Cities, the nation’s engines of economic growth and prosperity, are becoming less livable and less affordable for the majority of families and workers essential to a city’s function. Essential workers – nurses, firefighters, teachers – no longer live in the communities they serve and continue to be pushed out to the brink of financial ruin and to faraway suburbs. A city with a hollowed out middle class undermines the sustainability of society.

To find our missing middle, we must dream up a new era of housing for the masses. It is time to come together and reinvent the way we plan, build, and finance housing for our middle class – our future home depends on it.

The Housing Innovation Collaborative, a nonprofit housing innovation coalition based in Los Angeles, is collecting the following growing list of proposed housing project designs presented below as a resource for communities around the U.S. Concepts are subject to HICo’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

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The Essential Housing Innovation Challenge is a three-stage collaborative innovation production to introduce 100+ new housing design proposals to deliver housing for the middle-class*…

> Faster – By-right designs for a variety of prospective infill site categories

> Cheaper – Less than $250,000 per unit in total development costs (excluding the land purchase costs)

> Better – Active community engagement throughout design and implementation process

*defined as 80-120% of Los Angeles County’s area median income

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The ultimate goal of the Campaign is to reach and surpass Los Angeles County’s state-mandated moderate income housing production goals* by the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics – a seven-year feat that would consist of building 130k new moderate income units (almost 20k new homes per year), bringing in $40 billion in new investment, and creating thousands of stable, middle-class housing and manufacturing-sector jobs in the region.

To get there, we must first demonstrate a viable pathway forward for new moderate income housing development in Los Angeles.

*See state’s sixth cycle RHNA goals for LA County here (and how far short we are on our current production goals here)

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