Ready-to-Install Interior Kits for Everyday Living

Affordable housing and homelessness

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

At Kit Switch, we seek to make Los Angeles the best place to live. We deliver quality affordable products that make the building blocks of everyday living, enabling Angelenos to cook, clean, sleep, play, learn, in their home, no matter where they live or how much money they make.
“I get to live in the 21st century” - said a low-income senior resident at one of our open houses.
We tackle the challenges of fragmented and bespoke building retrofits, streamlining the process to alleviate cost and time burdens in housing development. While apartment components like kitchens and bathrooms are often repeated, they're still designed by architects on a time-consuming per-project basis and contractors face labor shortages and intricate supplier coordination.
As a result, one in ten apartments require immediate rehabilitation in the US today, because of deferred maintenance. Instead, Kit Switch helps increase access to safe and accessible homes and lower tenants’ maintenance and energy bills.

Kit Switch reinvents interior construction with turnkey modular products that help architects design and gather community feedback, halve installation time and improve safety for contractors, reduce cost for developers, all while including durable, healthy, and energy-efficient materials and features.
The LA2050 grant timeline aligns with our scale-up toward multifamily projects in LA County, such as with Optimist Youth Homes & Family Services (OYHFS), Holos Communities, American Family Homes, and other nonprofits with upcoming rehabilitation and new-build projects. This grant would support a pilot on OYHFS’ North Figueroa campus, with the addition of 5 kitchen kits for young adults experiencing housing insecurity. It will serve as a showcase of product quality and process efficiency for community stakeholders ahead of larger projects.
Concurrently, our distributed manufacturing model creates local workforce opportunities with LA-based partners.
We will structure our community engagement process from design through completion and operations. As a product company, we strive to sell “future-proof” products responding to functionality and accessibility needs, as well as sustainability and health concerns.
Finally, it will further our outreach with civic partners such as LA Housing Department’s Accessible Housing Program, and financial partners such as GenesisLA and other CDFIs, and bring to life secondary partnerships with earlier connections such as Habitat for Humanity LA.

Kit Switch will impact the LA area by contributing to the creation and rehabilitation of housing from small builds of 10+ units under the new SB9 regulation to large projects of 50-100+ units. We will also rehabilitate existing buildings, both residential and non-residential. With guaranteed schedule, transparent pricing, and quality design, our solutions are accessible across income levels (50-120% AMI), unlock 20-30% of embodied carbon savings compared to traditional construction, bring energy efficiency to older inefficient housing at 2-3x the speed of current retrofits, and ultimately offer more than 20% reductions in electricity and maintenance bills.
Upon completion of this grant, we plan to secure 3-5 multifamily projects in LA, with about 300 kitchen & bath kits, impacting about 500 residents with quality & healthy affordable housing and 30 construction & manufacturing workers with safe & stable jobs. By 2050, we expect our impact to scale to 30,000 residents and 7,000 workers.

Kit Switch is a women-founded public-benefit corporation with a mission around affordability, sustainability, and opportunity. Since our product launch in early 2023, we’ve been tracking our impact as follows:
Affordability - we quantify the people impacted by healthier interiors and lower energy bills, and gather feedback on functionality and accessibility via tenant surveys.
Sustainability - we track energy savings from faster retrofitting and avoided carbon emissions throughout our product's life cycle (production, shipping, installation, use and end-of-life).
Opportunity - we monitor the number of certified manufacturing and installation partners, the jobs created and skills acquired. We systematically survey installers on convenience, health and safety.
To ensure the effectiveness of our solution, we track time and cost savings from design through build. So far, we have met consistent 1-day installations and are expecting 10-30% in cost savings for our customers as we scale.