[LIGHT, UPBEAT ELECTRONIC MUSIC]
Hey, everyone, welcome to The Builder's Remedy Podcast.
My name is Ethan.
My name is Maxwell, and I'm Nehemiah.
And this is going to be our first episode.
Today we're going to be talking about San Diego's ADU bonus laws, what made them so great and successful compared to a lot of the other places in the state.
And we're also going to talk about some of the recent changes that just happened, you know, what that means for San Diego going forward.
And yeah, let's get into it.
Yes.
But before that, I guess we should introduce ourselves.
We're also the co-founders of not only Builder's Remedy, but also BuildSD, which is a...
It's a non-profit...
It's a group where we advocate for more housing and also show off what is going on in our city.
Show off what projects are getting built, what projects are proposed, and potentially what may happen with regional plans, city plans, local plans, what have you.
Yes, because San Diego County is such a large area where you keep hearing, oh, this project over here, this project over there.
We try to track every big projects here and there and put them in the map and, you know.
And we try to say up to date on those to keep people well informed, as well as we do several other things, including this podcast.
Yeah.
Now, moving forward, moving on, what is an ADU, I guess?
Well, an ADU comes in all shapes and sizes.
The most common form of ADU is a freestanding granny flat in the backyard, but an ADU can also take the form of a bungalow court, an attached unit over a garage, an eight-plex structure, and everything in between.
ADUs typically range between 400 and 1,200 square feet, but can be as small as 150 feet in some communities.
ADUs provide homeowners the opportunity to keep family close or generate additional income, and keeps homeownership within reach for people on a budget.
I think, you know, ADUs were something that were really common historically in the United States and abroad, but, you know, in the mid to early 20th century, there were a lot of laws that made these structures no longer really able to be built in the life.
I feel like a lot of people don't have very much history personally with ADUs anymore, even though they used to be so common.
So a lot of people don't exactly know what to picture in their mind when people talk about ADUs.
In all, you know, basic sense of the word, ADUs are just basically backyard units, they're backyard places.
They're places where you can build and have your teenage son live in.
We have a friend whose parents built an ADU on their backyard for him to stay.
Yeah, to have his own private space.
Now that he is an adult and have his own private space where he can do his own thing.
In the United States, you can take a train or drive along the northeast, and you can see all these backyard units.
Yeah, you look at communities in San Diego like Hillcrest, Bankers Hill, North Park, South Park, and Sherman Heights, all these other streetcar communities that we have here in San Diego.
And you will see, in every alley, you'll see a unit.
So these projects were often built at the same time or even before the home on the front street, as either as a starter home for somebody who just bought the property or as additional income for the homeowner or as a larger project, like say a bungalow court.
Yeah, I think a good thing for a lot of people to understand that I feel like a lot of people have misconception about is that ADUs are really small, cramped spaces.
There's actually a really wide range of spaces and sizes for ADUs.
You know, lots of ADUs can be larger than homes that you might typically picture in your mind.
Most of the people I know who live in ADUs really enjoy it.
And usually the space is pretty similar per person to something like what we have right now.
And we're really happy with the amount of space we have.
I believe the max square footage for an ADU, you know, legally, for co-advice, is 1200 square feet.
Yeah, that's right.
Which is large.
My parents' house in the suburbs is like 1700 square feet.
It's a two-bedroom.
Yeah.
Top off the second floor at 700.
Yeah.
Our three-bedroom apartment here is 1300 square feet.
So that is just larger than the largest ADUs.
Yeah. It's a very comfortable size.
Yeah.
ADUs are just units.
ADUs are just a different form of home.
Just, you know, legally different.
Yeah.
And there's been a lot of ADUs built recently, right?
We did have a long period of time where people really weren't allowed to build ADUs.
But in 2016, California passed SB 1069 and AB 2299, with the goal to make ADUs easier to build across California to help alleviate the housing crisis.
These changes were met with some pushback from cities seeking to limit the construction of ADUs, but over the next few years, additional reforms were made at the cross the straight level to ensure ADUs could be built easily across the state.
These reforms have had positive results across the state, but particularly in places like Los Angeles and San Diego, where we are, for example, California YIMBY found in Los Angeles, the number of ADU permits issued rose from just 80 in 2017 to 7,160 in 2022.
Unfortunately, despite the significant increase in ADUs across California from their pre-2016 numbers, cities continue to miss their housing goals by a wide margin.
