Unfortunately, many residents in Altadena and the Pacific Palisades will not return to rebuild their homes after the recent tragic fires there. As private developers circle the devastation, the time is now for returning homeowners to work together to preserve these California communities. Looking again to build a range of home types reflecting the single-family fabrics of both the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, this is an opportunity for Los Angeles to prove its intentions to create a sensible, sustainable, and affordable path forward—one that considers climate resilient design without the “McMansions” and “stucco box” apartments of decades past. Now is the time to think about a different approach to creating more housing. Our firm believes in “Gentle Density” as a housing strategy that gradually increases the number of homes in an area without disrupting the neighborhood’s character, proving the old adage that a little change goes a long way.

As fires regularly sweep across the edges of Los Angeles’s urban wild areas, rebuilding efforts should consider the role of wildflowers, sagebrush chapparal, and oak trees in fire ecology. Spread like a thin carpet across blackened hillsides, this low-density ecosystem has much to teach us about regrowth, natural systems, and the essentially delicate and temporal nature of life in a fire zone. Echoing this natural resistance to tall, dense vegetation, L.A.’s human settlements have likewise resisted the kinds of dense, residential development of other American cities, on the one hand mitigating the effects of unstable soils and, on the other, the devastating fluctuations of wind, humidity, and rising temperatures. Although often painted through the lens of social equity and the lack thereof, of “NIMBY-ism” and worse, Los Angeles’ vast and thin carpet of residential development offers opportunities for greater density, but is also its own ecosystem that, for better or worse, mirrors the natural systems in inhabits. Neither wildflower nor oak, the notion of Gentle Density reflects the pervasive and resilient nature of the chapparal, those thick and rugged plants and roots that provide shelter for wildlife and stability for the uneven ground we live on.

Our firm had been exploring the concept of Gentle Density to address the nationwide housing crisis when disaster struck in January. Historically in this region, there have been surprisingly few attempts to integrate higher density, low-rise, affordable housing directly into single-family urban and suburban neighborhoods. Isolated examples that predate the affordability crisis of the last 50 years do exist organically and under the radar in neighborhoods where they contribute to a manageable density that benefits incumbent and new residents alike. 

The resistance to high-density growth takes many forms. Sociologically, it manifests through lawsuits aimed at new developments, ritualistically accused of increasing traffic and harming neighborhood “character.” Whenever a new development is proposed to alleviate housing shortages, local and adjacent communities typically have an opportunity to provide input if the project changes any existing laws about density or use. More often than not, project neighbors will be up in arms over its potential impacts—so much so that an entire cottage industry has sprung up around neighborhood opposition, the well-known NIMBY phenomenon. 

The minute information about future developments becomes public—for example, the ubiquitous required environmental impact report (EIR) that all large-scale developments must provide—a lawsuit is born. Neighborhood groups will pour over EIRs looking for vulnerabilities (errors, omissions, etc.) and begin tossing wrenches into the process in a collective throwing contest that can add years to the creation of housing and thus exacerbates the affordable housing problem. 

The legacy of the well-meaning rollout of “transit-oriented development”—which is meant to pair dense housing with public transit options, with the theory that residents will take transit and not cause more traffic—has not borne sufficient fruit. In practice, studies show that allowing a developer to build more units because the parcel is near a bus stop does little to reduce the number of new car trips these developments will generate: wherever you have density, regardless of the transit conditions, you will have more cars and a degraded environment. And therein lies the problem and the need for a “gentler” approach. 

Gentle Density acknowledges the issue of increased traffic and its handmaidens: noise, pollution, and stress on local roads and safety. But how do we begin to insert more density into sprawling post–World War II cities? The answer lies in some revealing statistics that get at the root of the housing shortage. In Los Angeles County, for example, 89% of the land is zoned for single-family homes (one house on one property lot), with minimum property sizes for a house set at 5,000 SF. That’s a lot of land for one family in an ever-growing urban metropolis. Chipping away at that zoning in an incremental fashion, converting some of that land into two houses per property, or even up to six to eight, could add thousands of homes to the city while spreading the traffic burden out. 

As important as the reduction in traffic can be, the true value of the Gentle Density concept is a social one. Increasing density on small lots would allow better integration of a few people at a time into neighborhoods, block by block, where they have a real chance of speaking with neighbors who own their own homes and businesses and offer solid community support. 

Current zoning laws support multifamily housing that is clustered along busy commercial streets directly adjacent to tracts of single-family homes. This has proved to create an isolating, ghettoizing effect. The new residents really have no community interaction with the surrounding residents, resulting in micro-segregations at the scale of the city block. We understand that this is not the intention, but it is consistently the result. In fact, it makes us wonder: Did we learn nothing from the notorious housing projects of the 1960s? Decades of behavioral research back up the observation that living among economically stable neighbors leads to greater and more sustainable economic opportunities for all. Packing people into tall buildings or dense blocks does not a neighborhood make. Rather, a few extra people next door in a well-designed complex of two to eight units is much more conducive to positive social interactions. 

Proposed concept for eight manufactured units within a single-family neighborhood lot. 

Proposed concept for 8 rental units on one medium-density residential lot. 

Case Studies

Bell Design Group has studied sites in Carson, Santa Barbara, Oakland, and Simi Valley, California, on urban and suburban lots using a variety of zoning categories that permit anywhere between six and eight units, including accessory dwelling units (ADUs). While much has been written about new “small lot” laws that allow up to four units of for-sale single-family homes on a typical 5,000 SF lot, these developments are rarely used for affordable rental housing, with the small homes selling for upward of $1 million apiece. 

Besides zoning, the construction cost of building homes is also an obstacle to new housing of any type. Supply chains are still being rebuilt, and many construction workers were permanently lost to other industries following the 2008 financial crisis and have yet to return or be replaced. Using factory-produced housing is one way to reduce these hard costs because manufacturing housing, like any product, benefits from controlled production processes, automation, and the general efficiency of scale that assembly lines create.

Proposed plan for studio units in Carson, California. 

Although the suburban development of single-family homes is no longer unique to America, the community character and social cohesion that forms as a result is a particularly American phenomenon. American suburbs are unique in that they demand tolerance of your neighbors and their quirky habits, their pets, and their politics. This reduction of monocultural communities lifts all neighbors and is an integral part of housing solutions.

Utilizing current resources, our firm proposes a solution that places six to eight prefabricated studio units on a suburban lot (depending on the lot size). The idea is for the residents to become part of a community that helps the new neighbors grow and lead productive and successful lives. These units can be prefabricated with minimal site preparation to allow for lower hard costs. 

On the face of it, eight units may not seem like much, but if they are established organically—e.g., every third block—this number quickly compounds. These low-income residences, being nestled within single-family tracts, could be absorbed more quickly and with less impact than the large multifamily buildings typically clustered along commercial corridors in well-meaning, but problematic, fulfilment of TOD planning. 

Proposed concept for eight rental units on two levels.

Proposed concept for eight rental units on two levels. 

Gentle Density reflects natural growth patterns and provides a middle road between the excesses of single-family, private universe building, and the multifamily vehicle dump that is the inevitable result of dense housing along traffic corridors that will be underserved by public transit for many decades yet to come. Such modest and incremental growth can lead us to better and more equitable neighborhoods sooner, particularly in suburban communities, where density runs thin but neighborly bonds run deep. 

Featured image:  La Puente Park, Bell Design Group. All drawings courtesy of Bell Design Group.