Last month, we featured San-Diego-based architect Lily Robinson, who explained what accessory dwelling units (ADUs) are and the benefits they offer homeowners. In Part 2 of our interview, we’ll explore the design process and the ADU experience.
Q: Tell me about your property and the decision to build the ADU that you now live in?
A: The original house is a 1200-square-foot, single-story, Spanish-style home built in 1926. I bought the property in 2017 with the idea to convert the detached garage to a second living unit for my mom and dad to use as a vacation home. But during the design process, my father passed away, so I shifted the design to be for my husband and myself to live in.
We decided to keep the garage and build over it. We filed our ADU project permit in 2019 and did the work during the pandemic.
The design was very important to me, as an architect, and because my husband and I both were working from home. We needed separation between our living area and our work area, and an environment that optimized our physical and mental health.
We built a loft-style 900 square-foot residence above the existing garage. We also added a laundry room, art workshop and music studio on the ground floor adjacent to the garage, which we kept since I love the security of having my car off the street and protected.
Q: So, you are happy with how it turned out?
A: It’s perfect. Our living area is an open plan with a full kitchen along one wall, one bedroom, one bathroom and a large walk-in closet we call the dressing room. We have a seating area where the TV is, and there is enough space to accommodate my husband’s grandmother’s antique dining table which has seven leaves (to seat 12) when we need it.
We used all natural materials, with white oak wood flooring, limestone in the bathroom and granite counters in the kitchen. There are two windows on opposite walls in the bathroom for cross ventilation and views to a big tree. It’s very calming.
Q: Where is your front door? Is it behind the garage?
A: Yes. It’s very private. You reach it by going up the steps of an outdoor staircase that is sheltered by an overhang. In the back we’re also working on a garden and a pretty pathway to the staircase.
Q: You said your aim was to create an environment that optimized your physical and mental health. What does that mean?
A: We can start with the stairs. I included it into the design so that we can get our walks in, going down to the office to work and then up the stairs to our living area. There’s no bathroom on the ground floor, so we get our exercise every day.
Other optimal touches are the placement of windows for natural light, relaxing views and the prevailing sea breeze. Our ADU has cathedral ceilings, but rather than install a skylight — they always leak! — we have operable clerestory windows. They capture the afternoon breeze and help create a cross breeze without letting in the heat of the sun.
Did you know ceiling height can affect creativity and focus? I have an “idea corner” for creativity, which is a strategically placed desk in the main room with a 16-foot vaulted ceiling. When you need to focus, like in the office, a lower ceiling is better.
Q: From the outside, your ADU doesn’t look anything like the original house. Why?
A: My neighbors were surprised that the new ADU didn’t match the style of the existing house, but for me, architectural style is like fashion. I envisioned the new ADU as a younger sister to the main house — and you wouldn’t necessarily want the newest member of the family to dress like the oldest one, would you?
Q: I know you do residential remodels and room additions, but are ADUs your favorite thing to do?
A: ADUs are so much fun to design, especially when you plan to live in it. I tell people that an ADU can make your life so much better.
I have a client who built an ADU for herself on top of her parent’s one-story home. It’s only 650 square feet but it’s got everything she needs: a large bedroom, a balcony, a laundry area and a full kitchen. Not only that, but she also has great views. Her new kitchen looks out to a park in the front of the house and the bedroom … has a view of the ocean.
Q: What happened to your original house?
A: I have offered it to my mother — if she wants to move here from New York. It could also turn into a rental unit later. The rent from the house could easily cover our mortgage payment.
We might add a Junior ADU as a third rentable space in the future. Then, if we decide to retire somewhere else, we’d have income from three rental units.
Q: OK, we’ve decided we want an ADU and we call you. What then?
A: The first thing is to get your address, so I can look up the zoning and jurisdiction authority. Every single lot is different, with multiple overlays that may impact your property. It might be along a transit corridor or in a high hazard zone.
Next, I would ask you to contact the county assessor’s office and ask for the residential building record. It’s only available to the property owners and is required as part of a permit process if your existing house was built more than 40 years ago.
Then we would meet for an hour so I could ask tons of questions about your goals, your timeline and your budget. Investing in an ADU on your property can add so much to your life.
Catherine Gaugh is a freelance writer.
Last month, we featured San-Diego-based architect Lily Robinson, who explained what accessory dwelling units (ADUs) are and the benefits they offer homeowners. In Part 2 of our interview, we’ll explore the design process and the ADU experience.
Q: Tell me about your property and the decision to build the ADU that you now live in?
A: The original house is a 1200-square-foot, single-story, Spanish-style home built in 1926. I bought the property in 2017 with the idea to convert the detached garage to a second living unit for my mom and dad to use as a vacation home. But during the design process, my father passed away, so I shifted the design to be for my husband and myself to live in.
We decided to keep the garage and build over it. We filed our ADU project permit in 2019 and did the work during the pandemic.
The design was very important to me, as an architect, and because my husband and I both were working from home. We needed separation between our living area and our work area, and an environment that optimized our physical and mental health.
We built a loft-style 900 square-foot residence above the existing garage. We also added a laundry room, art workshop and music studio on the ground floor adjacent to the garage, which we kept since I love the security of having my car off the street and protected.
Q: So, you are happy with how it turned out?
A: It’s perfect. Our living area is an open plan with a full kitchen along one wall, one bedroom, one bathroom and a large walk-in closet we call the dressing room. We have a seating area where the TV is, and there is enough space to accommodate my husband’s grandmother’s antique dining table which has seven leaves (to seat 12) when we need it.
We used all natural materials, with white oak wood flooring, limestone in the bathroom and granite counters in the kitchen. There are two windows on opposite walls in the bathroom for cross ventilation and views to a big tree. It’s very calming.
Q: Where is your front door? Is it behind the garage?
A: Yes. It’s very private. You reach it by going up the steps of an outdoor staircase that is sheltered by an overhang. In the back we’re also working on a garden and a pretty pathway to the staircase.
Q: You said your aim was to create an environment that optimized your physical and mental health. What does that mean?
A: We can start with the stairs. I included it into the design so that we can get our walks in, going down to the office to work and then up the stairs to our living area. There’s no bathroom on the ground floor, so we get our exercise every day.
Other optimal touches are the placement of windows for natural light, relaxing views and the prevailing sea breeze. Our ADU has cathedral ceilings, but rather than install a skylight — they always leak! — we have operable clerestory windows. They capture the afternoon breeze and help create a cross breeze without letting in the heat of the sun.
Did you know ceiling height can affect creativity and focus? I have an “idea corner” for creativity, which is a strategically placed desk in the main room with a 16-foot vaulted ceiling. When you need to focus, like in the office, a lower ceiling is better.
Q: From the outside, your ADU doesn’t look anything like the original house. Why?
A: My neighbors were surprised that the new ADU didn’t match the style of the existing house, but for me, architectural style is like fashion. I envisioned the new ADU as a younger sister to the main house — and you wouldn’t necessarily want the newest member of the family to dress like the oldest one, would you?
Q: I know you do residential remodels and room additions, but are ADUs your favorite thing to do?
A: ADUs are so much fun to design, especially when you plan to live in it. I tell people that an ADU can make your life so much better.
I have a client who built an ADU for herself on top of her parent’s one-story home. It’s only 650 square feet but it’s got everything she needs: a large bedroom, a balcony, a laundry area and a full kitchen. Not only that, but she also has great views. Her new kitchen looks out to a park in the front of the house and the bedroom … has a view of the ocean.
Q: What happened to your original house?
A: I have offered it to my mother — if she wants to move here from New York. It could also turn into a rental unit later. The rent from the house could easily cover our mortgage payment.
We might add a Junior ADU as a third rentable space in the future. Then, if we decide to retire somewhere else, we’d have income from three rental units.
Q: OK, we’ve decided we want an ADU and we call you. What then?
A: The first thing is to get your address, so I can look up the zoning and jurisdiction authority. Every single lot is different, with multiple overlays that may impact your property. It might be along a transit corridor or in a high hazard zone.
Next, I would ask you to contact the county assessor’s office and ask for the residential building record. It’s only available to the property owners and is required as part of a permit process if your existing house was built more than 40 years ago.
Then we would meet for an hour so I could ask tons of questions about your goals, your timeline and your budget. Investing in an ADU on your property can add so much to your life.
Catherine Gaugh is a freelance writer.
All about ADUs, Part 2 The San Diego Union-Tribune
I try to be cognizant that I’m writing for an international audience here at Strong Towns. A lot of my idea fodder comes from walks around the city I’ve lived in for the last 11 years, but I fear I can only write so much about Sarasota, Florida, and have it be relevant and interesting to people who don’t live here.
I’ve always wanted to write about Laurel Park, a Sarasota neighborhood which I lived in from 2014 to 2016 and have admired for longer than that. Now that my family and I are moving away from Florida, it feels like the right time to pay a bit of tribute. (We are relocating to St. Paul, Minnesota, where I grew up and where my parents and some of my extended family still live. It’ll be good to be close to family and (more) friends, and to raise the kids amid that “village.”)