Yeah, in that regard, I think based on the latest housing inventory from San Diego, we built from 2020 to 2023, I believe the list of data was, it was, we built 20,000 homes.
However, we need to build, was it 82,000 by 2029?
I think that's right.
We'll flash the number on the screen if it's a little different, but that's in the very close ballpark.
And it really is a serious problem here.
Housing prices have risen so quickly across California, but particularly in places like San Diego that used to be considered a little bit more affordable than somewhere like LA.
We can always just blame people.
Our housing crisis is not caused by people moving here from out of state or even from other cities in the state.
It's been a problem ever since.
We just haven't been building as much homes as we used to.
I think an important thing to recognize as well is a lot of the decisions that were made in the past that restricted the types of housing that could be built and how much could be built didn't initially have their effects fully felt because we were able to just continue sprawling outwards.
But across California, from San Francisco and the Bay Area to Los Angeles to San Diego, we've grown so much now that we've really hit the maximum we could possibly grow outwards.
And once we reached that point, we really did start seeing dramatic increases in housing prices and serious consequences that are being felt today.
Yeah, we used to be able to sprawl out into these suburbs that we are completely unable to continue doing.
We have hit mountains, we have hit natural preserves, we have hit national parks, we have hit state parks, we have hit all these boundaries that are completely unavoidable.
And you simply can't continue this sprawling growth.
Or it's too dangerous to build it for fire.
Sprawl is very unsustainable.
There are places that's...
For example, let's take Houston or places in Texas where they are continuing to sprawl outside of their city centers.
But that kind of development is very unsustainable.
You have to pay for the roads, you have to pay for sewer water lines underneath those, the landscaping.
And it's just...
Why would you want to drive an hour from your house to the city center, if you work at a city center or downtown, to and from every single day?
Five days a week, let's say.
That's ten hours.
Yeah, we already have friends in the LA area who are already doing this.
They have commutes over an hour each way.
I used to have commute like that.
I worked in Orange County and I lived in Temecula, and that sucked.
Yeah.
It's just so much of your life wasted.
Yeah.
Even if you use the excuse that housing outside is very far away is cheaper, you don't make up the costs associated with commuting and all that just catches up with you.
It's cheaper for a reason, right?
All of the externalities of the distance that you add seriously tax your quality of life and even just your pocketbook.
It's not just money as well, it's also your time with the people you love, especially for friends, your family, if you have kids essentially.
Like for us, we used to live farther apart from each other.
Yeah.
Not far enough where we're like, our friendship is like, you know.
Strange.
Strange, but we used to live in different parts of the county.
Yeah.
Where it'd be an annoyance to get to something downtown or annoyance getting something closer where you live.
It took a lot of extra work to maintain our friendship in person, whereas now it's much more organic for us to be like, hey, let's hang out.
Yeah.
Like now.
Yeah.
Or a couple of days ago where you came up to my house.
Yeah, this is the area, so just pop by your apartment.
And to be clear, it wasn't for me, it was for...
It was for his cat.
But I think that brings us back to a great point that ADUs can be such a great way to enable people to keep family closer, right?
A lot of these places that people grow up in in California, there's just almost no chance that they're gonna actually be able to afford to live there, right?
And although obviously there are always gonna be places that are super expensive, what really is different about now is the size of these areas where you might never be able to return to are entire city or county size, right?
Yeah, like, for example, like, if you have a friend, say, in Temecula, and you live in San Diego, yeah, that is painful to make that trip.
That's a trip you'd only make once a month at most probably.
Oh, definitely.
And that's the same thing for your family.
I know that my grandparents, they live out in East County San Diego, and I do not see them as often as I should, as it just takes so long to get out there.
It probably takes me about 45 minutes to get out there sometimes, and that's annoying for both people.
There are real consequences of not allowing housing or being against building housing.
In terms of ADUs in particular, San Diego's ADU program, we have a bonus ADU program, which was very successful in building a ton of housing here.
What made it very successful, that was...
So the state ADU program, it allowed two ADUs per property on any property in California.
That was the standard ruling.
And localities were able to make the choice to go with that or go with the more ambitious ADU program, like LA and specifically San Diego has done.
So San Diego's bonus ADU program was that.
Yeah.
It was a program that allowed a homeowner or a developer to build an additional, one additional ADU per every, per a deed-restricted, affordable ADU that you give up, essentially.
