Christopher Hawthorne made a surprising career change. Last year, after nearly 14 years as the architecture critic at the Los Angeles Times, he took a job under Mayor Eric Garcetti as the city’s first chief design officer. Hawthorne had been one of the few architecture critics left at a major U.S. daily and gave a civic-minded rationale for his departure.

“I stubbornly continue to believe in the public realm,” he wrote in the Times. “A career spent writing about architecture and urbanism, while it’s certainly made me cynical in some ways, has yet to rob me of my faith in the power of the collective spaces of the contemporary city.”

So what does the chief design officer do? Hawthorne says he spends about 40 percent of his time overseeing the design quality of city projects already in the works and 40 percent on competitions and proposals to create new ones. The other 20 percent, he says, is spent talking with the public about the importance of design in the urban landscape.

He recently spoke with Dwell about the city becoming an architecture patron, the redesign of thousands of streetlights, and the future of housing in a town synonymous with 20th-century planning and single-family homes.

Dwell is based in San Francisco and New York, so it’s painful for us to ask, but is Los Angeles the coolest city in the country right now?

Christopher Hawthorne: L.A. is the most dynamic city in the country now in terms of culture and cultural production, and I think by a significant margin. This continues to be a really fantastic place to move if you’re a young chef, or a young artist, or a young writer, or a young musician. There’s just more room to operate here than in other cities.

But it’s difficult for younger architects to gain a foothold, just because the city has gotten bigger, more expensive in terms of its land. And so the opportunities that were available to young architects in the ’70s and ’80s, and really the whole modern history of Los Angeles, are trickier to find. And so I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

Is that something you want to remedy from City Hall?

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how we, as a city, can think of ourselves more actively as clients or even patrons of ambitious architecture and take the place, to a certain extent, of the private realm in driving architecture and design forward.

As far as I know, you’re the only critic turned city official in the country. Why were you the right person for the job? Well, one reason is that part of my role is to focus on design excellence and think about architectural quality. A practicing architect in this job might have a very specific idea about a solution to a problem. My job is to work with the architects who have been engaged by the city to make their projects as successful as possible in their own voice.

Can you give an example?

Right now, we’re working with the Bureau of Street Lighting to do a competition for a new standard streetlight. We install 1,000 to 2,000 of those in Los Angeles every year. So for one winning design team, it will be an opportunity to really make a mark across the entire city.

As in many cities around the country, housing costs in L.A. have risen rapidly, leading to an increase in homelessness and a squeezing out of the middle class. What are you doing about that?

The mayor has really been helping drive two policy initiatives on the housing front. The first is allowing more ADUs—an accessory dwelling unit or so-called granny flat, which is a second unit on one lot in a single-family neighborhood. And then there’s our Transit Oriented Communities program, which gives incentives to developers that build new housing near transit.

There’s a national conversation going on about the history of single-family neighborhoods and their connections to wealth gaps and gaps between white homeowners and communities of color. But I think that there’s been a stereotype of a rift between NIMBYs and YIMBYs [people who support affordable housing in theory but Not in My Backyard and those who say, Yes in My Backyard]. In my experience, when I talk to members of the public about this, I’m finding that most people are in the great in-between territory, where there are a lot more shades of gray.

So what’s the answer?

I’ve been working on a housing competition that we launched this fall looking for solutions to that question about the future of single-family neighborhoods by drawing on the particular architectural history of Los Angeles. That goes all the wayback to bungalow courts in the late 19th century and architects like Irving Gill, who was doing remarkably forward-looking, modernist multifamily projects in the early 20th century. A lot of architects, and I think particularly younger architects, are really interested in housing and working across the whole affordability spectrum.

What will you be looking for in the competition?

A combination of being deeply pragmatic but also really interested in experimentation, innovation—that’s what makes an L.A. project an L.A. project.