Are You Living in San Diego’s ‘Worst ADU’?
Happy Tuesday and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week’s stories include:
- The U.S. Department of Justice files its own anti-trust lawsuit against RealPage, accusing the company’s rent recommendation software of creating an effective landlord cartel.
- Rep. Robert Garcia (D–Calif.) says he’ll create a YIMBY Caucus in Congress.
- Tiny Rhode Island passes a big slate of housing bills.
But first, our lead story on San Diego’s accessory dwelling unit (ADU) boom and its discontents.
Are You Living in San Diego’s ‘Worst ADU’?
A pair of two-story, two-unit apartment buildings. A skinny three-story block rising above the single-story homes around it. Rows of two-story complexes going up in the backyard of a low-slung bungalow.
These are allegedly examples of “monster ADUs” taking over San Diego since the creation of the city’s ADU Bonus Program. Now the local news outlet OB Rag is collecting reader-submitted images of these new homes as part of its “worst ADU” competition.
Supporters of San Diego’s ADU Bonus Program—which allows for up to four ADUs citywide and a theoretically unlimited (but practically capped) number of units near transit—say it has produced a modest increase in new home construction in San Diego’s central, low-density neighborhoods.
But critics contend the program has perverted the original “granny flat”—a small unit meant to house an elderly relative—to unaesthetic, unaffordable “bunkers” destroying the city’s single-family neighborhoods.
The ADU Bonus Program’s streamlined approval process has eliminated the public hearings and planning commission votes that once empowered neighborhood critics to stop these kinds of projects.
Enter OB Rag‘s Worst ADU Contest, which attempts to give a voice to the vetoless.
“We thought this was a way for people to be heard,” says Kate Callen, a reporter at OB Rag, of the contest. “A lot of people who have these monster ADUs [next door] feel like collateral damage.”
San Diego’s Bonus ADU Boom
Since 2019, California state law has required cities to allow one ADU and one “junior ADU” (typically a small unit inside the primary home) per residentially zoned property. Cities are also required to ministerially approve ADUs—meaning no public hearings and no discretion from bureaucrats to shoot down or condition code-compliant projects.
In 2021, San Diego launched its ADU Bonus Program, which goes well beyond the state-level liberalization. It allows an additional two “bonus ADUs” to be built, provided that one is deed-restricted to be affordable to people of moderate incomes (that is to say, rents can’t be more than 30 percent of 120 percent of area median income.) The affordability restrictions have to last for 15 years.
In the city’s Transit Priority Areas—areas within one mile of a transit stop—builders can add a theoretically unlimited number of ADUs provided that each new market-rate unit is paired with a deed-restricted, moderate-income unit. The city’s lot coverage rules, height limits, and floor-to-area ratios put practical limits on how many of those theoretically uncapped ADUs can actually fit on a given property.
The program also waives parking requirements and prevents the city from requiring many off-site improvements.
More Units, Different Units
CalMatters reported last year that as of October 2023, builders have filed applications for 159 ADU Bonus Program projects totaling 1,200 units.
According to city data, 255 deed-restricted ADUs have been approved under the program since 2021. The city approved 4,246 ADUs and junior ADUs in that same time period. Roughly a third of new residential units permitted in San Diego since 2021 have been ADUs.
Those numbers have earned San Diego’s ADU Bonus Program a lot of praise from activists and analysts. While a lot of California’s efforts at deregulating small, multi-family “missing middle” construction have been a flop, San Diego’s program is throwing up a respectable number of units.
A report from the University of California, Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation spotlights the program as “a promising example for how cities can proactively facilitate housing growth.”
“Crucially [the program] is adding homes in areas that would have traditionally been reserved for single-
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