So you get one, you give up one, you get one, you give up one, you get one.
But what makes ours unique was there was no cap for areas that were transit priority.
Yes.
And I guess, what is transit priority?
I guess that's.
So the transit priority area, it's an area within half a mile of what's considered a high-quality bus stop, a high-quality trolley stop, high-quality BRT, commuter rail, what have you.
And the transit priority area, it basically showed you what areas in the city were very accessible by transit.
And the point of it was to zone accordingly.
So part of the TPA was that you could have theoretically unlimited bonus ADUs.
In reality, most ADU bonus program projects were between six units and about 20.
So these were not, these often were not small projects.
However, they didn't make up the majority of ADUs built in San Diego.
Majority were built to the state guideline of around two.
I believe about 25% of our ADUs built over the past few years were through the ADU bonus program, right?
So 75% of these projects could only have been at most two.
And of those 25% that did take advantage of the ADU bonus program, a lot of them were more like four, eight, although we did see some particularly large ones.
And I think that did end up causing a lot of the problems that we that we're seeing now.
Yeah, the controversy around...
And actually we have the numbers of what was permitted and what were actually bonus ADUs because of the popularity of this program.
Out of the 5720 ADUs that were permitted between 2021 and 2023, only 875 of those were bonus ADUs.
This law was passed in 2020, so there's like a little bit of like people have to catch up and get get with this new law.
But yeah.
But I believe when I did my math right, that was 15%.
Yeah, that was 225.
But 15%, that's...
I believe in recent years, it's closer to 25.
But over the past five, that does make a lot of sense.
Considering this is 2024, we're halfway between 2020...
This is 2025.
Yeah.
This data is '24.
Yes.
So these ADUs were popping up everywhere, including neighborhoods that were built primarily as single-family neighborhoods.
Yes.
Suburbs and all that.
They were coming in a lot of shapes and sizes.
What was really common were to have these sort of eight-plex style projects, where it would be either one or two buildings and eight units total, usually two-story apartment style building.
Right.
And these bonus ADUs, usually, I believe ADUs in general do not have parking requirements.
In the transit priority area, they did not.
Yes.
And so the controversy around this was parking, as always.
As always, with everything here, parking is almost always the first issue.
Aside from parking, it was just the lack of privacy, the neighborhood change that people always complain about, infrastructure, lack of parking, and the fire risk for some areas.
I think that for some neighborhoods, these concerns were valid.
I think for most neighborhoods, these were not.
Like, if you look at somewhere like the College Area, which historically most homes in the College Area have been large bedrooms who accommodate a lot of college students.
This has been a development that has been ongoing for the past 20 years, and the College Area has not had many upzones.
Only on commercial properties in the area, it was really happening.
So this latent demand caused the moment that this ADU bonus program popped up, people have built large ADU projects.
Yeah.
And whether that be a bungalow court style project, where you'll have a total of eight units, or you'll have a three-story building with around 10 to 12.
And for the uninitiated, the college area is, for San Diego, it's the area around San Diego State University, which is a major, one of the two major, three major universities.
It's the second largest university in San Diego County.
If we're counting USD, the University of San Diego.
But there's UCSD, SDSU and USD.
The area around SDSU, if you look at it in the map, it's very suburban.
Yeah, it's very suburban.
It's very single-family housing, which is very weird for a "College Area."
For the size of this university, there is simply not enough housing around it.
So, apartment projects have been popping up both sides of the Green Line from SDSU.
So, there's brand new housing in Grantville, as well as by Alvarado Hospital, which is now UCSD something hospital.
And there are housing projects actively under construction in these areas, so that people can go take transit to the university.
As many college students do not own a car, and those who do, it usually doesn't make sense to use it when you're by the college.
Yeah. Right?
So, having this transit oriented growth, as we are seeing, is great.
However, you can't live near the college and live in an apartment building.
Yeah. Despite the high demand, there are very, very few areas zoned for apartment buildings.
I think that's what made this ADU program so successful, is a lot of these areas that really were starving for housing supply, particularly around places like SDSU, finally had a release valve.
I think where the problems really started occurring, particularly the thing that galvanized the recent changes to our bonus law.
A good example of that was in Encanto, where you had particularly large lot sizes and historically disadvantaged communities, so the land prices were much cheaper than other areas.
And a large number of developers did build particularly large ADUs in Encanto, larger than the creators of the law themselves really anticipated.
