Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communication are described. A base station may indicate time and frequency resources for a low latency physical downlink control channel (sPDCCH), which may be different from another physical downlink control channel (PDCCH), to a user equipment (UE). The base station may then transmit a common sPDCCH (CsPDCCH) message to indicate which low latency control channel elements (sCCEs) are used for sPDCCH transmission during a given subframe. In some cases, the signaling used to indicate the initial resource allocation for sPDCCH may be infrequent relative to the CsPDCCH transmissions. If some of the resources initially allocated for sPDCCH are not actually used for sPDCCH during a subframe, the base station and the UE may use those resources for communicating data. For example, the base station may transmit data using a low latency physical downlink shared channel (sPDSCH) to the UE using those resources.