[Continued from yesterday's Part 2 and the previous Part 1.]

To legitimize a thing, give it a more respectable name.  In our modern era, we reinvented the flophouse or rooming house as the SRO (single-room occupancy), and the in-law apartment (or granny flat) as the Accessory Dwelling Unit:

In-law apartment, Connecticut suburb: note the connecting passage and apartment over garage

In the act of renaming these spaces as ADUs, we crate an opportunity for the state to take judicial cognizance of the informal reality that has crept up on it during the night, as mentioned in passing in a HUD Office of Policy Development & Research primer, Accessory Dwelling Units: Case Study:

Although a number of communities still restrict devel­opment of accessory dwelling units, there is a growing awareness and acceptance of ADUs as an inexpensive way to increase the affordable housing supply and address illegal units already in existence.

That couldn’t possibly be illegal, could it?

Wellfleet home with interior ADU

‘Illegal units already in existence’?  That sounds like an informal settlement to me – and indeed, the Turkish word for informal housing, gecekondu, means ‘mushroom housing’ for its tendency to crop up at night.  That’s where they came from, fifty years ago, in the Postwar boom of brand-new communities:

Suburbs continued to be a prevalent form of housing development throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The rapid growth of suburbs reinforced the high demand for lower-density development, and ultimately led most local jurisdictions to prohibit ADU construction. In spite of zoning restrictions, illegal construction of ADUs con­tinued in communities where the existing housing stock was not meeting demand; San Francisco was one such community.

Communities bloomed just south of San Francisco in places like Daly City, made mockingly famous by Pete Seeger singing a song by Malvina Reynolds:

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same,

There’s a pink one & a green one
And a blue one & a yellow one
And they are all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

Maligned in folk song: Daly City, CA

During World War II, the Bay Area experi­enced a defense boom that created a high demand for workforce housing –

‘Demand for workforce housing’?  Sounds strikingly contemporary to me. 

– resulting in a large number of illegally constructed second units.

Markets work.  Demand will find its supply.  If the formal housing will not accommodate the exploding demand, then the market will create informal housing.  

Informal housing (favelas) in Guarapiranga, Sao Paulo, 2008

By 1960, San Francisco housed between 20,000 to 30,000 secondary units, 90% of which were built illegally.  Page 1

A community that acquired nearly 30,000 apartments, 90% of them illegal?  Shades of today’s Sao Paulo, Istanbul, Cairo, Johannesburg … and Barnstable ?!?

Where Wellfleet was Cape Cod’s wrist, Barnstable is the tricep

Like all our other case-history towns, Barnstable is beautiful, coastal, affluent, and anti-growth.  It therefore has a massive workforce-housing problem, and an equally massive shortage of elderly apartments.

With seven villages within its boundaries and a total population of 47,821, the town of Barnstable is the largest community in both land area and population on Cape Cod.

Demographic inevitability being the mother of judicial amnesty, Barnstable developed an ADU zoning program:

Approved in November 2000, Barnstable’s Accessory Affordable Apartment or Amnesty Program is a component of its Affordable Housing Plan.

That word again – amnesty. 

“You keep using that word.”

You wouldn’t think of American suburbs as hotbeds of illegal and informal housing, but they are, and it’s not the poor who are building the housing, it’s their rich patrons and relatives surreptitiously converting spare rooms into bedrooms and wings into suite.

The program guides creation of affordable units within existing detached structures or new affordable units within attached struc­tures.

As we’ve seen, once you build a multi-room house, it’s mainly a case of labeling that defines whether it’s single-family with an extension, or multifamily with an ADU. 

Change the labels and it’s just a family room

Eligibility for the program is limited to single-family properties that are owner-occupied and multifamily prop­erties that are legally permitted.

The continuing emphasis on ‘occupied homeownership’ is doubtless aimed at both discouraging apartment blocks (God, no!) and kowtowing to the political reality that rich homeowners pay the real estate taxes that drive the city’s budget.

Barnstable’s amnesty program is seen as a way to bring the high number of existing illegal ADUs into compliance with current requirements.

That’s a remarkable concession.  Evidently illegal in-law apartments are sufficiently prevalent in Barnstable that to condemn them or seek to shut them down would provoke a political firestorm.  When a community becomes large enough, it becomes a constituency, a vote bank – and a political reality that compels the judicial reality to bend.