Yeah.
So many of these projects were somewhere between 30 and 50 units.
Yeah.
There were some that were even larger than that.
Like there was one in Pacific Beach that was proposed, there was 160 units and stuff like that.
It's kind of absurd.
They really should have thought about that.
But to me, within Encanto, it was a combination of a few things.
As you mentioned, it being a lower income community, and having been so for such a long time, made property values lower than the rest of the city.
And also the large minimum lot sizes in the area, in certain zoning groups, made it so you couldn't simply do a lot split or a subdivision.
If you wanted to get extra value out of the land, you would have to do the ADU bonus program, or you really had no other option.
Yeah.
It doesn't make sense for having in the city of San Diego to have a large square footage.
Yeah, these lot sizes were, I believe, quarter or half an acre.
No, that doesn't mean to say you shouldn't, someone shouldn't be owning big land in San Diego.
It's just, for the average family, 2,000 square feet probably would be nice.
Yeah, for the average person probably doesn't need a quarter of an acre for a single family home.
And that was the only thing allowed on that land, a single family home.
Meanwhile, you look at other communities like Hillcrest, which are still largely single family lots.
And you'll see these 40 foot wide by 120 feet deep, streetcar suburb lots that were built in other communities like North Park was 50 feet by 100 often.
And you compare that to Encanto where many of these lot sizes were over 100 by 100 feet.
Now, the bonus program was written, was implemented with the best of intentions to actually help us alleviate the housing crisis.
It was never going to be the solution to the housing crisis.
Yeah, it was not intended to replace things where apartments otherwise should have built.
It was not intended to replace things where single family homes probably should have been built.
This might be a good moment to really go into what the new changes were to, you know, kind of the backlash to these issues with the ADU bonus law, right?
What were some of those changes?
So some of these changes were firstly, most single family zoning, at least temporarily, there was a pause on it.
And then after that temporary pause, they came up with eight single family zoning areas that you were not allowed to build bonus ADUs on, unless you consider a high resource area.
So what a high resource area is, is it's areas with a lot of services, like libraries, parks, fire station, what have you, right?
And then the other rule was where you put ADUs.
ADUs, bonus ADUs to be specific, were no longer allowed on cul-de-sacs, on one entrance roads, like think of one-way road.
Like a cul-de-sac, for example.
Like a cul-de-sac.
And single entrance neighborhoods as well.
In suburban San Diego, a lot of our development post 1950s, because of the landscape that we have here, ended up with a lot of single entrance neighborhoods, a lot of very long cul-de-sacs to fill these valleys, and ridges, and other geography.
That's just suburbia in general.
Yeah.
The suburbia here has a lot of those.
You can look at neighborhoods like Tierrasanta, or Rancho Bernardo, or Sabre Springs, and you can see that in all the development there.
I think there was also a new infrastructure fee, right?
Yes.
So the ADU bonus program was not subject to developer impact fees.
So they added this as a way to, I want to say discourage the program.
I want to believe this isn't the best intentions, but to recoup income that they otherwise would have gotten through developer impact fees.
And the reason why it's an infrastructure fee is, it is a fee to be able to use the program, as otherwise they aren't allowed to have something like a developer impact fee on these.
Yeah.
And developer impact fees [DIF], as you know, they're a lot.
They are expensive.
Yes, but they are actually very important.
Because of Prop 13, where we limit our property taxes that we can get from property owners, there's not a ton of income coming from that source.
So, DIF fees in particular were implemented to get more funding, I guess, from development in order to-
Do a lot of neighborhood upgrades.
Yes.
Like in Bankers Hill, for example, they use those funds to build a park, or to repave streets, and widen sidewalks, and stuff like that.
It's essentially used to build parks, more parks.
The largest part of the Diff fees are park fees.
Like you take somewhere like Barrio Logan, for example, where they have very long desire to have a park on the coast, right?
Because they had their coastal access taken by the Navy during World War II to build a lot of shipyards and other things, right?
It took them up until the 1990s, I believe, the late 90s, to get a coastal park there.
And there's other ambitions in the neighborhood to continue building new parks, to upgrade existing ones, like Chicano Park.
There's also the effort to build a highway cap, a freeway cap over I-5, which is, it just makes sense.
It makes sense.
This is a neighborhood that really needs more green space, especially in the southern end, and that is where they are proposing the cap, the freeway.
