Since as far back as the days of Garbo, Bogey, and the old Red Car trolley line, affordable housing in Los Angeles has typically meant one thing: new houses, most likely built in some previously undeveloped patch of dust and chaparral. There have always been apartments, of course—in particular the midcentury “dingbat” type, hoisted atop thin pilot is—and here and there a smattering of postwar public housing projects. Yet by and large, the area has remained the poster child for all-American sprawl, countering rising real estate costs by letting private developers follow the freeways, littering single-family homes along the way.

Those days are over. “There are so many incentives at this point for developers to build affordable multiunit projects,” says L.A. architect Patrick Tighe. With its geographical expansion slowing, and with once low-rent neighborhoods rapidly gentrifying, the city is intensifying efforts to create subsidized apartment buildings wherever room can be found to put them.

The trajectory of Tighe’s practice is symptomatic of this shift. While the firm still designs some single-family homes and other types of projects, Tighe Architecture has also focused on higher density housing, from multifamily to accessory dwelling units. Over the last decade, it has been increasingly involved in the affordable sector, designing buildings in which all or a portion of the units are available at below-market rates. “We don’t discriminate between a wealthy client and a nonprofit,” Tighe says. As L.A. looks to build a more equitable future, Tighe and company are showing what that future could be.

Tighe’s CV reads like a checklist of West Coast design-world standbys: Trained at UCLA, he apprenticed briefly with Frank Gehry before spending seven years under Thom Mayne at Morphosis. Since then, his work has been in exhibitions at L.A. MOCA and the A+D Museum; he’s taught at SCI-Arc and currently holds a teaching position at USC. Perhaps most important, as the architect says, “I really evolved around the art world.”

Since his student days in the 1990s and continuing with commissions for galleries and live/work spaces for local creative professionals, Tighe has maintained a connection to the city’s broader cultural scene. The result is a portfolio that exudes an unmistakably Angeleno air—that giddy-making whiff of methane, jasmine, and sawdust.

The wild formal invention and raw materiality that give Tighe Architecture’s work its ineluctable L.A.-ness furnish a crucial response to a pressing question: What does it mean to build affordable housing in the city today?

Although the firm has completed multiple projects that feature some low-cost set-asides (as per L.A.’s recent inclusionary housing ordinance), one of Tighe’s early forays into 100-percent-affordable work came in 2010, with the sustainably built Sierra Bonita development in West Hollywood. The project created 42 one-bedroom apartments for low-income tenants with disabilities.

Five years later and only a few blocks away, Tighe returned to the fully subsidized arena with a commission for La Brea, a 50,000-square-foot complex with an equally compelling civic brief. The 32 apartments are for formerly homeless LGBTQ youth (as well as others living with disabilities or HIV/AIDS), with indoor/outdoor settings meant to help them readjust to domestic life. The firm’s next all-affordable project, Pacific Landing, opening later this year not far from the beach in Santa Monica, will offer 37 studios on up to two-bedroom units to low- and moderate-income renters.

Without making any overt distinctions between its private-sector and subsidized work, Tighe Architecture’s ecologically sound, contextually attuned affordable buildings give L.A. a new and alluring image of itself, one rooted in a sense of place but tempered by a commitment to inclusive and sustainable urbanism.

As the firm embarks on more ambitious projects in the below-market-rate sphere (including one major commission, in Watts, that will remake several contiguous blocks in a former industrial district), Tighe says he looks at every project as an artistic opportunity, imbuing each with the ingenuity, grit, and pizzazz of the creative milieu he’s been a part of for 30 years: “That, for me, is the ground from which to work.”

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Photography: Ye Rin Mok / @yerinmok