“The law does not bend”

Nevertheless, those granting the amnesty – that word again – cover themselves with a political fig leaf of public purpose:

In order to bring a unit into compliance, the property owner must agree to rent to low-income tenants — those earning 80% or less of the area median income — with a minimum lease term of one year.

Isn’t that nice – and convenient, since anybody we want to rent to will be low income.  It’ll be everybody’s mother or grandmother, long retired, or our friends’ domestic workers, who make low wages.  Either way, we cheerfully agree to the condition because it has no practical binding effect on our initial tenancy – and once it’s built, who’s to say what our tenant’s income will be?

Ask me no questions …

Nevertheless, those granting the amnesty – that word again – cover themselves with a political fig leaf of public purpose:

The amnesty program offers fee waivers for inspection and monitoring of units and designates town staff to assist homeowners through the program’s admin­istrative process.

Translation: we want you to rationalize your apartment, because it’s too much of a problem if you don’t.

The town can access Community Devel­opment Block Grant funds to reimburse homeowners for eligible costs associated with the rehabilitation or upgrade of an affordable ADU.

Housing built with legal informality is usually physically informal as well.  That becomes a health hazard or a fire hazard.  The community wants the housing regularized in civic self-defense.

According to Building Commissioner Tom Perry, “The benefit to this program is twofold. It is increasing the affordable housing supply and it also makes units, that before were unsafe and illegal, safe and legal.”

Homeowners are also offered tax relief to offset the negative effects of deed restrictions that preserve the affordability of the units.

That’s a very deft concession. 

What means ‘deft’?

Since we’re going to put a deed restriction on the (currently illegal!) apartment, we’ll give you a charitable deduction or real estate tax break for ‘diminishing’ the value of your property by rationalizing its existence!

Through its Amnesty Program, the town of Barnstable has successfully brought many of its illegal accessory units into compliance –

I should think so!  It’s paid the owners to come forward.

If you wave money, they will come

– with the added benefit of increasing the supply of affordable housing.

The visible supply, that is.

How do you like my accessories?

“When in-law apartments are outlawed, only outlaw in-laws will have apartments.”

– Bumper sticker from the National Relatives Accommodation Association (NRAA)

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As we saw in yesterday’s post, Accessory Dwelling Units (commonly known as ‘in-law apartments’) have a symbiotic relationship to their host property (usually a single-family home) in that they take advantage of the installed trunk infrastructure – streets, utilities – as well as the site infrastructure – the driveway, garage, lot layout – so that they naturally bud out as polyps from larger structures. 

Sprouting new housing: an in-law apartment being laid out

As presented in a little briefing primer, Accessory Dwelling Units: Case Study, prepared for HUD’s Office of Policy Development & Research, ADUs are a hardy and self-propagating form of low-tech affordable housing (alongside mobile homes and triple-deckers) that is inherently informal.

And it was on that concept of informality … seeping into the most pristine of formalized environments that I started thinking about ADUs in a quite different way. 

As HUD’s report puts it:

At the height of the suburbanization of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, high-density development became undesirable. Instead, communities favored low-density development defined by large-lot single-family homes.  Accessory apartments that were once a common feature in many homes were excluded from zoning ordinances.

Even as zoning seeks to be destiny, ADUs are a workaround against two-acre snob zoning, an affluent suburban spontaneous community that springs up, like our friends the tree-hugging mushroom conks, in the shade of larger single-family homes.

Look at all that informal biota!

The intrinsic informality of ADUs and the consequences of that informality are ideas latent and undeveloped in HUD’s report:

Allowing ADUs facilitates efficient use of existing housing stock, helps meet the demand for housing, and offers an alternative to major zoning changes that can significantly alter neighborhoods.

‘Alternative to major zoning changes’ = infiltration. 

Teams of dedicated homeowners are sneaking ADUs into the neighborhood

Growing demand for affordable housing (coupled with the limited amount of land available for development in many communities) has led to changing attitudes about the use and development of accessory apartments.

We’ve already seen that landlocked or land-limiting communities drive up the price of housing and create a vast workforce housing affordability gap. As they zone themselves blue in the states, these communities find that overly restrictive development practices are a neck tourniquet, one whose pressure they have to ease:

An increasing number of communities across the nation are adopting flexible zoning codes within low-density areas in order to increase their affordable housing supply.  Page 7.

