Los Angeles faces a huge housing crunch, with thousands of people living on the streets and numerous low-income workers unable to afford market-rate rentals or mortgages. Absent a large-scale housing program, dedicated developers and designers are piecing together residential solutions on infill sites that model high ideals. They often confront complex financial and political challenges, along with resistance from neighbors. To allay concerns, explain challenges, and elevate appreciation for affordable housing in Los Angeles, Friends of Residential Treasures Los Angeles (FORT: LA) and Frances Anderton created Awesome and Affordable: Great Housing Now, a multiplatform project that includes an explainer about L.A.s housing unaffordability and ways to tackle it (The Case for Great Housing); a Housing Terminology Playbook, written by David Kersh, that unpacks the policies, laws, and players underlying the maintenance and production of affordable homes; and 12 awesome projects, selected over the course of 2024. An edited excerpt of the accompanying interview with FORT founder Russell Brown and Anderton follows below. In early January, Los Angeles was beset by the devastating Palisades, Eaton, and other fires. This tragedy has put huge pressure on L.A.s housing supply, as thousands of evacuees rush to secure new homes, causing massive price gouging in the rental market and further squeezing the areas limited housing supply.Obviously, keeping people safe and housed is the first priority, and that comes with many challenges. Next comes rebuilding, and of course the architecture community stands ready with strategies for building back better in vulnerable areas. Long term, however, residents, politicians, and planners might ask if, after a century of runaway residential development in the fire-prone mountain ranges, it is time to reconsider our development patterns and perhaps disincentivize urban sprawl in the danger zones. This would go hand in hand with emphasizing denser residential development in the safer flatlands near downtowns and adjacent lowrise neighborhoods close to mass transit.Plenty of talented architects and developers are showing that this kind of infill can be done with great allure and at all income levels, as evidenced in this project and Andertons 2022 book Common Ground: Multifamily Housing in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the pressure is on to rebuild just as before. Before embers had cooled, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order temporarily suspending the permitting and review requirements under the California Environmental Quality Act and the California Coastal Act, which will speed up rebuilding in Los Angeles County wildfire zones. This was easy short-term politics but questionable long-term leadership.Rose Apartments mixes up ground-level offices and studios in wings around two stepped courtyards. (Jeff Durkin/Courtesy Brooks + Scarpa)Meanwhile voters have shown high resistance to intensifying development in downtown areas. In the last two years, Los Angeles elected officials, under pressure from stakeholders including homeowners, have already stymied directives and policy measures aimed at promoting denser housing. This means the two-thirds of residential land long zoned single family only remains at very low density (with the addition of ADUs), while multifamily buildings are mostly consigned to the thoroughfares.At the same time, confusingly, voters passed Measure A, a half-cent sales tax to support the construction of affordable housing. This is one of several funding measures passed in recent years by voters, aimed at resolving homelessness. Yet, when a real project is presented for a site, it becomes a much harder nut to crack, exemplified in the bitter political and legal struggle over an affordable complex designed for Venice Community Housing by Eric Owen Moss. The nonprofit developers have won the latest round but have switched architects.The devastation may, however, bring some winds of change. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has issued a new executive order calling for city agencies to expedite temporary occupancy approvals for 1,400 housing units that are near completion. It may be harder now for communities to thwart apartment construction, at all income levels. And hopefully the projects shown in Awesome and Affordable, along with many other inventive multifamily buildings by L.A. architects, will make a powerful case for denser development and a more equitable city. Awesome and Affordable is just one of several collaborations between FORT: LA and Anderton. In late January, they coproduced, with Helms Bakery District, a public event to address the fires and recovery. They are cohosting quarterly gatherings, combined with wine tastings, at the historic Barnsdall Art Park. Later this year they will publish Golden Years in the Golden State: Tales From the Senior City, an exploration into how older Angelenos are choosing to live. Additionally, FORT: LA and Anderton are collaborating on a documentary about the influential architects who began their careers in Venice in the 1970s, including Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Craig Hodgetts, Coy Howard, and Fred Fisher, bringing the story full circle with a re-creation of the famed 1980 Venice Beach photo taken by Ave Pildas.What has been the most rewarding part of working on the Awesome and Affordable project this past year?Its always inspiring to see great new architectureand its exciting to realize that there are endless new solutions to the challenge of providing affordable housing. Some of L.A.s most creative architects are putting their minds to that problem.In the past year, what have we seen? The extraordinary Isla Intersections designed by Lorcan OHerlihy Architects, which takes public land at an uninviting site at the intersection of the 105 and the 110 freeways and Broadway and turns lemons into lemonade with a very