Non-Speculative Housing

“Equitable Equity: Non-Speculative Housing in LA” is a research and publication project that examines how non-speculative housing and alternative development models might be adapted to the legal, financial, and cultural conditions of Los Angeles. At a time when housing in the United States is dominated by speculative, developer-driven real estate and shaped by the financialization of property, the project investigates alternative development as a reparative framework. The research attends to group formation, land acquisition, financing structures, and governance models that enable participatory housing.

Against a backdrop of disappearing artist-run spaces, eroding community centers, rising rents, and limited public housing infrastructure, the research positions alternative development as a counter-model that reduces speculative profit, foregrounds democratic design processes, and aligning with shared and negotiated ownership. It also addresses the parallel crisis within architectural labor, asking how architects might reclaim agency from market-driven systems by engaging in alternative economic and organizational practices.

The culmination of the research will be a publication scheduled for distribution in 2028. Conceived as both a discursive contribution and a practical guide, the publication will document the procedural and legal frameworks behind cooperative development while offering tools, diagrams, and case studies tailored to the Los Angeles context. By making visible the organizing processes behind non-speculative housing, the project seeks to catalyze new coalitions to imagine development as a collective, care-based practice—reframing housing not as a speculative commodity, but as shared civic infrastructure. 

The project builds on a several years of dialogue and convenings with artists, organizers, and cultural workers to explore collective ownership and arts-led housing strategies in response to displacement and spatial precarity in Los Angeles.