This isn’t an exercise in mere nostalgia. The built form of Laurel Park actually provides some excellent insight into what the next incremental stage of growth could look like for the over 75% of America’s residential landscape that is currently mostly (or wholly) occupied by single-family homes with yards. Good urbanism doesn’t have to mean large apartment buildings or some immaculate row of brownstones; the ad-hoc version on display in a neighborhood like Laurel Park is more relevant as a model of adaptation for, well, “the rest of us.”
Meet the Eclectic Neighborhood
Laurel Park is located just southeast of and adjacent to downtown Sarasota. The neighborhood is roughly 100 years old. Many homes and apartment buildings showcase the telltale Mediterranean Revival style of the city’s first big development boom in the 1920s, while others were built later. Today it’s a historic district and something of a relic: restrictive zoning and fierce (one could, not inaccurately, say NIMBY) advocacy by longtime residents has preserved Laurel Park’s lush greenery and its built form of mostly one- and two-story buildings in the shadow of downtown’s modern high-rises. What you see is a time capsule of the development pattern that evolved in the pre-suburban era. And the best word for that pattern is “eclectic.”
Things are cozy and close together here. You won’t have a grassy lawn to toss a football around. But what you sacrifice in elbow room, you gain in the benefits of compactness: a walkable, lively neighborhood with the population to support local businesses in close proximity.
You also gain a different kind of beauty. The buildings aren’t huge and monolithic. There are lots of little passages. The patios and modest yards and gardens of Laurel Park are high in delight per acre: lavish attention is paid to small landscaping and aesthetic details in a way that I’ve never experienced to be the case in a neighborhood where the lots are large.
And there is green space: the eponymous neighborhood park is a delight. A collection of communal children’s toys—tricycles, scooters, little play houses—resides permanently on and around the playground. People are almost always in the park chatting in mid-afternoon on a nice day.
All of this coexists easily. Not one of these things is a nuisance, or out of character. There are simply no discernible negative effects caused by this mixing of built form. There are no traffic problems or parking problems here.
And there are beneficial effects. One obvious effect of a diverse mix of housing types is that the neighborhood is home to a diversity of residents: old and young, renter and homeowner, “snowbirds” and year-round locals, married with children, single with roommates. For many younger renters, it’s virtually the only opportunity to live a walkable, urban lifestyle in Sarasota on the kind of income you have early in your career. This was what drew my wife and me to the neighborhood nine years ago.
(Source: Laurel Park Neighborhood Association.)
When we moved to Laurel Park as newlyweds, it was into an accessory dwelling unit tucked behind a small dingbat apartment building and a duplex on a corner lot. Our apartment was on the fence line with a single-family home: we were friendly with the homeowner and got to know the stray cats he would feed daily. (One of those cats we ended up adopting.)
The ADU we used to live in.
We were also friendly with our landlord, a Canadian who came down a few times a year. The rent was a bargain for anywhere in town, let alone a five-minute walk from Main Street’s shops and restaurants. Nothing remotely comparable exists in the larger, newer buildings nearby.
Our region is in a dire housing affordability crisis: from 2021 to 2022, rent growth here was a mind-boggling 47% (compared to 18% nationally). The crunch is especially acute in and near the downtown core; in Florida, we’re good at building subdivisions in cattle pastures but not so much at handling a surge of unmet demand for walkable urban living. Affordable housing for a downtown workforce is a constant topic of conversation in city hall; new construction is too costly and too slow to be the answer in and of itself. In this context, I find it beyond obvious that the eclectic mix of ADUs and other modest housing options already available in a neighborhood like Laurel Park is a crucial source of relatively inexpensive housing.
Another beneficial effect of this neighborhood’s built form is financial productivity. This is a place that is paying its freight. Its public infrastructure is modest (streets, for example, are narrow) while the concentration of private investment is significant, a direct consequence of the variety and compact arrangement of housing in Laurel Park. To see this, we need only compare a block of Laurel Park with a much more conventional block of single-family homes in nearby Hudson Bayou, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city.
The Laurel Park block accommodates roughly triple the number of homes in about the same land area. These are, on average, much smaller homes, and less expensive overall, even as the total assessed value per acre of the real estate is 39% higher in Laurel Park.
Creating More of a Good Thing
The actual market values of property here tend to be higher than the tax-assessed value by a significant margin. Real estate in Laurel Park has become tremendously expensive—in fact, prices here are just about the highest in the city when measured on a per-square-foot basis. (Keep in mind that the single-story 1920s bungalows of Laurel Park are quite small.)
This neighborhood is not expensive because it’s the kind of place that’s expensive to build—it isn’t! It’s wholly about the scarcity of this kind of place, and the desirability of the location.
And the answer to that problem is simple, in principle: more Laurel Parks. This place shouldn’t be the rarity it is. It’s a demonstrated huge success: there should be a dozen neighborhoods like it in Sarasota alone.
There aren’t. In fact, it’s illegal to make any other neighborhood here more like Laurel Park. Virtually every lot in Laurel Park violates some combination of the density, parking, and setback restrictions that apply to every other neighborhood in the city. (In fact, many of them violate the restrictions that apply to Laurel Park, itself—they just had the good fortune to have been developed before the modern zoning code was in place.)
We could make it so that just about any residential neighborhood could evolve to look more like Laurel Park. Not just here, but in almost any American city that shares the basic DNA of single-family detached homes on lots of modest size. It just requires some key policy changes to make the historic pattern already visible in Laurel Park legal to reproduce without a costly and uncertain variance process:
In neighborhoods dominated by single-family homes, allow buildings at the missing-middle level of intensity—certainly up to a fourplex or cottage court, but I would suggest up to the kind of small-scale apartment buildings that exist here.
Allow accessory dwelling units without onerous restrictions, like owner-occupancy on site or a separate sewer and water hookup.
Allow lots to be split and subdivided with few restrictions, only those needed for basic access and safety.
There is some momentum in this direction. Parking mandates have begun to fall like dominoes across the North American continent. And advocates for the reform of rigid single-family zoning have caught on to the idea of lot splits, in California and elsewhere.
An Evolutionary Pattern
It’s important to recognize that a neighborhood like Laurel Park is itself the result of ad-hoc evolution and reinvention over time. It wasn’t planned to be the eclectic mix that exists today. Here is an aerial photo from 1948, showing ample lawns and still large vacant tracts:
(Source: Sarasota County.)
Here’s 1986:
(Source: Sarasota County.)
Redevelopment continues on a modest, scattered basis, as individual houses are torn down and replaced. Some of the recent redevelopment in Laurel Park itself has taken the form of large, single-family homes, but other new construction replicates the fine-grained historic pattern of the neighborhood. In the latter case, the key is splitting up lots to build on very small chunks of land. Here’s an aerial view of a cluster of new townhomes built around an alley interior to a Laurel Park block. These tiny lots were created by subdividing larger ones; the neighborhood wasn’t originally platted with them.
There’s not much but regulation and our entrenched building culture keeping the average American neighborhood from beginning to fill in with something similar to this.
It’s not a master planning process, or a coercive one. Nobody is coming for anybody’s home or yard. This is an evolutionary process that can unfold, if allowed to, as individual homeowners make a range of choices for individual reasons.
Some people will always want their privacy and their yard and their elbow room. But lots of people would take this trade-off. And some of those “lots of people” own the suburban-style lots that comprise 75% and up of urban residential land in most U.S. cities. Those people can start filling in backyards—not all of them, of course, but a fraction of them, as the owners desire—with ADUs. We can start allowing owners to split up lots, or small developers to build cottage courts where in a previous era you’d have had one or two “McMansions,” simply because that was the only thing allowed.
Laurel Park demonstrates the kind of place that would result from that evolution. Far from feeling chaotic or crowded, it can be lovable, beautiful, and a boon to your city.
I try to be cognizant that I’m writing for an international audience here at Strong Towns. A lot of my idea fodder comes from walks around the city I’ve lived in for the last 11 years, but I fear I can only write so much about Sarasota, Florida, and have it be relevant and interesting to people who don’t live here.
I’ve always wanted to write about Laurel Park, a Sarasota neighborhood which I lived in from 2014 to 2016 and have admired for longer than that. Now that my family and I are moving away from Florida, it feels like the right time to pay a bit of tribute. (We are relocating to St. Paul, Minnesota, where I grew up and where my parents and some of my extended family still live. It’ll be good to be close to family and (more) friends, and to raise the kids amid that “village.”)
This isn’t an exercise in mere nostalgia. The built form of Laurel Park actually provides some excellent insight into what the next incremental stage of growth could look like for the over 75% of America’s residential landscape that is currently mostly (or wholly) occupied by single-family homes with yards. Good urbanism doesn’t have to mean large apartment buildings or some immaculate row of brownstones; the ad-hoc version on display in a neighborhood like Laurel Park is more relevant as a model of adaptation for, well, “the rest of us.”
