Built in 1927 as an Art Deco-style jail to hold 625 people, The Lincoln Heights Jail quickly became overpopulated and held nearly 2,800 prisoners by 1950. Due to overcrowding and high maintenance costs the City and County voted to decommission the jail in 1965. 

From 1979 to 2014 the jail housed the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts. In 2016 the City commissioned an adaptive reuse study and awarded an RFP to adaptively reuse the site in 2017.  In 2022 the developers returned the site to the City due to a high amount of environmental hazards and infeasibility.  Currently, there are City facilities located in separate buildings on the property.

The City is experiencing a housing crisis amidst a global climate crisis. LA County contains the nation's largest number of homeless individuals who reside outdoors on our streets.  The City is also mostly comprised of renters, half of which pay more than 30% of their income on housing and are thus housing cost-burdened. Low-cost housing is located far from the City’s job centres and boundaries contributing to sprawl in Southern California where some commuters spend up to 3-4 hours daily commuting into the City for work, leading to an increase in GHG emissions and Vehicle Miles Travelled.  It is imperative that we construct more infill housing close to DTLA. 

Approx. site area:

The site is 210,800 SF/ 2 hectares 

Key Information

The surrounding area is densely populated, with a high percentage of Latino and Asian residents. The median household income is among the lowest in the region and ranks in the 100th percentile for CES 4.0 pollution score.

Priority areas & main expectations:

The size and location of the site present a unique opportunity to become a pilot to model “Social Housing” for the local and regional community. It can become a catalyst for economic development and increasing access to natural resources. Solutions can either focus on the adaptive reuse of the jail (considering the inflexible concrete infrastructure) or can assume the land has been remediated and the building demolished. For either approach, teams should bear in mind the cost and feasibility of their proposed interventions. 

I'm interested! What next? 

• Team registration closed on 5 April 2024. Registered teams should now begin working on their projects! 

• The submission portal will open for entries at the end of April 2024. The deadline for teams to submit their projects is 20 June 2024.