And to do a con, the con for DIF fees is that this, I believe for Barrio Logan, it was $90,000 per unit.
The DIF fees limit the number of development happening in the area.
Because you have to pay $90,000 per unit per...
I think that's a good way to start talking about the...
There were significant issues with the bonus ADU program, but there were also a lot of really big successes.
And some of the changes, particularly single access roads, and there was a cap put on it, right?
And these fees...
Of four to six units, depending on the lot size.
Yeah.
These are likely to be pretty devastating to the amount of units that we've been building under the bonus ADU program in recent years.
Now, to be clear, I think the cap was, you're only allowed six ADUs for any property that is 10,000 square feet, was it?
That is six total ADUs in particular.
That includes the two states, and then it would be four additional bonus ADU.
I did check it doesn't include one JADU, so you are able to do one JADU, but...
If I'm not mistaken, I think the two ADUs is just ADU and then the JADU.
I would need to talk to you about that.
The city has finally clarified this as part of the newer forms.
They said that it does not include the JADU.
Okay.
Yeah. So now you can build three ADUs, two of those being normal traditional ADUs, and then one being a JADU, which is kind of like a new accessory dwelling unit.
It's like a smaller unit.
Like typically, it will be a converted garage, or it might be a side thing, but they're usually smaller than.
The term, it's so confusing in the differences between it.
It's just one, two, a couple of things.
Yeah. But by right, we are allowed two ADUs.
That's state law.
For San Diego, there's a couple of caps, depending on the property sizes.
Yes.
But the bonus ADU program was also, it was approve or deny.
The way that these projects work, it was either approve or deny.
And when you're denied there, you were told why you were denied, and you were able to make these changes to getting approved.
It wasn't like a community input process, it wasn't anything like that.
It wasn't by right, but it was close.
And that was a big deal for this program, honestly.
I am concerned that this is going to seriously impact our ability to build enough housing, right?
San Diego, I think we're just about half, building about half per year right now, as much housing as we're needed in order to just keep prices down.
Yeah.
This really isn't going to help.
I believe, I can't remember the state organization that said we might be out of compliance with our housing element with these changes.
I believe that...
HTC, I believe.
Yeah.
HTC is saying that we...
these changes may push us out of compliance, as bonus ADU was one of the reasons why we didn't need to aggressively up zone a lot of parcels, where cities like LA had to.
Yeah.
There are really a lot of big changes that have been made.
You know, it was a little disappointing, because I think a lot of us, in general, can recognize the issues with 50 unit ADUs being built in Encanto and neighborhoods like that.
There are issues with it.
Yeah.
It feels like...
The solution shouldn't be limit it down to six, and banning on every cul-de-sac, and banning it in most single-family zoning.
Right.
Because a lot of the concerns that were brought forward that brought the plans to change the bonus was because of the large number of units in a place like Encanto.
But a lot of unrelated things ended up being inside of these recent changes.
So there was a lot of concern around originally the high...
The...
I'm forgetting the term right now.
The high resource areas.
They were not originally included as an exception, right?
So you were not able to build ADUs in high resource areas.
These are the parts of the city with the best resources.
They're often the highest income areas of the city.
Historically, have they been the most successful at fighting development?
Historically, they've been the whitest, because a lot of them have had race charters and other bad things.
So you look at a community like La Jolla.
La Jolla was going to be able to get out of building any ADUs, which is a very NIMBY community.
It's a very white community.
It's a very wealthy community.
It's also an area that wants to be its own city.
New can of worms.
They aren't becoming their own city.
But if they do that, they're going to be slapped with a regional housing.
I do think one important thing to note is they would still have been under the 280 rule at the state level, but the bonus ADU law would no longer have applied to that.
And that causes a concern saying, hey, this lower income minority neighborhood - Encanto, is there a reason why we're not allowing any development in wealthy areas, too?
Yeah.
One issue I have with HTC and the bonus ADU program was, and San Diego, was why did San Diego use the bonus ADU program in order to, you know, to meet our housing allocation?
Instead of doing things through a more formal way of doing things, right?
Like they did for University City and Hillcrest, that was the latest up zones we had in the city.
And there are three up zoning projects in process, those being Plan Mid-City, College Area and Clairemont, right?
So there will continue to be more up zonings around the city.
However, these large city-wide up zonings, which the housing element required us to do, they were not as ambitious as we would have needed if we didn't consider Bonus ADU.