Meet the Eclectic NeighborhoodLaurel Park is located just southeast of and adjacent to downtown Sarasota. The neighborhood is roughly 100 years old. Many homes and apartment buildings showcase the telltale Mediterranean Revival style of the city’s first big development boom in the 1920s, while others were built later. Today it’s a historic district and something of a relic: restrictive zoning and fierce (one could, not inaccurately, say NIMBY) advocacy by longtime residents has preserved Laurel Park’s lush greenery and its built form of mostly one- and two-story buildings in the shadow of downtown’s modern high-rises. What you see is a time capsule of the development pattern that evolved in the pre-suburban era. And the best word for that pattern is “eclectic.”
Things are cozy and close together here. You won’t have a grassy lawn to toss a football around. But what you sacrifice in elbow room, you gain in the benefits of compactness: a walkable, lively neighborhood with the population to support local businesses in close proximity.
You also gain a different kind of beauty. The buildings aren’t huge and monolithic. There are lots of little passages. The patios and modest yards and gardens of Laurel Park are high in delight per acre: lavish attention is paid to small landscaping and aesthetic details in a way that I’ve never experienced to be the case in a neighborhood where the lots are large.
View fullsize
View fullsize
View fullsize
View fullsize
And there is green space: the eponymous neighborhood park is a delight. A collection of communal children’s toys—tricycles, scooters, little play houses—resides permanently on and around the playground. People are almost always in the park chatting in mid-afternoon on a nice day.
There are plenty of single-family homes:
View fullsize
View fullsize
View fullsize
View fullsize
Many of these homes have accessory dwelling units (ADUs), guest houses, or carriage houses:
View fullsize
View fullsize
View fullsize
View fullsize
There are duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes scattered throughout nearly every block:
View fullsize
View fullsize
View fullsize
View fullsize
There are cottage courts (tight clusters of small homes around a shared space):
There are apartment buildings, mostly from the 1920s Mediterranean Revival:
View fullsize
View fullsize
View fullsize
All of this coexists easily. Not one of these things is a nuisance, or out of character. There are simply no discernible negative effects caused by this mixing of built form. There are no traffic problems or parking problems here.
And there are beneficial effects. One obvious effect of a diverse mix of housing types is that the neighborhood is home to a diversity of residents: old and young, renter and homeowner, “snowbirds” and year-round locals, married with children, single with roommates. For many younger renters, it’s virtually the only opportunity to live a walkable, urban lifestyle in Sarasota on the kind of income you have early in your career. This was what drew my wife and me to the neighborhood nine years ago.
(Source: Laurel Park Neighborhood Association.)
When we moved to Laurel Park as newlyweds, it was into an accessory dwelling unit tucked behind a small dingbat apartment building and a duplex on a corner lot. Our apartment was on the fence line with a single-family home: we were friendly with the homeowner and got to know the stray cats he would feed daily. (One of those cats we ended up adopting.)
The ADU we used to live in.
We were also friendly with our landlord, a Canadian who came down a few times a year. The rent was a bargain for anywhere in town, let alone a five-minute walk from Main Street’s shops and restaurants. Nothing remotely comparable exists in the larger, newer buildings nearby.
Our region is in a dire housing affordability crisis: from 2021 to 2022, rent growth here was a mind-boggling 47% (compared to 18% nationally). The crunch is especially acute in and near the downtown core; in Florida, we’re good at building subdivisions in cattle pastures but not so much at handling a surge of unmet demand for walkable urban living. Affordable housing for a downtown workforce is a constant topic of conversation in city hall; new construction is too costly and too slow to be the answer in and of itself. In this context, I find it beyond obvious that the eclectic mix of ADUs and other modest housing options already available in a neighborhood like Laurel Park is a crucial source of relatively inexpensive housing.
Another beneficial effect of this neighborhood’s built form is financial productivity. This is a place that is paying its freight. Its public infrastructure is modest (streets, for example, are narrow) while the concentration of private investment is significant, a direct consequence of the variety and compact arrangement of housing in Laurel Park. To see this, we need only compare a block of Laurel Park with a much more conventional block of single-family homes in nearby Hudson Bayou, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city.
The Laurel Park block accommodates roughly triple the number of homes in about the same land area. These are, on average, much smaller homes, and less expensive overall, even as the total assessed value per acre of the real estate is 39% higher in Laurel Park.
Creating More of a Good ThingThe actual market values of property here tend to be higher than the tax-assessed value by a significant margin. Real estate in Laurel Park has become tremendously expensive—in fact, prices here are just about the highest in the city when measured on a per-square-foot basis. (Keep in mind that the single-story 1920s bungalows of Laurel Park are quite small.)
This neighborhood is not expensive because it’s the kind of place that’s expensive to build—it isn’t! It’s wholly about the scarcity of this kind of place, and the desirability of the location.
And the answer to that problem is simple, in principle: more Laurel Parks. This place shouldn’t be the rarity it is. It’s a demonstrated huge success: there should be a dozen neighborhoods like it in Sarasota alone.
There aren’t. In fact, it’s illegal to make any other neighborhood here more like Laurel Park. Virtually every lot in Laurel Park violates some combination of the density, parking, and setback restrictions that apply to every other neighborhood in the city. (In fact, many of them violate the restrictions that apply to Laurel Park, itself—they just had the good fortune to have been developed before the modern zoning code was in place.)
We could make it so that just about any residential neighborhood could evolve to look more like Laurel Park. Not just here, but in almost any American city that shares the basic DNA of single-family detached homes on lots of modest size. It just requires some key policy changes to make the historic pattern already visible in Laurel Park legal to reproduce without a costly and uncertain variance process:
In neighborhoods dominated by single-family homes, allow buildings at the missing-middle level of intensity—certainly up to a fourplex or cottage court, but I would suggest up to the kind of small-scale apartment buildings that exist here.
Allow accessory dwelling units without onerous restrictions, like owner-occupancy on site or a separate sewer and water hookup.
Eliminate parking mandates.
Make setback requirements small to zero.
Eliminate minimum lot size requirements.
Allow lots to be split and subdivided with few restrictions, only those needed for basic access and safety.
There is some momentum in this direction. Parking mandates have begun to fall like dominoes across the North American continent. And advocates for the reform of rigid single-family zoning have caught on to the idea of lot splits, in California and elsewhere.
An Evolutionary PatternIt’s important to recognize that a neighborhood like Laurel Park is itself the result of ad-hoc evolution and reinvention over time. It wasn’t planned to be the eclectic mix that exists today. Here is an aerial photo from 1948, showing ample lawns and still large vacant tracts:
(Source: Sarasota County.)
Here’s 1986:
(Source: Sarasota County.)
Redevelopment continues on a modest, scattered basis, as individual houses are torn down and replaced. Some of the recent redevelopment in Laurel Park itself has taken the form of large, single-family homes, but other new construction replicates the fine-grained historic pattern of the neighborhood. In the latter case, the key is splitting up lots to build on very small chunks of land. Here’s an aerial view of a cluster of new townhomes built around an alley interior to a Laurel Park block. These tiny lots were created by subdividing larger ones; the neighborhood wasn’t originally platted with them.
There’s not much but regulation and our entrenched building culture keeping the average American neighborhood from beginning to fill in with something similar to this.
It’s not a master planning process, or a coercive one. Nobody is coming for anybody’s home or yard. This is an evolutionary process that can unfold, if allowed to, as individual homeowners make a range of choices for individual reasons.
Some people will always want their privacy and their yard and their elbow room. But lots of people would take this trade-off. And some of those “lots of people” own the suburban-style lots that comprise 75% and up of urban residential land in most U.S. cities. Those people can start filling in backyards—not all of them, of course, but a fraction of them, as the owners desire—with ADUs. We can start allowing owners to split up lots, or small developers to build cottage courts where in a previous era you’d have had one or two “McMansions,” simply because that was the only thing allowed.
Laurel Park demonstrates the kind of place that would result from that evolution. Far from feeling chaotic or crowded, it can be lovable, beautiful, and a boon to your city.
Good urbanism doesn’t have to mean large apartment buildings or an immaculate row of brownstones; the ad-hoc version on display in this Florida neighborhood is more relevant as a model of adaptation for the rest of us.
Meet Ryan O’Connell, the founder of How To ADU, and an advocate for more housing in California.
O’Connell moved to Napa in 2012 to start nakedwines.com. The business funds winemakers around the country and around the world.
In traveling all over California’s wine regions, O’Connell recalled how he met many vineyard workers, winery teams, and hospitality staff that could not afford to live in the regions where they work.
“There just isn’t enough housing,” he said.
Falling back on his political science background (he earned a B.A. at Tulane University), O’Connell set out to explain Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) to California homeowners.
His goal? “To create simple ways for homeowners to reduce California’s housing shortage, in a way that benefits them and their communities.”
Support local news coverage and the people who report it by subscribing to the Napa Valley Register.
1. What was your childhood ambition?
I used to tell my parents that I wanted to be the President! But when I was 8, I saw Bill Clinton on TV and told my mom I didn’t want to be President anymore. She asked “why not?” and I said Clinton got a lot of gray hair in his first year.
