Caitlin Bigelow grew up in La Mesa, a San Diego suburb. โMy parents were both journalists,โ she said, until her mom quit her job to care for Bigelow and her brother. โMoney was tight on one salary. They rented out the granny flat that was attached to the garage. It was teeny tiny, but they rented to a SDSU student and that was the difference that paid the mortgage.โ
Itโs this distant memory that fuels Bigelowโs passion for accessory dwelling units โ small secondary units that share the property of a larger, more primary home. โI grew up seeing the benefits that these bring to families, not only economic stability but social stability. Grandparents can live on the property with you. There are so many wonderful things about these units,โ she says. โWhen I saw [Californiaโs] regulations passed in 2017 that allowed homeowners across the state to build these things, I thought โthis is going to be a game-changer for families and for California,โ so I quit my job and started Maxable,โ a company that offers ADU consulting and services to Californians.
As Next City previously reported, the regulations Bigelow refers to are a set of reforms passed in 2017. As of this year, additional state laws were put in place to further promote the development of ADUs, this time including โjunior accessory dwelling unitsโ which the state considers to be ADUs that total 500 square feet or less. The driving force behind these changes is a desire to build more ADUs as a response to the stateโs growing housing crisis. In many California cities, vast expanses are dedicated to single family zoning, even as housing prices are out of reach for many. In San Diego, the housing crisis is especially direโjust 24 percent of households are able to afford the median home price in San Diego County: $655,000.
โSan Diego is really limited in the amount of vacant land left to develop. A lot of that is due to its environmentally sensitive lands,โ says Gary Geiler, the development services director for the City of San Diego. โWe protect a lot of canyons and hillsides. Half of the floodplain area is beaches and bluffs, so the developable land is pretty much developed, so weโre looking at fill-in development to add housing.โ
One of the strategies San Diego County deployed last fall to further support ADU development was offering free, pre-approved ADU floor plans and waiving $15,000 in permit and development fees to reduce the costs associated with construction.
โWeโve had companion unit regulations on the books since the 90s,โ Geiler says, โbut they were more design-oriented and required conditional use permits. We didnโt get a lot of applications, maybe 10 in a year.โ These days, those numbers are way up. โIn 2017โฆ we got an increase of over 100 applications that first year, so we said, โOK, weโre onto something here.โโ The city has since done away with even more fees. โThe applications increased even further,โ Geiler says. โWe had probably over 300 applications in 2018 and over 600 in 2019. So far we have about 200 new units this year and about 1,000 units applied for.โ
While Bigelow is quick to give the city and county credit for all theyโve done to promote ADUs, she sees room for improvement when it comes to the pre-approved plans. โWhat it means is that those plans have structural pre-approval. It doesnโt mean that you can go into the county office, choose a plan, and pull a permit,โ she says. โYou still have to hire an architect or a designer to draw up a plan to show how it will fit on the property to show that itโs still in compliance.โ
She also just doesnโt like the pre-approved plans. โTheyโre not good,โ she says. โThe plans arenโt what people are looking for. They have a 650-square-foot studio which is a nice size large one-bedroom. It shouldnโt be a studio. The other is an 800-square-foot one bedroom and it should be a two-bedroom.โ
Bigelow also says that while the pre-approved plans can save money on the design and planning side of things, the construction associated with them isnโt necessarily the cheapest.
Sheโd like to see San Diego take an approach more like San Joseโs where the city opened up the plan design process to local design professionals and created something of a library of plan choices that offer more variety to meet the needs of different homeowners. In San Jose, that library and its easing of zoning requirements has led to an increase from the city issuing 15 ADU permits in 2015 to 414 in 2019. Through July 2020, San Jose has issued 191 permits. She also sees the efforts of cities like Minneapolis which have done away with single family zoning entirely as another major step in the right direction for the proliferation of ADUs.
As the San Diego push for ADUs is meant to increase available housing stock, the city has restricted renting them out for terms less than 30 days, as an attempt to discourage short-term rentals on sites like Airbnb.There have been reports that homeowners arenโt complying, however. โ[Short-term rentals] arenโt allowed becauseโฆ [the program] is for our housing stock, itโs not for hotel or motel kind of uses,โ Geiler says. โMost neighborhoods are happy weโre doing that and itโs not going to change anytime soon.โ
Geiler and the city continue to improve the cityโs ADU processes. Heโs setting his sights on further improvements, like reducing parking requirements.
Cinnamon Janzer is a freelance journalist based in Minneapolis. Her work has appeared National Geographic, U.S. News & World Report, Rewire.news, and more. She holds an MA in Social Design, with a specialization in intervention design, from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a BA in Cultural Anthropology and Fine Art from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.