Yes.
With all the upzoning, with all the development happening in the city, one would ask, why?
Or how do we get around?
How do we, you know?
How do we make this more requirement?
Yeah.
How do you make this requirement?
How do we allow more people to live in this city?
Allow less people to have to move out because of high cost and stuff like that?
I think a good lesson maybe to learn from this that Nehemiah kind of alluded to is, we basically met our housing element requirements by building apartment buildings through the ADU bonus loss, right?
And there was backlash to that because that's not what people were sold when the bill was written, and maybe that wasn't expected to be so successful, but that's what happened, right?
Going forward, I think the right thing to do is to allow and to plan for apartments and middle income, missing middle housing, right?
Instead of enabling it through these kind of, I wouldn't say shady ways, but definitely less planned.
Yeah.
It's not like you're doing a district-wide upzoning or like a corridor zoning.
Instead, we basically did, hey, there's this cool trick to build an apartment building in a single-family neighborhood.
Yeah.
It's called building at 50 percent affordable ADUs.
Yeah.
And more often than not, part of the reason why it was so successful was that there was less red tape.
Because it's not a very good apartment building.
Yeah.
And I think there are good lessons to learn from that, right?
What made this program successful?
Because I think one of the problems was the expectations of something like an ADU.
It's okay.
Something like an ADU program, and then what actually happened, right?
But we still do need to build more housing.
And yet we are struggling to build housing in ways that don't include ADUs, frankly, right?
I think one of the valuable lessons to learn is allowing people to do more things by-right, allowing people to just be denied or approved and know why, right?
I think that San Diego has partially learned this lesson with programs like Complete Communities, where these apartments projects are allowed by right in these specific areas, right?
That does allow for a lot more housing to be built quicker.
If we've decided as a city that we aren't going to be doing things like we had before with the ADU bonus program and these really large ADUs, which helped us meet at least some of our housing element, right?
Then we really do need to start looking at these sorts of issues and creating reforms for the other kinds of housing that we've been building as well, because otherwise we're not going to meet our goals.
I mean, we're already so far behind.
It really is important.
There are solutions, there are reforms happening, like single stair reforms.
Oh, just cutting red tape as well for cities, for the city required.
Having SDG&E may be an actual good player in it.
Oh, I have a lot of thoughts on SDG&E.
Just to put a personal perspective, I have been working on a small project, a small infill project in Hillcrest.
The lot is 20 feet wide by 90.
That's a tiny lot for the area.
And the only-
...That's a train!
But in order for that plot of land to work, you're going to need to build up.
And you're also going to need to take the full 20 feet of frontage.
However, for electricity, you might be required a transformer.
So that cuts out 9 feet of the frontage.
We don't have an alley, so we only have the street.
So, it's going to cut off part of the structure.
It's not an uncommon situation, too.
But it's just infuriating if you want to put it under ground.
That's $100,000.
It's not an uncommon situation to not have an alley.
You look downtown, there's literally no alleys.
You look in Bankers Hill, there's no alleys.
That's why we have so many of these utility boxes in the middle of the sidewalk here in Little Italy.
Yes.
Just hire people.
I would personally would like just to have a phone number with SDG&E, just to ask them what to do with this.
How?
Help me.
The last thing that SDG&E wants to give you is their phone number.
It's like, okay, help me get you more customers.
They're addicted to money.
It's like, we're building a, say, 10-unit apartment building.
That's 10 more.
I guess there's already an existing.
Don't worry about it.
There's nine more people.
There's nine more accounts for you to-
Yeah.
To-
To profit off of it.
You are an electricity company.
You make money by selling people electricity.
Yes.
But-
That's a whole other thing.
Joking aside, SDG&E is a bad company.
Joking aside, I don't like them.
Joking aside, I don't like SDG&E.
I don't like the different monopoly.
But they-
That's an issue.
When it comes to regulation of property, this is something the city can solve.
Yeah.
In order to build our housing, in order for people, more people, eventually our kids, when we have kids, if we have kids-
To be able to stay in the city.
To be able to stay in the city that they grew up in.
Yeah.
These kinds of regulations need to go, these kinds of regulations need to be streamlined to build more housing.
Growing up here in San Diego, I've seen a lot of my friends leave the city as they simply could not afford it.
I saw this recently, one of my friends had to move to Florida.