In fact, it appears that hardly had the suburbs been bedroom-zoned into uniformity than their inhabitants, in an evolving ecosystem, discovered they needed to create these smaller flats and apartments, interspersing them into places where they had been deliberately zoned out:

In the late 1970s to the 1990s, some municipalities adopted ADU programs to permit the use and construc­tion of accessory units.  Many of these programs were not very successful, as they lacked flexibility and scope.  Although a number of communities still restrict devel­opment of accessory dwelling units, there is a growing awareness and acceptance of ADUs as an inexpensive way to increase the affordable housing supply and address illegal units already in existence.

The HUD study cites several sample communities, all of them similar in that they are well located in leafy attractive coastal areas, and really affluent.  Let’s start with the home of the Banana Slugs:

And proud to be a slug!

Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz, California is a seaside city with a population of 54,600; it is one of the most expensive cities in the country in which to live.  In 2006, the median price for a single-family home in Santa Cruz was $746,000, which only 6.9% of the city residents could easily afford.

The HUD study cites several sample communities, all of them similar in that they are well located in leafy attractive coastal areas, and really affluent.  Let’s start with the home of the Banana Slugs:

In spite of the high cost of living, the city continues to be a desir­able destination on account of its scenic location and prox­imity to San Francisco and the Silicon Valley.

Santa Cruz, 1943; the way the locals liked it

Desirable places that restrict new supply – either because of natural barriers like the Pacific Ocean or man-made barriers like freeways or NIMBYism – always develop a high cost of living

The location of a campus of the University of California — the area’s largest employer — also adds to the demand for housing in Santa Cruz. Another contributing factor is the limited amount of land allowed for development within the city’s greenbelt.  

Santa Cruz sought to preserve its small-town character by ruling certain development out of bounds.  But just as Portland, Oregon’s smart growth policies didn’t stop growth, merely displacing it, Santa Cruz’s policies led to rising home prices, creating even more economic pressure to develop mushroom-like accessory or informal apartments:

In order to preserve the greenbelt while accom­modating new growth, promoting public transportation, and increasing the supply of affordable housing, the city adopted a new ADU ordinance in 2003.

In other words, Santa Cruz decided it needed more housing, and higher de facto density, so it opted to allow ADUs on lots already developed into single-family homes – in effect, individualized infill:

This ordinance sets forth regulations for the location, permit process, deed restrictions, zoning incentives, and design and development standards for ADUs.

A sound principle of political economics is that what you can’t prohibit entirely you should channel by licensing and taxing. 

Any idea how much tax you could raise on that?

That’s what Santa Cruz has done:

Accessory dwelling units are permitted in designated residential zones on lots that are at least 5,000 square feet in area.

By limiting ADUs to lots above 1/9 of an acre, in effect the law routes around minim lot-size zoning.  How  novel!

No more than one ADU per lot is allowed.

To try to prevent clandestine apartments popping up.

The property owner must occupy the primary or accessory dwelling unit.

At least at the development stage, although more than likely this rule is unenforceable once the property is built.

ADUs that do not meet the permitting requirements stipulated in the ordinance must undergo a public hearing process.

Locally known as trial by taste police.

Now, sirrah, can you defend your architectural plans?

Development fees are waived for ADUs made available for low- and very-low-income households.  Page 4

Whether this is political optics (to neutralize NIMBY opposition by offering a counterbalancing liberalizing force) or response to a workforce housing shortage, either way it’s a sensible policy.  And it’s been effective, as seen by Santa Cruz’s rise in permitted ADUs:

On the other side of the country, but in a no less shingled and tony part of the coastline, something similar has arisen in Wellfleet, on Massachusetts‘ Cape Cod:

Wellfleet is located in Barnstable County, Massachusetts. Located on Cape Cod, Wellfleet is a tourist town with a year-round population of 3,500, which increases to 17,000 in the summer months. Sixty-one percent of the land area in Wellfleet is part of the Cape Cod National Seashore and about 70% of the entire land area is protected from development.

As with Santa Cruz, we have the pattern of affluence, geography, and severe restrictions on development, leading to a huge need for smaller-scale and more affordable apartments, including for the aging parents of the rich homeowners:

Wellfleet also has a growing concentration of elderly residents 65 years and older. A housing needs assessment study conducted by the town in 2006 recom­mended the adoption of an affordable ADU program to meet elderly housing needs and to increase the supply of affordable multifamily rental units.

