Elizabeth Shin

Elizabeth Shin is a Master of Urban and Regional Planning student with a concentration in design and development. She has a background in landscape architecture and worked for Tulare County Planning Department before coming to UCLA. Elizabeth is currently an Urban Design Fellow at HereLA, where she works on design and planning across a range of project types.

Project Overview

Los Angeles faces one of the most severe housing affordability crises in the United States, which some have attributed in part to prescriptive design requirements. Los Angeles Housing Department (LAHD) design standards, drafted to balance affordability with design quality, have been unchanged since 2015, leaving Los Angeles increasingly out of step with the city’s escalating housing affordability challenges. This project seeks to evaluate how the L.A.’s architectural design guidelines impact the cost and feasibility of single- and multifamily housing development, with the goal of identifying opportunities to remove or revise requirements, and achieve a more balanced scale of affordability and design quality. Through a combination of stakeholder interviews, cost analysis and comparative review, the project aims to address the following question: How do LAHD design requirements differ from those of other housing funding programs, and which standards could be updated to better support cost-effective housing production?

Why is this topic, specifically, important to you?

The ability to find or keep a home depends on forces beyond individual control, with rents rising faster than wages, zoning laws restricting where new housing can go, or design regulations becoming barriers to affordable housing development. Access to shelter is shaped by policy, how planners draw lines, how architects define beauty, how governments decide what is worth enforcing. Understanding how design standards impact the cost and feasibility of affordable housing projects is essential to reducing the regulatory barriers to development.

Who are the partners involved in this project and how will you be working with them?

This project is in collaboration with the Los Angeles Housing Department (LAHD). I will also be working closely with affordable housing developers and architects within Los Angeles as part of my research.

How do you hope that this project will impact the field moving forward?

I hope to find ways to reform design regulations so they support, rather than stifle, the creation of affordable housing.