The Angeleno Porch: Six Social Spaces Shaping L.A.’s Affordable Housing

The porch was a feature of the American house until the mid-20th century, when the primary outdoor space became the backyard, hidden from the street, private. This was particularly evident in the Los Angeles region, defined by the single family home, individualism and suburban expansion. Creature comforts also played a part. The porch, a place to shoot the breeze and feel the breezes, was rendered obsolete by TV and AC.

But in L.A. there was another domestic tradition that nurtured social connection: housing around courts, in period revival and modern styles. Neighbors and friends could hang out together in a semi-public realm, on outdoor staircases and walkways or on the stoops of dwellings that faced each other across a shared path, lawn or patio.

Today, mission-driven architects and developers are expanding on these influences, in exemplary low-income housing in Los Angeles. Denser, taller buildings feature open-air circulation and leisure spaces that serve environmental and social ends, with striking architectural effect.

This exhibit features a multi-perspectival structure made of six porch-like spaces: courtyard, staircase, walkway, bridge, terrace, roof deck. It is framed by a curated selection of images of past precedents and contemporary housing by leading Los Angeles architects, featuring one or more of these spaces. They are color coded: Courtyards are RED, Staircases are PINK, Walkways are BLUE, Bridges are YELLOW, Terraces are PURPLE and Roof Decks are AQUA. 

Click on The Exhibit button to learn about the curatorial concept and the featured architects. Click on the images in the frame for more about the buildings.

The Exhibit

The Angeleno Porch comprises a structure made of six spaces that evoke the social function of porches: courtyard, staircase, walkway, bridge, terrace, roof deck. The exhibit was imagined as an immersive spatial journey through these interwoven porch elements, color-coded by typology, and reinforcing themes of connection, neighborliness, and community.

The structure is framed by a curated selection of images of contemporary buildings featuring those spaces – designed by the architects Brooks + Scarpa, Nicole Comp/Akin, Don Empakeris Architects, FSY Architects, Koning Eizenberg Architecture, Kevin Daly Architects, KFA, Lahmon Architects, Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects, Michael Maltzan Architecture, John V. Mutlow Architects, Studio One Eleven, Tighe Architecture, and Wyota Workshop.

The shots on the model frame are by photographers including: Iwan Baan, Benny Chan, Jeff Durkin, Art Gray, Tim Griffith, Cheron Hall, Natalia Knezevic, Adam Latham, John Edward Linden, Jim Simmons, Eric Staudenmaier, Paul Vu, Joshua White, Chuen Wu. Some of those images double up as doors, which open to reveal residents of the buildings, sharing their love for their “porches.”

At the frame’s base sit etchings of some of the many early Angeleno buildings that serve as precedents for housing with porch-like spaces: El Cabrillo (1928) by Nina and Arthur Zwebell, Strathmore Apartments (1937) by Richard Neutra, Villa Primavera (1923) by Nina and Arthur Zwebell, 3625 Fredonia Drive (1964) by Ray Kappe, and Laurelwood Apartments (1949) by R.M. Schindler.

The co-creators of this installation share a love for art and theatricality and architectural precedent that infused the narrative. The composition is multi-perspectival. Spatial elements are valentines to buildings by past and contemporary architects – Lorcan O’Herlihy’s entry stair at at MLK1101, for example; the wood siding in Kevin Daly’s Gramercy Place Apartments; the cantilevered bridge in Kevin Daly’s Tahiti Housing; the screen in Michael Maltzan’s courtyard at New Carver Apartments; the pink staircase at Santa Monica Vermont by Koning Eizenberg; a courtyard with curving concrete walls and benches as in The Courtyard at La Brea, by Tighe Architecture and John V. Mutlow Architects; entry patios off an open walkway at Ramsgate Apartments by Wyota Workshop. The courtyard, seen from above and sideways, hints at LA’s historic Moorish and Mediterranean-inspired courts. 

The exhibit also taps into a range of artistic and theoretical references. The designers took inspiration from Massimo Scolari’s book Oblique Drawing and his research on historical Chinese axonometric representations that disrupt spatial logic, and the architectural historian Mario Carpo’s theories on how architectural meaning and innovation often emerge through reinterpretation and recomposition. Other references include the dreamlike shadow boxes of Joseph Cornell, the enigmatic cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico, and the sun-drenched paintings of David Hockney, the cinematic drama of film noir, and of course the unmistakable iconography of Los Angeles itself: sunshine, surfboards, blue skies and sea, palm trees and golden-pink light.

