Los Angeles is a city that sells a fantasy long before it offers a home. Endless light, the illusion of boundless space, a promise of reinvention, all held together by a skyline constantly rewriting itself. But beneath the cinematic haze lies a quieter, more urgent reality: a housing crisis that has shaped an entire generation’s understanding of what “making it in LA” even means.
For Keerti Nair, the crisis is not just a headline, a statistic, or a political talking point. It is the landscape she moves through every day, as an architectural designer and project manager specializing in affordable and permanent supportive housing, and as a woman rebuilding her life and creative identity in one of the world’s most mythologized cities.
But this is not the story of an architect lamenting the system. It is the story of a woman choosing to work inside the system, pushing against its limits and quietly forcing the city to say yes to projects meant for people who are rarely centered in urban design.
A Los Angeles Life Rooted in Purpose
Keerti’s Los Angeles is not the LA of the tabloids. This is the LA of early-morning light on stucco buildings, of coffee before site meetings, of afternoons spent navigating city approvals rather than red carpets. It is a lifestyle built around precision, responsibility, and a sense of ethical momentum.
“I think people forget that architecture isn’t just design,” she says. “It’s negotiation, coordination, translation, it’s understanding how a city works and, sometimes, how it fails.”
Her work at FSY Architects, an award-winning Los Angeles firm specializing in affordable and supportive housing, is where this philosophy becomes daily practice. FSY is known for creating buildings with the heart of boutique residential design but the purpose of public service. For Keerti, whose background spans India and the American Midwest, the firm has become the ideal setting for a career that lives at the intersection of technical skill, social impact, and urban storytelling.
From Mumbai to Los Angeles. A Life Defined by Movement and Meaning
Before arriving in California, Keerti lived a childhood shaped by mobility, Kerala to Riyadh to Mumbai, a sequence that heightened her awareness of how culture, space, and identity collide. It also gave her an unusually global understanding of home.
“Growing up between vastly different societies taught me to see how people inhabit space,” she explains. “It also made me understand very early what it feels like to be excluded from certain spaces.”
Perhaps that is why affordable housing has become her niche. It isn’t simply a professional specialization, it is the natural continuation of a personal story marked by borders, boundaries, and belonging.
The Invisible Luxury of Good Architecture
Most people talk about housing in Los Angeles through the lens of scarcity or rising costs, but for Keerti, the conversation starts with something far more human: stability, safety, and the right to live with dignity. “Good housing isn’t a privilege,” she says. “It’s fundamental. It’s the ground people build their lives on.”
At FSY Architects, she channels this belief into the kind of work that reshapes neighborhoods quietly but profoundly. Much of her role centers on shepherding affordable and permanent supportive housing projects through Los Angeles’s complex approval systems, navigating building codes, coordinating with city departments, and ensuring compliance with layers of regulations that would overwhelm anyone not deeply fluent in the process.
Among her projects is Solaris in Koreatown, a supportive housing community tailored to formerly unhoused residents, where careful planning around circulation and shared areas supports a sense of stability. She also played a key role in Rosa de Castilla in El Sereno, a multifamily building recognized for its thoughtful interior layouts and warm, community-oriented design. In South LA and Hollywood, she worked on developments such as The Pointe on Vermont and The Pointe on La Brea, both of which add desperately needed housing units to neighborhoods where affordability is increasingly elusive. Most recently, with Peak Plaza set to break ground, Nair successfully navigated the complex sequence of technical reviews, permits, and city approvals that shape Los Angeles development.
None of these buildings are meant to be architectural spectacles. They are designed to function gracefully, to feel welcoming, and to serve people who are often disconnected from the city’s dominant architectural narrative. Keerti’s task is to make sure every one of these projects moves from concept to reality without compromising the needs of the future residents they are meant to support.
“Architecture isn’t about grand statements,” she says. “It’s about the everyday experience of living, how light enters a room, how safe someone feels walking down a hallway, how a building supports a person’s life. That’s the real work.”
A Day in the Life of an LA Architect
Keerti’s daily routine is far from the romanticized image of an architect sketching on tracing paper in a sunlit studio.
Her mornings often begin with tracking the status of permits, corresponding with engineers, or coordinating with city officials who oversee zoning, fire codes, and accessibility requirements. Her afternoons might be spent on construction sites, troubleshooting technical issues, or guiding consultants through changes that ensure compliance with funding agencies and municipal regulations.
But there is a rhythm to it, a ritual, even, that she has grown to love.
“Los Angeles teaches you how to hold intensity and ease at the same time,” she says. “You can leave a meeting about building regulations and then immediately be surrounded by mountains, palm trees, and this insane, beautiful light.”
It is this contrast, the bureaucratic and the cinematic, that defines her LA lifestyle.
Architecture as a Form of Wellness
In a city obsessed with wellness trends, Keerti practices a different kind of wellness: the wellness of creating spaces that improve the mental, emotional, and physical health of others.
Supportive housing projects, she explains, are designed not just to shelter residents but to restore them. That means thinking about access to sunlight, safe communal areas, clear navigation, durable materials, and calming colors. It means designing for those who have lived through trauma.
“Good housing is preventative care,” she says. “It can stabilize an entire life.”
Her belief in architecture as social care extends to climate resilience as well, a topic she sees as inseparable from urban justice. As temperatures rise and weather patterns shift, low-income communities will be the first to feel the impact. For Keerti, designing for affordability now must also prepare for environmental uncertainty later.
Los Angeles as a Muse and a Mandate
Living and working in LA has pushed her creatively and ethically. The city’s contradictions, glamour and struggle, promise and precarity, remind her daily why her work matters.
“Los Angeles is a dream city,” she says, “but the dream must include everyone.”
For Keerti, the most meaningful part of her lifestyle isn’t the architecture itself, it’s the moment a building opens and residents walk through the doors for the first time. The keys, the relief, the possibility.
“That,” she says, “is the real reward.”
A Life Built With Purpose
In a profession often dominated by aesthetics and ego, Keerti Nair represents a much kinder type of architect, one whose lifestyle is defined not by spectacle, but by intention. She lives in a city that worships image, yet dedicates her days to the invisible work that makes life safer, fairer, and more stable for the community.
