JOIN US AT THE 11TH ANNUAL DESIGN FOR DIGNITY CONFERENCE

For more than a decade, Design for Dignity has become one of the most important civic conversations emerging from the architecture community in Los Angeles — a forum where architects, policymakers, developers, advocates, financiers, and community leaders come together to confront the urgent realities of housing, homelessness, and social equity through the lens of design.

At the center of this evolving platform has been Will Wright, the steward of Design for Dignity and the driving force behind the conference since its inception 11 years ago. What began as a bold conversation about dignity and housing has evolved into a powerful call for coordinated action and systemic change.

Ahead of this year’s conference, themed “From Crisis to Construction: Building a City of Yes,” we asked Will to reflect on the evolution of Design for Dignity, the role architects must play in addressing Los Angeles’ housing crisis, and why this year’s conversations may be more urgent — and more actionable — than ever.

We posed the following questions to him:

1. Over the past 11 years, Design for Dignity has evolved from a conversation about homelessness and housing into a broader platform connecting design, policy, finance, and community advocacy. Looking back at the conference’s evolution, what do you believe architecture and the design community can uniquely contribute to solving Los Angeles’ housing crisis today?

When we held the first Design for Dignity, I thought of it as a conversation — a chance to get architects in a room and ask an uncomfortable question: what is our responsibility to the people our city has failed to house?  We organized the conference in direct response to the launch of the CAO’s Homelessness Report in 2016.  The report offered the City Council and the Mayor’s Office with nearly 50 policy and funding recommendations, and a legislative implementation strategy to deliver achievable results.  Design For Dignity was a direct response to helping the City of LA expedite those implementation strategies.

Eleven years later, it’s become a platform, and the most meaningful change I’ve watched isn’t in the policy landscape — it’s in our own profession. We’ve moved from treating homelessness and housing as someone else’s problem to recognizing it as central to what we do. Michael Lehrer, FAIA put it best in one of our early conferences: “Making ‘home’ is the primal act of architecture and of being an architect.” That line has stayed with me, because it reframes the crisis not as a detour from our discipline but as its very center.

What architecture uniquely contributes is imagination disciplined by reality. Designers can take an abstract policy or a line in a capital stack and translate it into a place a person actually wants to live — one with dignity, light, and belonging built in, not value-engineered out. We’re also natural translators: fluent in regulation, construction, finance, and human experience all at once, which means we can sit between the silos and make them legible to each other. And we can de-risk experimentation — model the “missing middle,” show what’s possible — so the city can be the design laboratory it should be.

2. This year’s theme, “From Crisis to Construction: Building a City of Yes,” suggests a shift from diagnosing problems to implementing solutions. What does a true “City of Yes” look like to you, and what are the biggest barriers — cultural, political, financial, or institutional — preventing Los Angeles from getting there?

A true City of Yes is one whose default answer to a well-designed, dignified home is yes — where the system is built to enable housing rather than to interrogate it. One of the most clarifying things we ever heard at Design for Dignity came from Natasha Hicks: the housing system isn’t broken; it’s working exactly as it was designed. That’s a hard truth, but also a hopeful one, because anything designed can be redesigned. A City of Yes means predictable, streamlined entitlements; design guidelines across funding sources that align rather than contradict; and — at the deepest level — a shared belief that access to safe, dignified housing is a civil right, not a privilege we ration.

The barriers are real at every level: institutional inertia in our zoning and land-use legacy, financial friction that spikes the cost and time of every project, and political will that’s still too anemic for the scale of the need. But if I’m honest, the deepest barrier is cultural — a scarcity mindset and a fear of change that makes “no” feel safe. We have to make it safer to fail, to experiment, to try a new typology or lot configuration, and learn from it. A City of Yes isn’t naïve optimism; it’s the discipline of removing, one by one, the reasons we’ve taught ourselves to say no.

3.  One of the most compelling aspects of Design for Dignity is that it brings together voices that do not always share the same room: architects, developers, elected officials, advocates, financiers, and community leaders. Why is this kind of cross-disciplinary dialogue essential right now, and what do you hope attendees walk away with after this year’s conference?

The honest reason I built Design for Dignity the way I did is that the housing crisis has never been a design problem, or a finance problem, or a policy problem — it’s all of them at once, and for too long each discipline has been solving its own slice in isolation. The room itself is the intervention. When an architect, a developer, an elected official, a community advocate, and a financier actually have to listen to each other for two days, the silos start to thin, and people stop talking past one another. Some of the most durable work to come out of this conference — efforts like the Open Source Homeless Initiative, or our collaborations with people like Rochelle Mills and the broader advocacy community — exists because relationships formed in that room and outlasted it.

This year’s theme, “From Crisis to Construction: Building a City of Yes,” is a deliberate push from diagnosis to action. We’ve spent years naming the problem well; now I want people to leave with a hammer in hand. My hope is that every attendee walks away with two things: a relationship they didn’t have before, and one concrete commitment — a single issue they’ll prioritize and actually move forward. If the conference ends and nothing gets built, we’ve only had a very articulate conversation. The point is to build.

JOIN US – REGISTER HERE.

Will Wright, Hon. AIA|LA – Director of Government & Public Affairs, AIA Los Angeles

Will Wright has spent more than two decades working at the intersection where design ambition meets political reality. As Director of Government & Public Affairs for AIA Los Angeles, he serves as the region’s principal advocate for architectural excellence and the built environment — translating the priorities of the design community into policy outcomes that shape how Los Angeles grows, functions, and endures.

Wright’s practice is fundamentally one of connection. He brings together architects, elected officials, agency leaders, developers, and community stakeholders around complex challenges — from infrastructure investment and project delivery reform to environmental performance and housing production — and guides those conversations toward durable, city-wide solutions.

His civic footprint extends well beyond AIA|LA. Since 2015, Wright has served on the County of Los Angeles Quality and Productivity Commission, where he currently holds the role of First Vice-Chair. He sits on the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles County Business Federation (BizFed), co-chairing its Land Use, Housing & Real Estate CEQA Committee. And in 2013, he became a founding board member of From Lot To Spot, an organization that transforms vacant parcels into parks and open spaces for underserved communities — work that reflects his long-standing belief that design equity and civic health are inseparable.

Wright holds a Master of Fine Arts from ArtCenter College of Design and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Southern Methodist University.