California Cities Going the Extra Mile to Support ADU Construction

Cinnamon Janzer reports on San Diego County's approach to Accessory Dwelling Units, deployed last fall to further support ADU development beyond the allowances made by state law, by "offering free, pre-approved ADU floor plans and waiving $15,000 in permit and development fees to reduce the costs associated with construction."

Janzer quotes Gary Geiler, the development services director for the city of San Diego, to explain what the city is doing to support ADU construction in a city with notoriously high housing prices, much like the rest of the cities in the state. 

“We’ve had companion unit regulations on the books since the 90s,” Geiler says, “but they were more design-oriented and required conditional use permits. We didn’t get a lot of applications, maybe 10 in a year.” These days, those numbers are way up. “In 2017… we got an increase of over 100 applications that first year, so we said, ‘OK, we’re onto something here.’” The city has since done away with even more fees. “The applications increased even further,” Geiler says. “We 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.”

Janzer also speaks with Caitlin Bigelow, a resident of the nearby city of La Mesa, who started the company Maxable to offer ADU consulting and services to Californians, who finds room for improvements for both the city and the county's efforts, finding fault especially with the pre-approved floor plans, and points to the example of San Jose for a model for improvement. 

"She’d like to see San Diego take an approach more like San Jose’s 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," reports Janzer.