LA practice Kadre Architects uses design as a street-level tool for social change

In February, ICON was invited to the ribbon-cutting for an adaptive reuse project in the high desert, an hour north of Los Angeles. Over the course of 18 months, a former dilapidated and crime-plagued motel had been transformed into a green park-style campus, adorned with colourful walkways, children’s play areas and lattice like solar porches for families transitioning out of homelessness.

Across 38 newly renovated units, The Sierra is providing interim housing, three daily meals, case management and support services to its 152 residents, who are mostly single mothers and children. And, just two days after opening its doors, it had hit full capacity.

The project is among the growing portfolio of Los Angeles firm Kadre Architects – a young practice intent on finding creative ways to address California’s complex urban challenges by using design to enact social and humanitarian change. Kadre’s founder, third-generation architect Nerin Kadribegovic, came to the US as a refugee following the ethnic conflicts in Yugoslavia and Bosnia in the 1990s.

Photography courtesy of Kadre Architects featuring Nerin Kadribegovic

Modest, empathetic, but with a clarity of focus, Kadribegovic credits his personal experience of displacement as having been foundational in ‘learning to do a lot with very little’. Over coffee at his studio in the city’s Eagle Rock neighbourhood, he explains how these formative teenage years helping to repair neighbours’ blown-out doors and windows using found materials built a tenacity and a creative ability to think on his feet. This pragmatism and versatility remain central to his practice’s work today. Imparting hope and safety during hardship has become second nature.

Following the Dayton Accords in 1995, which put an end to the Bosnian war, the 17-year-old applied for refugee status in the US and was placed with a family in Salt Lake City. He enrolled in community college, then university, eventually moving to Los Angeles for a master’s degree at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), taking a job with local firm Lehrer Architects on graduation. The first project Kadribegovic worked on with Lehrer was a community centre that was serving the population of Skid Row, an area long known for its condensed homeless population.

‘Homelessness is so multi-faceted,’ he notes. ‘For decades, the city has struggled to get a grip on the crisis due to structural and bureaucratic reasons.’ In recent years though, numbers have spiked. In 2023, over 75,000 people in Los Angeles County were either unsheltered (living outside, in tents, cars, caravans and other makeshift encampments), or in transitional or emergency housing. Personal vulnerabilities may explain who becomes homeless within a given community under a specific set of circumstances. But the regional variation in rates of homelessness can only be adequately explained by the costs and availability of housing.

Photography courtesy of Kadre Architects featuring The Sierra

Working his way up at Lehrer, Kadribegovic became a leader in the practice and eventually a partner alongside the founder, Michael Lehrer. When the emergency housing crisis began in early 2020, the team was on the city’s shortlist. And as the pandemic took hold, they were tasked with designing, permitting and delivering factory-built tiny home villages in just three months, as a way of providing temporary shelter to homeless populations.

‘At that time, we developed a really strong relationship with the project team, because we were hand-in-hand walking through the fire,’ explains Kadribegovic. ‘We created hundreds if not thousands of emergency units really quickly, and it helped bring the city back from the brink. That was the first project, the second, third, fourth, fifth in quick succession, and after that I decided it was time for me to start my own practice.’

Kadre Architects is now two years in, and, with dozens of projects on its books, Kadribegovic has grown his team to 14 fulltime staff. He still collaborates with Lehrer Architects, and both work closely with Hope the Mission, the largest homeless service provider in the Greater Los Angeles Area.

From youth housing and community centres, to spearheading San Diego’s Emergency Housing Implementation Plan across safe camping, safe parking, sleeping cabins and adaptive reuse, the practice works fluidly across typologies. Facades are often used as a bright and colourful canvas for public art – a low-cost intervention designed to create a sense of belonging and dignity for residents.

Photography courtesy of Kadre Architects featuring The Alvarado

In January this year, Kadre and Lehrer unveiled a new housing format for Los Angeles, which saw an evolution from the tiny home villages of the pandemic. Larger in footprint to allow families to stay together and with private bathrooms and kitchenettes, this community of 34 self-contained units, named New Beginnings, increases privacy and autonomy for residents who are on the road to permanent housing.

But it is in adaptive reuse where Kadre seems to have found its sweet spot. ‘On average, it takes five years to build a new, multifamily affordable housing project here,’ Kadribegovic explains. ‘The planning and design take a year; construction takes about a year. Then three years are essentially spent trying to get approvals.’

California’s policy of discretionary approvals also means any local resident can block the project if they don’t want affordable housing in their neighbourhood. By-right development avoids this issue by strictly conforming to zoning and building codes, but the need to hit a critical mass of housing density coupled with challenges around legislation and financing mean that most new build proposals fail to pencil out.

In 2020, the state introduced Project Homekey, an initiative to acquire and retrofit hotels for supportive housing. Through its streamlined financing and environmental review processes, and by encouraging by-right permitting, Homekey has enabled Kadre to convert down-at-heel motels into housing fast and at scale.

Photography courtesy of Kadre Architects featuring The Woodlands site