Terrace Ways

Los Angeles, CA
2025

with Kaitlin Faherty

Winner, Shared Futures category,
UCLA cityLAB Small Lots, Big Impacts Competition

What makes an alleyway a Terrace Way?

A winning entry in UCLA cityLAB’s Small Lots, Big Impacts competition, TERRACE WAYS reconceptualizes Los Angeles’s neighborhood alleyways as eco-social infrastructure for dense, climate-conscious urban housing. 

Terrace Ways offer an adaptable system for mass timber housing on narrow corner-alley lots. Amplifying the LA Green Alley Initiative, Terrace Ways engage the alley as an extension of the building and its ecological systems, from stormwater management and treatment to shared community space and resources. The diverse unit types reflect the diversity of LA’s would-be-homeowners while retooling the amenities of the single-family house for a more collective future.

The jury noted that “Terrace Ways includes a variety of unit types that offer different, and flexible types of homeownership models for future tenants. Furthermore, the building’s dynamic building section is especially effective at bringing some of the elements of traditional single family homes skyward, an essential precondition for densifying Angeleno living on our boulevards.”