Between sea and sand … Wellfleet

Like Santa Cruz, Wellfleet has geographic boundaries and developmental boundaries, and both have rendered Wellfleet unaffordable, and also inhospitable for the elderly parents of the homeowners who pay the property taxes that keep the place beautiful.  So, in deference to those owners, Wellfleet went the ADU route:

To encourage participation in the ADU program, Wellfleet has instituted a new affordable accessory dwelling unit loan program. 

Sixteen units have been approved since the start of the program in November 2006. 

This may seem like few to you – and it is – but it’s sixteen more than would otherwise exist.

Wellfleet offers tax exemptions to homeowners on the portion of the property that is rented as an affordable unit.

The program offers interest-free loans for homeowners to develop affordable accessory units.

The funds can also be used by homeowners to bring their ADU up to code.  Page 7.

Up to code?  Does that mean these ADUs used to be … illegal?

Or did the law win?

[Continued tomorrow in Part 3.]

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“When in-law apartments are outlawed, only outlaw in-laws will have apartments.”

– Bumper sticker from the National Relatives Accommodation Association (NRAA)

Despite all the emphasis we bestow on the visible and regulated forms of affordable housing – LIHTC, HUD Section 8, even inclusionary zoning – there are more forms of invisible affordable housing than are dreamt of in the typical policy maker’s philosophy. 

Spot the affordable housing?

To mobile homes and triple-deckers we must add the modest creature with the unlovely name of accessory dwelling unit (ADU), more commonly known as the ‘in-law apartment,’ and featured in a bland but nevertheless thought-provoking little briefing primer, Accessory Dwelling Units: Case Study, prepared for HUD’s Office of Policy Development & Research by Sage Computing [Why them? No particular expertise in housing. – Ed.].

Let’s introduce our protagonist, the ADU:

Here’s what you get when you Google Adu

Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) — also referred to as accessory apartments, second units, or granny flats — are additional living quarters on single-family lots that are independent of the primary dwelling unit.

I always heard them referred to as ‘in-law’ apartments.

“Shouldn’t you call them ‘parental’ apartments?”

The sepa­rate living spaces are equipped with kitchen and bath­room facilities, and can be either attached or detached from the main residence.

Like mushrooms on trees, in-law apartments sprout in the best and most well-spaced, orthogonally planned neighborhoods, and for many of the reasons that mushrooms find trees such compatible hosts.

Just consider me an arboreal accessory?

Being a responsible landlord is work (being a slumlord is a different and dishonorable work).  You have to rent the apartment, and collect the rent.  You are on-call to your residents all the time (broken pipes, no heat).  You have to maintain the apartment, and renovate it.  Meanwhile, you must monitor your residents, who may be up to no good, damaging the apartment, or skipping without paying. 

It’s no business for amateurs, yet amateurs are often the earliest small-scale landlords, and without small-scale landlords we would have little if any successful scattered-site housing.  For the smaller landlord, proximity is thus a management asset even as it’s a personal-life headache.

The in-law apartment solves these problems by adding the common wrinkle that the tenant is a member of the extended family; someone we want close but not too close.  It could be aging parent(s), or indigent wastrel offspring, or even a close friend or someone whom we want under our financial care.

This case study explores how the adoption of ordinances, with reduced regulatory restrictions to encourage ADUs, can be advantageous for communities.

When the additional tenant is part of the extended family, the in-law apartment serves simply as a suite of rooms on a smaller scale than those kings used to stash their mistresses out of sight of their wives. 

Yes, dear, you can have this whole wing

When the tenant is a stranger, or at any rate not legally part of our family, then the evolving modern house has divided, via construction mitosis, into two homes, subverting the snob zoning that our carefully pristine community sought to impose to keep ‘those people’ out. 

Like mushrooms, then, in-law apartments pop up unnoticed, cluttering the nurtured uniformity of our subdivision.  They are frequently illegal, and being illegal, they pose an administrative and enforcement challenge – which makes them very interesting from a policy and real-estate development standpoint.

Following an explanation of the various types of ADUs and their benefits, this case study provides examples of municipalities with successful ADU legislation and programs.

Let us begin at the beginning:

History of ADUs

Development of accessory dwelling units can be traced back to the early twentieth century, when they were a common feature in single-family housing.