2. What job would you like to try/not try?
Try: Generative AI (artificial intelligence) is so fascinating right now – I’d like to learn how to harness that power for good. I’ve heard that prompting AI will be an entire career one day, like learning how to use a printing press or code software.
Not try: I have so much respect for school teachers and, while I do a lot of educational content, I couldn’t imagine the responsibility of doing that in person and being responsible for a big group of young people.
3. How did you get into the housing industry?
I left my dream career in the wine world in the middle of a global pandemic to make a difference in the housing shortage.
When I launched How To ADU’s YouTube channel and Facebook group, I barely had three subscribers: me, my wife, and my mom!
Fast forward three years and we now have the largest online community of homeowners in California with over 20,000 members of our Facebook group, 54,000 followers on TikTok and 9,000 subscribers on YouTube.
It turns out that people really need information about these new laws and how they can use them to change their lives!
4. What is the biggest challenge your business/industry has faced?
Education and communication are the biggest challenges in the ADU space.
The state passes new zoning laws almost every year, and then each city and county have local staff and nonprofits all working individually on separate programs, ordinances, and more.
While we optimistically call this patchwork process something like the “laboratories of democracy” it ends up with a very fragmented system that varies from one zip code to another.
We are lucky that in Napa we have great programs at the county and city level, nonprofits like the Napa Sonoma ADU Center, and private sector innovation like Redwood Credit Union’s incredible ADU construction loan. So the challenge here is exporting those successful programs to other parts of the state.
5. What’s one thing Napa could do to help local business?
We need to build more housing so that the people who work in Napa can afford to live in Napa.
We benefit from a strong economy and provide a lot of work opportunities in our community, but we do not provide enough housing at different sizes, and levels of affordability.
If you’re a resident of Napa, or work or play here, I hope that you’ll support more housing being built so we can keep our community vibrant and healthy.
6. If you could change one thing about the housing industry, what would it be?
I hope that we all learn to work together to build great communities. Too often, I see arguments between groups of people who should be natural allies.
For example, pro-housing developers, tenant protection organizations, environmentalists, and labor activists may all take different “sides” of a debate. But there are good, smart ways to build that make our communities stronger and serve all of us well.
7. What’s your favorite gift to give?
My go-to is old bottles of wine that I made back in the day. That has to be the least original answer, but it’s the truth. I love sharing wine with people, and sharing a story about the bottle.
8. What’s your favorite charity or nonprofit?
The Napa Sonoma ADU Center and the Napa Valley Community Foundation. Honestly, I am very lucky to be based in a place that takes housing so seriously and has devoted so much talent and so many resources to housing.
9. What’s something people might be surprised to know about you?
I tried to buy a Swedish porcelain factory on vacation once.
10. What is one thing you hope to accomplish in your lifetime that you haven’t yet?
I want to help California reach its goal of building 180,000 units of housing a year.
When I first said that, my wife suggested “maybe start with one.”
Home movies that included this 1962 film taken at Disneyland were recently digitized by Napa’s Closs family. The family has owned and run Buttercream Bakery for many years. Disneyland opened in 1955.
Closs family
Photos: Check out Napa County’s LEAST expensive home sold in January
23 Lena Drive, American Canyon.
This American Canyon home was the least expensive home sold in Napa County in January. It sold for $515,000. The home is located at 23 Lena Drive.
Source: AJ Hearn, Realty One Group Fox
Dave Horn Unlimited Real Estate Photography
23 Lena Drive, American Canyon
This American Canyon home was the least expensive home sold in Napa County in January. It sold for $515,000. The home is located at 23 Lena Drive.
Source: AJ Hearn, Realty One Group Fox
Dave Horn Unlimited Real Estate Photography
23 Lena Drive, American Canyon.
This American Canyon home was the least expensive home sold in Napa County in January. It sold for $515,000. The home is located at 23 Lena Drive.
Source: AJ Hearn, Realty One Group Fox
Dave Horn Unlimited Real Estate Photography
23 Lena Drive, American Canyon.
This American Canyon home was the least expensive home sold in Napa County in January. It sold for $515,000. The home is located at 23 Lena Drive.
Source: AJ Hearn, Realty One Group Fox
Dave Horn Unlimited Real Estate Photography
23 Lena Drive, American Canyon.
This American Canyon home was the least expensive home sold in Napa County in January. It sold for $515,000. The home is located at 23 Lena Drive.
Source: AJ Hearn, Realty One Group Fox
Dave Horn Unlimited Real Estate Photography
23 Lena Drive, American Canyon.
This American Canyon home was the least expensive home sold in Napa County in January. It sold for $515,000. The home is located at 23 Lena Drive.
Source: AJ Hearn, Realty One Group Fox
Dave Horn Unlimited Real Estate Photography
23 Lena Drive, American Canyon.
This American Canyon home was the least expensive home sold in Napa County in January. It sold for $515,000. The home is located at 23 Lena Drive.
Source: AJ Hearn, Realty One Group Fox
Dave Horn Unlimited Real Estate Photography
23 Lena Drive, American Canyon.
This American Canyon home was the least expensive home sold in Napa County in January. It sold for $515,000. The home is located at 23 Lena Drive.
Source: AJ Hearn, Realty One Group Fox
Dave Horn Unlimited Real Estate Photography
The business news you need
Get the latest local business news delivered FREE to your inbox weekly.
Meet Ryan O’Connell, the founder of How To ADU, and an advocate for more housing in California.
O’Connell moved to Napa in 2012 to start nakedwines.com. The business funds winemakers around the country and around the world.
In traveling all over California’s wine regions, O’Connell recalled how he met many vineyard workers, winery teams, and hospitality staff that could not afford to live in the regions where they work.
“There just isn’t enough housing,” he said.
Falling back on his political science background (he earned a B.A. at Tulane University), O’Connell set out to explain Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) to California homeowners.
His goal? “To create simple ways for homeowners to reduce California’s housing shortage, in a way that benefits them and their communities.”
Support local news coverage and the people who report it by subscribing to the Napa Valley Register.
1. What was your childhood ambition?
I used to tell my parents that I wanted to be the President! But when I was 8, I saw Bill Clinton on TV and told my mom I didn’t want to be President anymore. She asked “why not?” and I said Clinton got a lot of gray hair in his first year.
2. What job would you like to try/not try?
Try: Generative AI (artificial intelligence) is so fascinating right now – I’d like to learn how to harness that power for good. I’ve heard that prompting AI will be an entire career one day, like learning how to use a printing press or code software.
Not try: I have so much respect for school teachers and, while I do a lot of educational content, I couldn’t imagine the responsibility of doing that in person and being responsible for a big group of young people.
3. How did you get into the housing industry?
I left my dream career in the wine world in the middle of a global pandemic to make a difference in the housing shortage.
When I launched How To ADU’s YouTube channel and Facebook group, I barely had three subscribers: me, my wife, and my mom!
Fast forward three years and we now have the largest online community of homeowners in California with over 20,000 members of our Facebook group, 54,000 followers on TikTok and 9,000 subscribers on YouTube.
It turns out that people really need information about these new laws and how they can use them to change their lives!
4. What is the biggest challenge your business/industry has faced?
Education and communication are the biggest challenges in the ADU space.
The state passes new zoning laws almost every year, and then each city and county have local staff and nonprofits all working individually on separate programs, ordinances, and more.
While we optimistically call this patchwork process something like the “laboratories of democracy” it ends up with a very fragmented system that varies from one zip code to another.
We are lucky that in Napa we have great programs at the county and city level, nonprofits like the Napa Sonoma ADU Center, and private sector innovation like Redwood Credit Union’s incredible ADU construction loan. So the challenge here is exporting those successful programs to other parts of the state.
5. What’s one thing Napa could do to help local business?
We need to build more housing so that the people who work in Napa can afford to live in Napa.
We benefit from a strong economy and provide a lot of work opportunities in our community, but we do not provide enough housing at different sizes, and levels of affordability.
If you’re a resident of Napa, or work or play here, I hope that you’ll support more housing being built so we can keep our community vibrant and healthy.
6. If you could change one thing about the housing industry, what would it be?
I hope that we all learn to work together to build great communities. Too often, I see arguments between groups of people who should be natural allies.
For example, pro-housing developers, tenant protection organizations, environmentalists, and labor activists may all take different “sides” of a debate. But there are good, smart ways to build that make our communities stronger and serve all of us well.
7. What’s your favorite gift to give?
My go-to is old bottles of wine that I made back in the day. That has to be the least original answer, but it’s the truth. I love sharing wine with people, and sharing a story about the bottle.
8. What’s your favorite charity or nonprofit?
The Napa Sonoma ADU Center and the Napa Valley Community Foundation. Honestly, I am very lucky to be based in a place that takes housing so seriously and has devoted so much talent and so many resources to housing.
9. What’s something people might be surprised to know about you?
I tried to buy a Swedish porcelain factory on vacation once.