Together, the team aimed to evoke the unique spirit and layered complexity of Los Angeles—its glamour and grit, light and shadow, wealth and poverty—while celebrating the design and development teams making this city more livable and inclusive through an “architecture of generosity.”

The Team

The Angeleno Porch emerged from a collaboration between Friends of Residential Treasures: Los Angeles (FORT: LA), Frances Anderton, and Wyota Workshop.

FORT: LA is an award-winning nonprofit that educates the public about houses and housing in Los Angeles through tours, films, scholarly research and public events. Frances Anderton is an architecture journalist and author of Common Ground: Multifamily Housing in Los Angeles, about the legacy of housing in LA centered on social space. She and FORT co-created Awesome and Affordable: Great Housing Now!, a year-long project that endeavors to explain and elevate design-forward, low-income housing in Los Angeles. These two projects informed the concept for The Angeleno Porch. 

They joined forces with the Wyota Workshop team of Siddhartha Majumdar, Anupama Mann, and Isaac MacLeod — a Los Angeles-based architecture and design practice with built work in Los Angeles, Joshua Tree, India, and Costa Rica. Their interest in housing, material expression, and shared social space informed the development of the project as a whole and helped shape the concept and design of the installation. 

The Angeleno Porch model was built by:
Construction team: Anupama Mann, Isaac Macleod, Siddhartha Majumdar, Luo Lei, Rory Macleod, Mac Hemlock
Laser cutting: Manny Torres, 2ndwnd
Frame color print and etching: Pov.Studio
3D print: Grigori Khachatryan, Architect’s Corner
Model cabinet and frame: Tim Howell, HaHaSoSo
CNC routing: Renzo Pali, Ezra Pali
Miniature Artwork: Afreen Mann Majumdar

From left to right: Isaac Macleod, Siddhartha Majumdar, Anupama Mann,
Frances Anderton, Russell Brown. Photo by Christopher Munch.

Affordable Housing in LA

To appreciate The Angeleno Porch, it helps to know about the context for the low-income housing celebrated in the exhibit.

Los Angeles today faces an enormous housing crisis, exacerbated by the fires of 2025, which left thousands of evacuees. The City of Los Angeles (one of 88 cities in the County of Los Angeles) alone faces an estimated deficit of 450,000 dwellings, half of them to be earmarked as “affordable,” meaning at discounted rents for households earning typically between 30% and 60% of the median income in their region.

The lack of affordability results from multiple intersecting factors, including historic exclusionary zoning and disinvestment in public housing, the gulf between wage levels and housing costs, high priced materials and labor, a highly regulated and time-consuming approvals process, and market-driven development that has prioritized profit over affordability. Conversely, some housing experts argue that too many restrictions constrain a free market that might otherwise produce a range of affordability options.

While policymakers are trying to loosen zoning and increase options for low rise “missing middle” housing – through measures such as adding Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) and other structures onto single family lots – the primary option to achieve affordability in Southern California is subsidized housing. This is typically produced by nonprofit developers using Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) and other funding streams to provide dwellings that are then “deed-restricted” (meaning, the property’s use is limited per conditions on the property deed) at subsidized rents for some 55 years (in California). Another approach is through “inclusionary” policies, whereby a percentage of units in a market-rate development are set aside for below market rents, resulting in mixed-income development.

Sometimes the 100% affordable homes are aimed at specific demographics, like veterans or seniors or people who were living on the streets. Sometimes these homes come with wraparound “supportive services,” for people with mental or physical disabilities.

They typically take the form of newly built or retrofitted older multifamily buildings, produced by nonprofit developers who emerged in the 1960s as large-scale investment in public housing waned, growing in the Reagan years to become leading providers of low-income and supportive housing in Los Angeles.

Many of the nonprofits are mission-driven developers who started out as scrappy, grassroots organizations; some were religious in origin, some secular progressives. They include Community Corporation of Santa Monica (Community Corp), West Hollywood Community Housing Corporation (WHCHC), Venice Community Housing (VCH), Hollywood Community Housing Corporation, and Holos Communities.