The Postwar dream: one family, one house, one car, one garage

So used have we as Americans become to the conceptual of the canonical single-family home that we’ve forgotten that multi-family housing – many families sharing one kitchen and one bathroom – used to be the norm, and that as recently as sixty years ago, rooming houses were a common and accepted form of long-term lodging for single individuals.

Man’s bedroom, Wichita Kansas rooming house, circa 1940

As we moved to the suburbs, our need for single-room occupancy or smaller proximate apartments moved with us:

After World War II, an increased demand for housing led to a boom­ing suburban population.

Immediately a tension arose between the abstract notions of bedroom communities and the messy reality of people and families:

Characterized by large lots and an emphasis on the nuclear family, suburban devel­opment conformed to Euclidean-type zoning codes, a system of land-use regulations that segregate districts according to use.

No room for variation … yet

Newly constructed suburbs, being designed for that mythical ‘typical American family’ with 2.4 children, made no provision for ADUs, so people installed them anyway, legally or surreptitiously.  Today they come in three main physical types:

Depending on their location relative to the primary dwell­ing unit, ADUs can be classified into three categories: in­terior, attached, and detached.

It began as an attic, now it’s an apartment

Interior ADUs are located within the primary dwelling, and are typically built through conversion of existing space, such as an attic or basement.

Might look like a garage, but it’s really an ADU

As the picture makes clear, interior ADUs blend in, becoming practically invisible unless they announce their presence. 

What moth?  What in-law apartment?

[Clandestine rooms are another staple of housing, from Jacobean priest holes to Underground Railroad cellars.  They're a worthy subject for another post. – Ed.]

Attached ADUs are living spaces that are added on to the primary dwelling. The additional unit can be located to the side or rear of the primary structure, but can also be con­structed on top of an attached garage.

Attached ADU

Detached ADUs are structurally separate from the primary dwelling. They can be constructed over existing accessory structures, such as a detached garage, or they can be built as units that are separate from accessory and residential structures.

ADU over detached garage

The only affordable housing with a Mercedes out front?  ADU over detached garage

The law of economic pressure means that ADUs pop up primarily in highly affluent communities, the very ones most righteous about preserving their pristine low density.  This happens because they fill an important housing need:

Accessory dwelling units offer a variety of benefits to com­munities.

[1] They help increase a community’s housing supply, and since they cost less than a new single-family home on a separate lot, they are an affordable housing option for many low- and moderate-income residents.

Many South Africans I know employ a domestic worker to whom they become quite attached.  (So, I understand, do many affluent southern Californians, but I see that only second-hand.)  Offering a few rooms in one’s house to one’s domestic mixes charity with economy.

A television show about a lovable live-in maid

[2] Elderly and/or disabled persons who may want to live close to family embers or caregivers, empty nesters, and young adults just entering the workforce find ADUs convenient and affordable.  

Family polyps – people leaving the nest or people returning to the nest – often find ADUs a convenient halfway house.  Whether we’re trying to give Junior a rent break even while we’d just as soon Junior not flop all over the living room couch, or helping Grandma live comfortably and contentedly even while we have a bit of respite from Grandma, the value of propinquity without omnipresence makes an ADU an inexpensive compromise.

[3] In addition to increasing the supply of afford­able housing, ADUs benefit homeowners by providing extra income that can assist in mitigating increases in the cost of living.

When Junior moves back home, Junior can be charged rent – or a family that’s fallen on slightly harder times can convert the extra rooms by taking in a lodger. 

In prior times, it got a bad name …

There’s also the barter-for-benefit symbiosis.  Up and down my street in Cambridge are several really large houses whose owner of record is quite elderly and whose occupants include an extended brood of much younger people, students or friends or a combination of both, who happily live in the big house, providing services to the owner and in turn receiving an unmatchable location.  Driving slowly through the neighborhood, you’d never dream at how many young people in fact dwell within these larger houses.

[4] There is no need to develop new infrastruc­ture, since ADUs can be connected to the existing utilities of a primary dwelling.

So the same municipal investment yields more people, and potentially more jobs.

 [5] They can be designed to blend in with the surrounding architecture, maintaining compatibility with established neighborhoods and preserving community character.

What in-law apartment?

As we’ll see, that camouflage is a deliberate adaptation which diminishes both the psychology intrusiveness of adding density in the form of ADU, and the risk of being found out.

My secret lodging revealed!

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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