10. What is one thing you hope to accomplish in your lifetime that you haven’t yet?
I want to help California reach its goal of building 180,000 units of housing a year.
When I first said that, my wife suggested “maybe start with one.”
Home movies that included this 1962 film taken at Disneyland were recently digitized by Napa’s Closs family. The family has owned and run Buttercream Bakery for many years. Disneyland opened in 1955.
Closs family
Photos: Check out Napa County’s LEAST expensive home sold in January
23 Lena Drive, American Canyon.
This American Canyon home was the least expensive home sold in Napa County in January. It sold for $515,000. The home is located at 23 Lena Drive.
Source: AJ Hearn, Realty One Group Fox
Dave Horn Unlimited Real Estate Photography
23 Lena Drive, American Canyon
This American Canyon home was the least expensive home sold in Napa County in January. It sold for $515,000. The home is located at 23 Lena Drive.
Source: AJ Hearn, Realty One Group Fox
Dave Horn Unlimited Real Estate Photography
23 Lena Drive, American Canyon.
This American Canyon home was the least expensive home sold in Napa County in January. It sold for $515,000. The home is located at 23 Lena Drive.
Source: AJ Hearn, Realty One Group Fox
Dave Horn Unlimited Real Estate Photography
23 Lena Drive, American Canyon.
This American Canyon home was the least expensive home sold in Napa County in January. It sold for $515,000. The home is located at 23 Lena Drive.
Source: AJ Hearn, Realty One Group Fox
Dave Horn Unlimited Real Estate Photography
23 Lena Drive, American Canyon.
This American Canyon home was the least expensive home sold in Napa County in January. It sold for $515,000. The home is located at 23 Lena Drive.
Source: AJ Hearn, Realty One Group Fox
Dave Horn Unlimited Real Estate Photography
23 Lena Drive, American Canyon.
This American Canyon home was the least expensive home sold in Napa County in January. It sold for $515,000. The home is located at 23 Lena Drive.
Source: AJ Hearn, Realty One Group Fox
Dave Horn Unlimited Real Estate Photography
23 Lena Drive, American Canyon.
This American Canyon home was the least expensive home sold in Napa County in January. It sold for $515,000. The home is located at 23 Lena Drive.
Source: AJ Hearn, Realty One Group Fox
Dave Horn Unlimited Real Estate Photography
23 Lena Drive, American Canyon.
This American Canyon home was the least expensive home sold in Napa County in January. It sold for $515,000. The home is located at 23 Lena Drive.
Source: AJ Hearn, Realty One Group Fox
Dave Horn Unlimited Real Estate Photography
The business news you need
Get the latest local business news delivered FREE to your inbox weekly.
Napa 10 Questions: O’Connell knows How to ADU Napa Valley Register
Contractor Cole Kelly is currently building a accessory dwelling unit for the Barrett family in the Lacey area.
Steve Bloom
sbloom@theolympan.com
The Barrett family of Lacey had to make some important decisions about their future housing needs, finally deciding that a family member would downsize into a new accommodation to free up space at an existing residence.
Such a move might sound familiar to many families trying to care for an older parent who still wants to remain nearby.
But for Mary Barrett, who has lived in Lacey’s Brentwood neighborhood for more than 30 years, she isn’t downsizing into a single-family home or an apartment. She will be moving all of 20 feet into an 800-square-foot accessory dwelling unit.
What’s an ADU? An ADU is a tiny home-like structure that exists as an accessory to a primary residence, either attached to the home or detached from it, and is viewed as one of the growing options to address Washington state’s housing shortage. Between 2000 and 2015, the state’s housing supply fell short of growth by 225,000 units, according to Gov. Jay Inslee’s Office.
The result has been a limited supply of single-family homes, a surge in apartment construction, and enough demand to make the cost of buying a home and paying rent increasingly expensive.
The median price of a Thurston County home continues to hover around $500,000, while average rents in the county are just under $1,500 a month, according to Thurston Regional Planning Council data. In a little more than a decade, the cost of buying or renting has just about doubled in expense, the data show.
In response, some local governments have taken steps to encourage what is known as the “missing middle,” the other types of housing that fall somewhere between a house and apartment, such as a duplex, triplex, fourplex or ADU.
A cold start
Lacey rolled out its ADU program in 2020 and 2021, the two years forever associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. But in 2022 the program showed signs of life, with the city issuing four ADU permits, said Ryan Andrews, Lacey’s planning commission manager.
The city is offering four approved design plans: A 480-square-foot studio, a 600-square-foot one bedroom and two 800-square-foot options — a single-story two bedroom and a two-story two bedroom unit.
Why isn’t the city issuing more ADU permits? One reason is much of Lacey’s housing stock was built in the 1990s, Andrews said, when homes were being built on tiny lots. However, many of the city’s older neighborhoods have much larger lots.
Andrews said he thinks it’s just going to take time for people to recognize those reinvestment opportunities.
One such area can be found south of Lacey Boulevard and north of 37th Avenue, between Golf Club Road to the west and Ruddell Road to the east. The Brentwood neighborhood happens to be in this area. It’s also near Wonderwood Park.
That’s where the Barrett family home is, on one-third of an acre, according to Thurston County Assessor’s Office data. That is plenty of room for an ADU. When Lacey officials talk about the program, they typically refer to 10,000-square-foot lots as the appropriate size for ADUs, although lots smaller than that will work, too, Andrews said.
Mary is downsizing into the ADU so that she can age in place and still be close to her sons, who will move into the primary residence.
One of her sons is a longtime renter, she said.
“After a while it just gets old, moving from house to house,” Barrett said.
She considered buying a home and renting it to her sons, but that was too expensive.
In this arrangement, her sons have stable housing, and after she passes on, they have other options, she said. They could sell the house and ADU, they could rent the ADU, or one son could live in the ADU while the other lives in the primary residence.
Is it affordable housing?
Mary’s 800-square-foot ADU is being built by Cole Kelly of Kelly & Associates LLC, an 18-month-old Olympia-based contractor. This is his first ADU project under his shingle, although he has built them before for other employers, he said.
Kelly began work on the project in January and expects to finish toward the end of April. In addition to the two bedrooms, it has a kitchen, bathroom and a small living area. His budget is around $224,000, although it could be less than that due to some Lacey incentives.
Kelly budgeted $15,000 for building permit fees, but the city is only going to charge him $1,600, he said. The city is also waiving the fees associated with connecting to city water and sewer.
That’s a major savings, he said. Instead of having to run water and sewer connections out to the street, he was able to tie into the home’s existing system.
Still, he acknowledged that even building an ADU comes with its share of costs. He hired subcontractors for the project and Kelly said he is conscientious about the types of building materials he uses, favoring higher quality materials over off-the-shelf materials.
What would he charge in monthly rent for an 800-square-foot ADU? Based on his expenses, Kelly thinks it would still be $1,500 to $2,000 per month, which is right around the average cost of rent in the county.
If he were building Lacey’s 480-square-foot ADU, Kelly said he didn’t think he could do it for less than $100,000, although he is encouraged by Lacey’s steps to streamline the process. That could put rent closer to an affordable range.
Olympia Master Builders supports the ADU.
“As an organization we’ve been working with local jurisdictions to adopt ADU policies for a few years now,” Executive Officer Angela White said. “We feel that ADUs are one more way to increase housing stock in a community. OMB is always a proponent of jurisdictions having a broad range of options when it comes to housing people.”
Rolf has worked at The Olympian since August 2005. He covers breaking news, the city of Lacey and business for the paper. Rolf graduated from The Evergreen State College in 1990.
Contractor Cole Kelly is currently building a accessory dwelling unit for the Barrett family in the Lacey area.
Steve Bloom
sbloom@theolympan.com
The Barrett family of Lacey had to make some important decisions about their future housing needs, finally deciding that a family member would downsize into a new accommodation to free up space at an existing residence.
Such a move might sound familiar to many families trying to care for an older parent who still wants to remain nearby.
But for Mary Barrett, who has lived in Lacey’s Brentwood neighborhood for more than 30 years, she isn’t downsizing into a single-family home or an apartment. She will be moving all of 20 feet into an 800-square-foot accessory dwelling unit.
What’s an ADU? An ADU is a tiny home-like structure that exists as an accessory to a primary residence, either attached to the home or detached from it, and is viewed as one of the growing options to address Washington state’s housing shortage. Between 2000 and 2015, the state’s housing supply fell short of growth by 225,000 units, according to Gov. Jay Inslee’s Office.
The result has been a limited supply of single-family homes, a surge in apartment construction, and enough demand to make the cost of buying a home and paying rent increasingly expensive.
The median price of a Thurston County home continues to hover around $500,000, while average rents in the county are just under $1,500 a month, according to Thurston Regional Planning Council data. In a little more than a decade, the cost of buying or renting has just about doubled in expense, the data show.
In response, some local governments have taken steps to encourage what is known as the “missing middle,” the other types of housing that fall somewhere between a house and apartment, such as a duplex, triplex, fourplex or ADU.