creative design utilizing shipping containers repurposed into a courtyard complex in a triangular arrangement that has layered terraces and a shady, quiet place for the residents to sit inside a courtyard area, as well as a new, landscaped paseo alongside the building. We also saw The Journey, on Lincoln Boulevard at Venice, another uninviting place to live that has been turned into something special by the architects at Studio One Eleven. They figured out how to turn a dense development for people who were formerly living on the streets or transitioning out of foster care into a complex of airy little studios and one-bedroom dwellings, opening onto stacked open terraces that offer residents a view toward the sea. From the same nonprofit developer, for a similar demographic as The Journey, comes Rose Apartments, a stunning complex designed by Brooks + Scarpa, which mixes up ground-level offices and studios in wings around two stepped courtyards with a lustrous glitter stucco facade.We also got to see retrofits of older buildings, like St. Andrews Court, a bungalow court which was acquired and beautifully restored by Hollywood Community Housing in the 1990s. Also in Hollywood, we have the Castle Argyle, which, when it was built in the 1920s, was pretty fancy rental apartments for people who were hoping to make it in the movie business. Over the years, it fell into disrepair and it is now senior housing, lovingly repurposed by Bell Design Group, with a new outdoor plaza, showing that affordable housing doesnt have to be a negative experience or a negatively perceived experience. Those are some of the highlights of this year. Its been a really wonderful journey, and my only regret is not being able to shine a light on even more of the projects out there.Masterplan for Jordana Downs (Urbanist471/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)Did any human stories from the project resonate with you personally?One of the projects we included was Jordan Downs, a famous public housing estate in Watts that started out as wartime housing. Over the years it suffered from a concentration of poverty, a lack of economic opportunity in the area, and it became beset with social problemsso much so that the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles stepped in and entered into a deal, somewhat controversially, with private affordable housing developers to have them take over the management of the building. They embarked on a massive overhaul involving a rolling program of demolition of the existing buildings and the construction of new structures within a masterplan established by a firm called Mithun/Solomon, led by Daniel Solomon and John Ellis. This is a very sensitive development because, despite all of its problems, it was home for a lot of people who were nervous about the transition in ownership and the changes in their lives that were going to happen.Now, of course, in one visit, I cant say that I came away with a full picture of whats going on there, but I did run into a resident who had moved from one of the older buildings, where people were particularly skeptical of what was coming, into a new section of the development that was designed by a terrific firm, FSY Architects, that also designed our January awesome, the Vista Ballona. They are creative with producing unpretentious, light-filled, modest dwellings that have a sense of calm. The resident told me that he loved his new place. He liked some of the new features, like air-conditioning. He talked about how restful he found his new dwelling.Was there anything that jumped out at you that you would like to change?Well, it relates to the air-conditioning mentioned above. I heard that at Jordan Downs not everybody was happy about the newly added air-conditioning because it added to their electricity bills. And one of the things I noticed on my travels aroundL.A.s affordable housing was how several new developments were configured around an open courtyard, for social reasons, and yet they did not have windows in the wall of the unit that faced the courtyard, thereby denying the lovely natural light and cross-ventilation enabled by that open space. It seems that there are various reasons for this, from fire codes to privacy to costs, but this seems like a huge missed opportunity for affordability and enhanced livability. Do you have any advice for emerging architects who might be interested in building affordable housing?Building affordable housing is not simply about designing housing; its also about navigating tremendously complex rules and limitations. Affordable housing is borne of complex legislation at the city, county, and state levels because the free market doesnt produce affordable housing. The free market, by definition, produces housing that is aimed at what the market will bear, and what the market will bear is very high priced, because there are enough people in L.A. earning high enough salaries. So the market simply doesnt provide for the lower-middle and very-low-income people. And yet, the backbone of L.A.s economy is those workers, whether its in the service industry, teachers, people working in hospitals, and so on.Around 8,000 people joined the list for the Vista Ballona and only 50 applicants were housed. Every project is piecemeal and can take years. Thats not really solving a problem; its making a teeny dent in a problem. At a certain point, one has to ask: Is this viable? Can we not do something at scale that really expedites the process?So architects, these days, have to don another hat. They must help push for policy changes. That might mean speaking up at community meetings or council meetings and making the case for this housing, or it might mean getting involved in pushing for legislative change. Its a brave new world for architects. Affordable housing is the new frontier. Its essential right now in L.A. and in many cities in the world, and architects ought to engage with it and, ideally, do it well.