And then another one of my friends, their family started to move to Arizona.
Like this is happening and it has been for a while, but due to the cost of living crisis here and the housing crisis, a lot of people are being pushed out.
Yeah.
And we're going through our closing thoughts here.
There is still hope.
So the ADU bonus program is still a thing, even though it has been significantly reduced, it does still exist and people will still make use of it.
And then, there's also been some other developments, like San Diego has signed on with a state law that allows you to build condo ADUs.
So you can set ADUs as individual units, individual homes.
That's one complaint people have been having is, apartments, every development that's been happening around the city aren't for rent.
Yes.
There's a reason for that, which we can touch on in a future episode.
But we need more apartments, condos, ADUs to sell.
And that's a very easy way for people to get into property ownership, to draw their net worth for equity.
Yeah.
Just simply, someone who is retired, they own a home, and they want to sell a right to build an ADU, like an ADU subdivide, right?
Where they could sell this permit for somebody to build an ADU, and then they can get extra money to help out with their retirement.
Or somebody who owns a property, they can split it up into multiple ADUs, or they can sell existing ADUs, and they can take that money and go ahead and go to the next project to go ahead and grow their network, grow their business.
Now, I have some thoughts.
If you do a garage conversion, which is going to be an ADU, how do you sell that?
Oh, yeah.
But...
Disconnected ADUs is very easy.
Yeah, disconnected.
For areas in central San Diego, with Alley Access and all that, that's very easy.
There's going to be, you know, there's going to be some...
There's going to be some concerns.
Some concerns, as always, right?
But there's going to be some bad actors, as always.
But let's not be...
Let's not make perfect the enemy of good.
Yeah.
That's right.
We need more housing.
And a lot of people do deserve a homeownership opportunity, which this would grant them.
And not only people moving in to San Diego, it's also seniors.
That's seniors who may be living in a single-family house and want to downsize.
They maybe don't want to rent a smaller apartment or condo.
They would like to own it.
Yeah. They would like to own, let's say, a two-bedroom condo.
Well, an ADU is a great option for that.
If you want to live in the same neighborhood as well.
That's a big deal, particularly in these places that have historically had such large lot sizes.
If you've lived there your whole life, you want to downsize, you might not have the option to downsize right now.
So this is really exciting.
Yeah.
Already.
There are also several state laws in process.
Like there's one that would change the ADU parking requirement statewide, so that ADUs under 500 square feet would be exempt, stuff like that.
So there's definitely progress going on.
Yeah.
But I feel like largely the ADU discussion is kind of on a hold here in San Diego.
Yeah.
And a lot of groups here are trying to move on to more, what they view as more productive goals, like a single stair, for example.
But I think that there's still a lot of future in building ADUs here.
Yeah.
I hope it continues to be a significant part in the new housing being built, because it really is one of those ways to add new housing to places that otherwise just wouldn't see it.
Yeah.
And it does reflect these state-allowed ADUs.
They reflect three-fourths of the ADUs we've been building.
So it's not a significant slowdown.
It is a cut and it's unfortunate to see, but we will still keep building these state-allowed ADUs.
Now, ADUs are not the solution to our housing crisis.
It is a tool in our toolkit.
Exactly.
It's a great missing middle type tool.
It allows development basically city-wide.
And now that it's been cut from the bonus ADU program for single family, that will be changed, but these other ADUs are still there.
Yeah.
So there's a ton of news happening around ADUs, the bonus ADU program here in San Diego.
And we have, as obvious, as evident, we have a bunch of thoughts on it.
Yeah. So if you would like to join in on our conversation, in the conversation, you know, feel free to leave a comment.
Yes. Feel free to leave a comment.
We also have a Discord if you want to join, it's going to be linked down below.
Our website, buildsd.org.
And we're working on some projects like a, we're working on a public documents database.
So that's all primary sources for stuff.
Going back to the 1960s.
Bunch of reading.
Yeah.
We also host a semi-monthly...
Semi-monthly meet up.
Yes.
We had our last one at Bankers Hill, and we went to a coffee shop.
That was nice.
And then hopefully we can do another one soon.
All righty.
That has been The Builder's Remedy.
As always, my name is Nehemiah.
My name is Maxwell.
And I've been Ethan.
Thank you so much.
You have a great night.
Bye-bye.
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(c) 2025 BuildSD.org contributors Captions: Samuel Sharp