Several of them teamed up with a generation of Los Angeles architects forging a path independent from, but touched by, the formalism of Frank Gehry and Morphosis, in whose offices several of them cut their teeth. The firms, including Koning Eizenberg, Kevin Daly, Michael Maltzan, Lorcan O’Herlihy, Brooks + Scarpa, and Patrick Tighe, forged a new kind of multifamily housing for the less affluent, trying to infuse as much visual flair as possible in a building type that faces numerous constraints. The firm Killefer Flammang, founded in the 1970s, a prolific builder of housing informed by social and urbanist considerations, was also a training ground for many designers of affordable housing. Added to the mix is a new generation of firms whose work is eclectic in style but united in core values: to create architecturally aspirational and sustainable dwellings with a free flow of light, air and sense of community.

The constraints that confront development and design teams include limits on spatial and material expression, in part because funding streams for affordable housing often come with conditions (on unit size, placement of windows, planning for accessibility, and more). Also, most new affordable housing structures are built using a construction typology known as Type V or 5-over-1: several stories of wood or “stick” frame over a “podium” of concrete, containing parking and other uses. This “podium and wrap” typology can result in expediently built, formulaic designs. Deft designers and developers however maximize its potential, evidenced in the buildings in this PORCH exhibit.

Other constraints include pushback from surrounding communities resistant to affordable housing. Location then becomes a factor. Kept out of low rise and single family residential neighborhoods by costs and opposition, low-income housing is often high density and built in less than ideal sites, near highly trafficked arterial roads and mass transit stops. Designers must figure out ways to provide places of respite from noisy and polluted streets, while massing buildings in ways that harmonize as best as possible with the adjacent low-density residences.

The concentration of dwellings also means limited personal space for residents, but this can be offset by generous amounts of communal space. Most complexes have enclosed, common amenities including laundries, mail, computer, and community rooms. They can also have plentiful open spaces, starting with the courtyard and leading into a spatial weave that can create the feel of a small, hillside village, and a strong sense of place. The plaza provides passive cooling and lighting, essential for energy efficiency as well as human wellbeing, and serves as a primary social condenser. Then come circulation routes that are kept open to the sun and air wherever possible – staircases, walkways, and bridges – and add visual drama and human connection as they ascend through the complex. They flow into dedicated social spaces: terraces, and finally roof decks, which used to be for AC units and other paraphernalia, and now serve as the building’s viewing and social highpoint. It is these spaces that are the focus of The Angeleno Porch.

Read more about affordable housing at Awesome and Affordable: Great Housing Now!, another FORT initiative.

Sponsorship and Special Thanks

This project would not have been possible without the generous support of the MaddocksBrown Foundation, whose belief in our mission made all the difference; we are also deeply grateful to the FORT: LA Board for their unwavering dedication, thoughtful guidance, and tireless support throughout every stage of the process.

The team would also like to acknowledge the invaluable contributions of Robin Bennett Stein, Summer Bennett Stein, and Angelique Gross, whose support and involvement have been deeply appreciated.

We also extend our heartfelt thanks to the dedicated FORT: LA team members—including Aprilia Ayu Pratama, Lena Astari, and thunder rumbles.

The PORCH Playlist

Have yourselves a PORCH party!

Take your pick from tunes curated by DJ Caviar, aka Robin Bennett Stein, that provide the soundtrack for the six porch-like spaces in The Angeleno Porch (courtyard, staircase, walkway, bridge, terrace, roof).

Around 100 cuts, including Reflections From The Porch (Typical Cats); Back Door Front Porch (Shelby Lynne), The Bridge (Sonny Rollins), The Stoop (Little Jackie) and Won’t You Be My Neighbor (Mister Rogers), evoke or shout out specific porch references: ideas of neighborliness, friendship, conversations, hangin’ out, spontaneity, party, gathering, harmony, making peace, laughter. Sound experiences include textural cuts, break-beats, and vibe tracks that suggest air, wind, breeze, weather, birds, bells, chimes, bees, shade, light, sky, views, clouds, sun, humidity; in sum, all the feelings and encounters possible in porch-like, indoor-outdoor transitional spaces.

As DJ Caviar points out, “the porch is a celebration or crucible of humanity and community in experiential form, space, time, and heart.”