A cold startLacey rolled out its ADU program in 2020 and 2021, the two years forever associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. But in 2022 the program showed signs of life, with the city issuing four ADU permits, said Ryan Andrews, Lacey’s planning commission manager.
The city is offering four approved design plans: A 480-square-foot studio, a 600-square-foot one bedroom and two 800-square-foot options — a single-story two bedroom and a two-story two bedroom unit.
Why isn’t the city issuing more ADU permits? One reason is much of Lacey’s housing stock was built in the 1990s, Andrews said, when homes were being built on tiny lots. However, many of the city’s older neighborhoods have much larger lots.
Andrews said he thinks it’s just going to take time for people to recognize those reinvestment opportunities.
One such area can be found south of Lacey Boulevard and north of 37th Avenue, between Golf Club Road to the west and Ruddell Road to the east. The Brentwood neighborhood happens to be in this area. It’s also near Wonderwood Park.
That’s where the Barrett family home is, on one-third of an acre, according to Thurston County Assessor’s Office data. That is plenty of room for an ADU. When Lacey officials talk about the program, they typically refer to 10,000-square-foot lots as the appropriate size for ADUs, although lots smaller than that will work, too, Andrews said.
Mary is downsizing into the ADU so that she can age in place and still be close to her sons, who will move into the primary residence.
One of her sons is a longtime renter, she said.
“After a while it just gets old, moving from house to house,” Barrett said.
She considered buying a home and renting it to her sons, but that was too expensive.
In this arrangement, her sons have stable housing, and after she passes on, they have other options, she said. They could sell the house and ADU, they could rent the ADU, or one son could live in the ADU while the other lives in the primary residence.
Is it affordable housing?Mary’s 800-square-foot ADU is being built by Cole Kelly of Kelly & Associates LLC, an 18-month-old Olympia-based contractor. This is his first ADU project under his shingle, although he has built them before for other employers, he said.
Kelly began work on the project in January and expects to finish toward the end of April. In addition to the two bedrooms, it has a kitchen, bathroom and a small living area. His budget is around $224,000, although it could be less than that due to some Lacey incentives.
Kelly budgeted $15,000 for building permit fees, but the city is only going to charge him $1,600, he said. The city is also waiving the fees associated with connecting to city water and sewer.
That’s a major savings, he said. Instead of having to run water and sewer connections out to the street, he was able to tie into the home’s existing system.
Still, he acknowledged that even building an ADU comes with its share of costs. He hired subcontractors for the project and Kelly said he is conscientious about the types of building materials he uses, favoring higher quality materials over off-the-shelf materials.
What would he charge in monthly rent for an 800-square-foot ADU? Based on his expenses, Kelly thinks it would still be $1,500 to $2,000 per month, which is right around the average cost of rent in the county.
If he were building Lacey’s 480-square-foot ADU, Kelly said he didn’t think he could do it for less than $100,000, although he is encouraged by Lacey’s steps to streamline the process. That could put rent closer to an affordable range.
Olympia Master Builders supports the ADU.
“As an organization we’ve been working with local jurisdictions to adopt ADU policies for a few years now,” Executive Officer Angela White said. “We feel that ADUs are one more way to increase housing stock in a community. OMB is always a proponent of jurisdictions having a broad range of options when it comes to housing people.”
Rolf has worked at The Olympian since August 2005. He covers breaking news, the city of Lacey and business for the paper. Rolf graduated from The Evergreen State College in 1990.
Ready to live in an 800-square-foot house? Lacey is issuing permits for unique option The Olympian
Over the past few years, Judy Ousterhout had been pondering her future as a healthy older adult: Where would she retire? How could she generate extra income? Would she be willing to leave her Palo Alto home? The longtime Palo Alto resident, who bought her two-bedroom home on Channing Avenue in 1975, decided that building a home in her backyard was the answer.
Working with Stephanie Batties, her former business partner from The Right Touch Designs, Ousterhout custom designed her perfect “retirement” home tucked behind a garage at the end of her long driveway.
BRIGHT, LIGHT AND PRIVATE
In August 2022, the city did its final inspection on her 472-square-foot ADU and adjacent new one-car garage, which took two years to complete.
“One of the things I wanted was privacy for myself and privacy for the tenant,” said Ousterhout, who plans to rent out the backyard home.
Her design allows her and her labradoodle to use her backyard and pool without being visible from the new unit’s living area.
Because a garage was included in her project, she was able to position the new unit along the fence line, maximizing space for a private-access gated walkway leading to the home, which matches the property’s main gray stucco residence.
Clerestory windows let plenty of light into the living space, without sacrificing Ousterhout’s privacy. At the back of the home’s living room, a large sliding-glass door opens onto an ample wood deck, extending the living space outdoors.
The floors throughout the unit are synthetic material designed to look like wide-plank weathered wood.
Oil-rubbed bronze door and cabinet handles and fixtures offer rich contrast to the bright white walls throughout the home.
The kitchen is cleverly simple, with dark charcoal quartz counters, a four-burner Wolf induction cooktop, an under-counter refrigerator and a separate under-counter freezer. Ousterhout sacrificed an oven, but installed a microwave and toaster oven.
For such a small home, there is a deceptive amount of storage with cabinets tucked neatly into nearly every space. There’s even a specially designed desk nook off the kitchen.
FINDING INSPIRATION
Many of her ideas came from attending open houses for local homes with guest properties. She took pictures of things she liked and began curating her plan. Designer Batties was able to draw and submit elevations to the city for the permitting process.
Throughout her project, Ousterhout replicated things from her own home, including appliance brands and fixtures she liked, and created spaces like a desk nook that she thought she would use.
“My decisions were made on what would I want if I lived here,” she said.
Just past the desk down a short hallway lies the minimalist bedroom. The high ceilings continue here, along with an ample closet. The bathroom has a high window, streams of light and a glass-enclosed shower. The sink is one piece of white quartz on a custom-designed cabinet with two drawers cut around the under-the-sink pipe to maximize storage. A stacked Miele washer and dryer are tucked next to the shower with storage above. There’s also a white screen that can be pulled down to conceal the laundry nook. Again,
Ousterhout made decisions by asking, “Who will be living here? What do they want when they come home?”
Ousterhout said she zeroed in on the idea for a living unit on her property several years ago, around the same time the city of Palo Alto was making it easier for property owners to build extra living space.
“As I was embarking into my older years, I had two thoughts: I might eventually need help close by, and I might need the additional income,” she said. “As life goes on, it’s not a bad idea.”
A SURGE IN BACKYARD COTTAGES
Ousterhout isn’t alone in utilizing her property for additional living space. Local interest in accessory dwelling units has surged in Palo Alto in recent years. In 2015, the city received only 10 permit applications for these structures. The number climbed to 75 in 2019 and to 78 in 2020. In 2021, it soared to 136, according to a 2022 city report.
Ousterhout said she did her research, meticulously reviewing each requirement in the city’s ADU handbook.
The ADU, however, didn’t happen without challenges, she said.
Ousterhout said she started the project in early 2020, just as the world shut down because of the pandemic. That meant she could only meet with city planning staff by phone or over Zoom rather than in person.
Another early hurdle was complying with state and federal flood zone restrictions, and relying on the planning staff to discover and correct a surveying error, which would have mistakenly required her new dwelling to be higher than her original home.
After the plans were approved, the permit issued and the unit nearly complete, the city over-looked an installed utility box that was placed outside the unit. It turned out the box needed to be placed inside to protect it from the weather. Hence, the box was reinstalled inside, on the back bedroom wall, covered by a colorful quilt.
Ousterhout said despite a few unexpected challenges, building a secondary housing unit on her property has been worth it. Her next task, she said, will be carefully advertising her unit to the right tenant.
Elizabeth Lorenz is a freelance writer.
Uploaded: Mon, Jan 23, 2023, 10:13 am
Over the past few years, Judy Ousterhout had been pondering her future as a healthy older adult: Where would she retire? How could she generate extra income? Would she be willing to leave her Palo Alto home? The longtime Palo Alto resident, who bought her two-bedroom home on Channing Avenue in 1975, decided that building a home in her backyard was the answer.
Working with Stephanie Batties, her former business partner from The Right Touch Designs, Ousterhout custom designed her perfect “retirement” home tucked behind a garage at the end of her long driveway.
BRIGHT, LIGHT AND PRIVATE
In August 2022, the city did its final inspection on her 472-square-foot ADU and adjacent new one-car garage, which took two years to complete.
“One of the things I wanted was privacy for myself and privacy for the tenant,” said Ousterhout, who plans to rent out the backyard home.
Her design allows her and her labradoodle to use her backyard and pool without being visible from the new unit’s living area.
Because a garage was included in her project, she was able to position the new unit along the fence line, maximizing space for a private-access gated walkway leading to the home, which matches the property’s main gray stucco residence.
Clerestory windows let plenty of light into the living space, without sacrificing Ousterhout’s privacy. At the back of the home’s living room, a large sliding-glass door opens onto an ample wood deck, extending the living space outdoors.
