In 2016, Legal Battle Lines Are Drawn in the Back Yard

The Washington Post’s Wonkblog revisits the conflict in Los Angeles around second units, or granny flats, since a 2016 lawsuit forced the city to stop issuing permits for them.

The suit itself is naturally limited to legal arguments, explored in the article. But even the land-use lawyer behind the complaint admits his opposition is also socially motivated, hinging on a desire to maintain a particular aesthetic and class sensibility in single-family neighborhoods.

Emily Badger writes:

Secondary units don’t just alter the scenery or erode privacy. Build enough, and a neighborhood may not truly remain single-family anymore, with all its associations of middle-class stability and nuclear families.

Advocates for second units also sometimes adopt, rather than challenge, these terms; a state senator trying to overrule local restrictions like Los Angeles’s told the Post:

"There is a mind-set in suburbia that … it’s going to be those people — which is ridiculous, because the cost of housing in California is so high that it’s really us. It’s teachers and the people that work on my staff."

While solving L.A.'s legal problems may not be easy, there is a path forward. Public resistance may be more difficult to erode. The city is launching a pilot program to showcase less "menacing" second units, Badger reports—but "a community lender is underwriting their construction loan, because traditional banks won’t finance such properties."