amenities, and compact communities as alternatives to the traditional detached house.
A Framework for Decentralized American Cooperative Housing aims to create scalable, permanently affordable homes by decoupling the human right to a home from speculation and wealth accumulation. The opportunity presented by the Small Lots Big Impacts competition is the perfect catalyst to spark a chain reaction of cooperatives that permanently provide affordable housing to the people of Los Angeles. Our proposal establishes a Community Land Trust (CLT) that unites independent housing cooperatives under collective land stewardship. Cooperatives take ownership of their buildings, while the CLT retains the land—leasing it to each cooperative, removing the land from speculative markets and ensuring permanent affordability, while retaining the ability for cooperatives to take out loans against the land for further development. Although the program is expansive in scope, in this Shared Futures proposal we focus specifically on designing one of the cooperatives within the land trust.
This multi-story building is designed to maximize the advantages of cooperative ownership, achieving high density with generous shared amenities through co-housing. The primary architectural feature of the project is the satellite rooms, woven into the fabric of the structure and interspersed across floors to allow maximum flexibility for diverse households and families to comfortably live in the cooperative. Public circulation corridors merge seamlessly with the interior courtyard, and a rooftop terrace, transforming simple passageways into vibrant social spaces. These versatile areas adapt to evolving community needs—as workshops, study nooks, or gathering halls—reinforcing the cooperative ethos. Architectural strategies optimize density without compromising habitability: compact unit footprints are augmented by the second floor double height public space which, combined with central atrium, facilitates natural light and cross-ventilation. Construction is expedited through modular, panelized systems—complete with prefabricated kitchen and bathroom pods—reducing on-site labor, accelerating schedules, and ensuring consistent quality control.
Designed by Lincoln Ruiz-Truong and Nick Grosh