The floors throughout the unit are synthetic material designed to look like wide-plank weathered wood.
Oil-rubbed bronze door and cabinet handles and fixtures offer rich contrast to the bright white walls throughout the home.
The kitchen is cleverly simple, with dark charcoal quartz counters, a four-burner Wolf induction cooktop, an under-counter refrigerator and a separate under-counter freezer. Ousterhout sacrificed an oven, but installed a microwave and toaster oven.
For such a small home, there is a deceptive amount of storage with cabinets tucked neatly into nearly every space. There’s even a specially designed desk nook off the kitchen.
FINDING INSPIRATION
Many of her ideas came from attending open houses for local homes with guest properties. She took pictures of things she liked and began curating her plan. Designer Batties was able to draw and submit elevations to the city for the permitting process.
Throughout her project, Ousterhout replicated things from her own home, including appliance brands and fixtures she liked, and created spaces like a desk nook that she thought she would use.
“My decisions were made on what would I want if I lived here,” she said.
Just past the desk down a short hallway lies the minimalist bedroom. The high ceilings continue here, along with an ample closet. The bathroom has a high window, streams of light and a glass-enclosed shower. The sink is one piece of white quartz on a custom-designed cabinet with two drawers cut around the under-the-sink pipe to maximize storage. A stacked Miele washer and dryer are tucked next to the shower with storage above. There’s also a white screen that can be pulled down to conceal the laundry nook. Again,
Ousterhout made decisions by asking, “Who will be living here? What do they want when they come home?”
Ousterhout said she zeroed in on the idea for a living unit on her property several years ago, around the same time the city of Palo Alto was making it easier for property owners to build extra living space.
“As I was embarking into my older years, I had two thoughts: I might eventually need help close by, and I might need the additional income,” she said. “As life goes on, it’s not a bad idea.”
A SURGE IN BACKYARD COTTAGES
Ousterhout isn’t alone in utilizing her property for additional living space. Local interest in accessory dwelling units has surged in Palo Alto in recent years. In 2015, the city received only 10 permit applications for these structures. The number climbed to 75 in 2019 and to 78 in 2020. In 2021, it soared to 136, according to a 2022 city report.
Ousterhout said she did her research, meticulously reviewing each requirement in the city’s ADU handbook.
The ADU, however, didn’t happen without challenges, she said.
Ousterhout said she started the project in early 2020, just as the world shut down because of the pandemic. That meant she could only meet with city planning staff by phone or over Zoom rather than in person.
Another early hurdle was complying with state and federal flood zone restrictions, and relying on the planning staff to discover and correct a surveying error, which would have mistakenly required her new dwelling to be higher than her original home.
After the plans were approved, the permit issued and the unit nearly complete, the city over-looked an installed utility box that was placed outside the unit. It turned out the box needed to be placed inside to protect it from the weather. Hence, the box was reinstalled inside, on the back bedroom wall, covered by a colorful quilt.
Ousterhout said despite a few unexpected challenges, building a secondary housing unit on her property has been worth it. Her next task, she said, will be carefully advertising her unit to the right tenant.
Elizabeth Lorenz is a freelance writer.
The perfect backyard retirement home | News | Mountain View Online | Mountain View Voice
The Khamlins’ new home is one of three basement apartments that developer Gabe Horstick added to nine existing units in the 1930s brick building on Kedzie Boulevard after buying it in July 2021. Horstick’s firm, Base 3 Development, was able to add the three because of the city’s two-year-old ordinance allowing new additional dwelling units, or ADUs, including basement or attic apartments and detached coach houses, for the first time since they were banned in 1957.
The ordinance allowed Horstick to add three units if one met affordability requirements. He says it worked for him, “because I could turn a nine-unit building into a 12,” enhancing rental income.
And it worked for the Khamlins, who pay about $1,500 a month for the three-bedroom unit, a little more than half the monthly rent Horstick plans to charge for the other two ADUs.
In-demand Logan Square got a few new housing units, one of them within affordability guidelines, the landlord got to boost his profitability, and a struggling immigrant family found a comfortable spot.
Now, if that success can be replicated dozens or hundreds of times around the city, the ADU program will trigger a wave of new affordable housing in Chicago. So far, however, it’s more like a ripple confined to affluent North Side neighborhoods. Of 403 applications that have been approved, 84% are in the North and Northwest Side pilot zones, according to Department of Housing policy director Daniel Hertz.
The applications cover 454 units, 40 of them meeting the city’s affordability guidelines. The great majority are not yet built. As of late October, according to the Department of Housing, construction permits had been issued for 122 units, with permits pending for 78 more.
The ADU ordinance—approved in December 2020, with the first applications for permits available in May 2021—has not yet set off big changes in the city’s housing profile, although city officials and developers say some tweaks and expansions that are pending could speed it up. To be fair, it should be noted that the COVID-years supply-chain disruptions and increased construction costs contributed to the seemingly slow pace of new units getting built.
Even so, changes are needed. Two that are crucial, says city Housing Commissioner Marisa Novara, are adding a staffer to focus on getting ADU financing and expertise to property owners on the city’s South and West sides and opening the ADU ordinance to the entire city, not just the five pilot zones approved in 2020.
Novara told Crain’s in late December that she’s been authorized to add a staff position whose brief will include ADU assistance that may bring more such units to places like Grand Crossing and Washington Park.
Expanding beyond the pilot zones is not yet scheduled but is a goal, Novara said. Limiting ADUs to pilot zones initially was a compromise made to get City Council approval.
One developer of ADUs says it dramatically undercut the rollout. “At least half the inquiries I get are from people who are outside the pilot zones,” says David Wallach, a longtime Chicago builder who heads the ADU-focused firm Chicago Granny Flats. “There’s demand from all over the city, if we were allowed to build all over the city.”
Wallach’s firm is building its fourth new coach house-style ADU. One is in Evanston, which also approved ADUs in 2020, and two of the city projects are for homeowners who told Crain’s they’re adding the space for home offices, but with bathrooms and kitchens so they can be lived in by family members or become rental tenants later if the need arises. That is, they’re essentially expanding their own living space thanks to an ordinance intended to create new housing units.
While that may seem to evade the spirit of the ordinance, Wallach and the two city officials defended them as creating at least potential new living units. On top of that, Wallach says, building a coach house on a Chicago alley has the added benefit of putting eyes on that alley, potentially making it safer.
The Khamlins’ new home is one of three basement apartments that developer Gabe Horstick added to nine existing units in the 1930s brick building on Kedzie Boulevard after buying it in July 2021. Horstick’s firm, Base 3 Development, was able to add the three because of the city’s two-year-old ordinance allowing new additional dwelling units, or ADUs, including basement or attic apartments and detached coach houses, for the first time since they were banned in 1957.
The ordinance allowed Horstick to add three units if one met affordability requirements. He says it worked for him, “because I could turn a nine-unit building into a 12,” enhancing rental income.
And it worked for the Khamlins, who pay about $1,500 a month for the three-bedroom unit, a little more than half the monthly rent Horstick plans to charge for the other two ADUs.
In-demand Logan Square got a few new housing units, one of them within affordability guidelines, the landlord got to boost his profitability, and a struggling immigrant family found a comfortable spot.
Now, if that success can be replicated dozens or hundreds of times around the city, the ADU program will trigger a wave of new affordable housing in Chicago. So far, however, it’s more like a ripple confined to affluent North Side neighborhoods. Of 403 applications that have been approved, 84% are in the North and Northwest Side pilot zones, according to Department of Housing policy director Daniel Hertz.
The applications cover 454 units, 40 of them meeting the city’s affordability guidelines. The great majority are not yet built. As of late October, according to the Department of Housing, construction permits had been issued for 122 units, with permits pending for 78 more.
The ADU ordinance—approved in December 2020, with the first applications for permits available in May 2021—has not yet set off big changes in the city’s housing profile, although city officials and developers say some tweaks and expansions that are pending could speed it up. To be fair, it should be noted that the COVID-years supply-chain disruptions and increased construction costs contributed to the seemingly slow pace of new units getting built.
Even so, changes are needed. Two that are crucial, says city Housing Commissioner Marisa Novara, are adding a staffer to focus on getting ADU financing and expertise to property owners on the city’s South and West sides and opening the ADU ordinance to the entire city, not just the five pilot zones approved in 2020.
Novara told Crain’s in late December that she’s been authorized to add a staff position whose brief will include ADU assistance that may bring more such units to places like Grand Crossing and Washington Park.
Expanding beyond the pilot zones is not yet scheduled but is a goal, Novara said. Limiting ADUs to pilot zones initially was a compromise made to get City Council approval.
One developer of ADUs says it dramatically undercut the rollout. “At least half the inquiries I get are from people who are outside the pilot zones,” says David Wallach, a longtime Chicago builder who heads the ADU-focused firm Chicago Granny Flats. “There’s demand from all over the city, if we were allowed to build all over the city.”
Wallach’s firm is building its fourth new coach house-style ADU. One is in Evanston, which also approved ADUs in 2020, and two of the city projects are for homeowners who told Crain’s they’re adding the space for home offices, but with bathrooms and kitchens so they can be lived in by family members or become rental tenants later if the need arises. That is, they’re essentially expanding their own living space thanks to an ordinance intended to create new housing units.
While that may seem to evade the spirit of the ordinance, Wallach and the two city officials defended them as creating at least potential new living units. On top of that, Wallach says, building a coach house on a Chicago alley has the added benefit of putting eyes on that alley, potentially making it safer.
Chicago ADU program hasn’t sparked granny flat, coach house wave Crain’s Chicago Business
Port Hueneme–The City Council, Monday, December 19, introduced and amended section 10802 of Chapter 6 of Article 10 in the Port Hueneme Municipal Code for Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) development standards.
ADUs are otherwise known as Granny Flats, Casitas, and Second Dwelling Units, which can be detached, attached, or within a second residence as a Junior ADU.
“The State Government Code has established certain development standards to use,” Community Development Director
Tony Stewart said. “When we went through this about two years ago to establish the current ADU Ordinance, we discussed that State Law has basically preempted most local law when it comes to the construction of ADUs with regards to parking setbacks, density, building, and building heights.”
He said they constantly change regulations, and the Council must address the new regulations in the ordinance.
“It’s important for us to have our own ADU regulations because it at least allows us locally to provide a maximum ADU size,” he said. “It also allows us in the City of Port Hueneme to require an Affordable Housing Agreement with ADUs.
Stewart said there are exceptions for caregivers or family members.
“State law does continue to whittle away at our local zoning authority,” he said.
“This is part of our newly adopted housing element for our general plan, and HCD is the State Agency that approved our housing element,” he continued. “It keeps track of our ADU Ordinance and how we comply with that.”
This year’s changes increase the maximum height of a detached ADU from 16 feet, the rest of the City’s maximum height limits, to 18 feet.
“Then for attached ADUs, they can be up 25 feet and two stories in height, whether or not the primary dwelling unit is that high or not,” he said.
Stewart said the State deleted the minimum lot size requirement for ADUs.
“This is the one we lost,” he said. “Previously, we had been required to allow ADUs on any size lot if it was under the State’s 800 square foot threshold for the size of the ADU. It now applies to all ADUs across the board, so we can no longer require a minimum lot size.”
He said it clarifies that building codes harmful to public health can be required to be corrected.
“If a building violation or a zoning issue that makes the property non-conforming exists, we still have to allow the ADU to be built,” he said. “It’s only at the house where the primary residence is falling apart if it’s been burned where there is a public health and safety risk that has to be fixed. Otherwise, we have to allow the ADU to be constructed.”
The ADUs must be approved ministerially (over the counter), which is what the City currently does.
“It also states if we have design standards or if a jurisdiction, such as the City of Port Hueneme, we have to make sure our approvals are objective,” he said. “Our design standards require that the ADU match the primary residence in architectural design for the State’s considered objective. We just have to make sure that’s specified in our ordinance.”
He said the City must remove the fact that a garage or carport is converted into an ADU; they cannot require its replacement.
“In the past, if someone converted the garage, they would have been required to build a new one unless they were in close proximity to public transportation,” he said. “That’s no longer the case.”
Stewart said if a qualified non-profit constructs an ADU, they can sell it separately from the primary residence.
“That is under certain specific requirements, and that probably won’t happen very often in the City of Port Hueneme, but we still need to clarify that in the ordinance,” he said. “We had previously also required that ADU kitchens be a certain size, and they had certain sized appliances. We can no longer do that.”
He said if an ADU application is denied, and it’s hard to deny them, the City must provide a full list of why the application was deficient and how the issues can be remedied within the required 60-day timeframe.
“The project is exempt from CEQA because it exempts projects where it can be seen with certainty there can be no possibility that the activity in question will have a significant impact on the environment,” he said.
Councilman Steven Gama said Ventura County shut down the City’s Little League snack bar, and he asked if there is uniformity between ADU kitchens.”
“They’re laying on us pretty heavy down at Bubbling Springs Park,” he said.
Stewart said ADU standards are a unique animal and permissive.
“They’ve taken away our local land use authority, but it’s only applicable to ADUs,” he said.
Gama commented that the County has more stringent rules for the snack bar than what the State mandates for ADU kitchens.
Councilwoman Misty Perez asked if there is a requirement to be a certain amount of feet from a fence line.
“It depends,” Stewart said. “They are minimized at this point, and if it’s detached, it would be four feet from the side of your property lines. If it’s going above an existing property line, it can be at the property line as well.”
Councilwoman Laura Hernandez asked Stewart if he received an inquiry from Joan Tharpe regarding age limits in demographic categories as they apply to ADUs. She asked him to provide his response.
Port Hueneme–The City Council, Monday, December 19, introduced and amended section 10802 of Chapter 6 of Article 10 in the Port Hueneme Municipal Code for Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) development standards.
ADUs are otherwise known as Granny Flats, Casitas, and Second Dwelling Units, which can be detached, attached, or within a second residence as a Junior ADU.
“The State Government Code has established certain development standards to use,” Community Development Director
Tony Stewart said. “When we went through this about two years ago to establish the current ADU Ordinance, we discussed that State Law has basically preempted most local law when it comes to the construction of ADUs with regards to parking setbacks, density, building, and building heights.”
He said they constantly change regulations, and the Council must address the new regulations in the ordinance.
“It’s important for us to have our own ADU regulations because it at least allows us locally to provide a maximum ADU size,” he said. “It also allows us in the City of Port Hueneme to require an Affordable Housing Agreement with ADUs.
Stewart said there are exceptions for caregivers or family members.
“State law does continue to whittle away at our local zoning authority,” he said.
“This is part of our newly adopted housing element for our general plan, and HCD is the State Agency that approved our housing element,” he continued. “It keeps track of our ADU Ordinance and how we comply with that.”
This year’s changes increase the maximum height of a detached ADU from 16 feet, the rest of the City’s maximum height limits, to 18 feet.
“Then for attached ADUs, they can be up 25 feet and two stories in height, whether or not the primary dwelling unit is that high or not,” he said.
Stewart said the State deleted the minimum lot size requirement for ADUs.
“This is the one we lost,” he said. “Previously, we had been required to allow ADUs on any size lot if it was under the State’s 800 square foot threshold for the size of the ADU. It now applies to all ADUs across the board, so we can no longer require a minimum lot size.”
He said it clarifies that building codes harmful to public health can be required to be corrected.
“If a building violation or a zoning issue that makes the property non-conforming exists, we still have to allow the ADU to be built,” he said. “It’s only at the house where the primary residence is falling apart if it’s been burned where there is a public health and safety risk that has to be fixed. Otherwise, we have to allow the ADU to be constructed.”
The ADUs must be approved ministerially (over the counter), which is what the City currently does.
“It also states if we have design standards or if a jurisdiction, such as the City of Port Hueneme, we have to make sure our approvals are objective,” he said. “Our design standards require that the ADU match the primary residence in architectural design for the State’s considered objective. We just have to make sure that’s specified in our ordinance.”
He said the City must remove the fact that a garage or carport is converted into an ADU; they cannot require its replacement.
“In the past, if someone converted the garage, they would have been required to build a new one unless they were in close proximity to public transportation,” he said. “That’s no longer the case.”
Stewart said if a qualified non-profit constructs an ADU, they can sell it separately from the primary residence.
“That is under certain specific requirements, and that probably won’t happen very often in the City of Port Hueneme, but we still need to clarify that in the ordinance,” he said. “We had previously also required that ADU kitchens be a certain size, and they had certain sized appliances. We can no longer do that.”
He said if an ADU application is denied, and it’s hard to deny them, the City must provide a full list of why the application was deficient and how the issues can be remedied within the required 60-day timeframe.
“The project is exempt from CEQA because it exempts projects where it can be seen with certainty there can be no possibility that the activity in question will have a significant impact on the environment,” he said.
Councilman Steven Gama said Ventura County shut down the City’s Little League snack bar, and he asked if there is uniformity between ADU kitchens.”
“They’re laying on us pretty heavy down at Bubbling Springs Park,” he said.
Stewart said ADU standards are a unique animal and permissive.
“They’ve taken away our local land use authority, but it’s only applicable to ADUs,” he said.
Gama commented that the County has more stringent rules for the snack bar than what the State mandates for ADU kitchens.
Councilwoman Misty Perez asked if there is a requirement to be a certain amount of feet from a fence line.
“It depends,” Stewart said. “They are minimized at this point, and if it’s detached, it would be four feet from the side of your property lines. If it’s going above an existing property line, it can be at the property line as well.”
Councilwoman Laura Hernandez asked Stewart if he received an inquiry from Joan Tharpe regarding age limits in demographic categories as they apply to ADUs. She asked him to provide his response.
For the complete story, visit tricountysentry.com.
Port Hueneme updates ADU development standards – Tri County … Tri County Sentry
