Are ADUs popping up in SLO County really ‘affordable’ to renters? | Opinion

After some 20 years, Trilogy at Monarch Dunes — an upscale golf course community in Nipomo — is entering its final phase of development.

In June, Shea Homes won approval for a revised plan that moved the location of the hotel, reduced the commercial area and added 122 more homes than originally planned.

Thirty-one of those homes will come with attached “granny units” — officially known as accessory dwelling units or ADUs — which will potentially be available to rent at affordable, or at least moderately affordable, rates.

The changes were controversial, but most of the opposition centered on the new location of the hotel or the loss of commercial space.

The ADUs got barely a mention at the Board of Supervisors meeting, though Supervisor Bruce Gibson expressed doubts about whether or not those units will truly be affordable to renters.

“Perhaps the 30-or-so ADUs, if they’re rented by a landlord with a bit of a social conscience, might be reasonably affordable to some individuals. But I think we should just get real about how this housing addition will affect the situation,” Gibson said.

Yet the county is designating half of those ADUs as “affordable” and the other half as “moderate” for purposes of meeting state housing targets — even though local officials have no idea what the rents will be or if they will be rented at all. That will be totally up to the homeowners.

Thirty-one ADUs may not seem like a huge deal — but try telling that to 31 people who have been struggling for months, even years in some cases, to find affordable rentals on the Central Coast.

Gaming the system

San Luis Obispo County isn’t alone in treating ADUs as affordable housing, based on the assumption that they are “affordable by design” and will therefore be affordable to rent.

Some of California’s wealthiest communities have been accused of trying to sidestep state rules by over-relying on ADUs in their state-required housing plans.

Since those plans focus on potential development — including housing that may not even be in the pipeline — these affordable units could be phantoms that will never exist.

The state of California typically doesn’t challenge local jurisdictions on the issue.

It allows local governments to classify secondary units as low-income based either on actual or anticipated affordability.

Let that sink in for a second. ADUs can be counted as affordable housing based — not on what they will actually rent for — but on what they might possibly rent for at some future date.

What’s more, the state doesn’t monitor the calculations.

“We rely on the jurisdictions to report their data and we do not verify,” according to Megan Kirkeby, deputy director of housing policy for the state Department of Housing and Community Development.

Grand jury urges change

Over-reliance on ADUs in wealthy Silicon Valley communities caught the attention of the San Mateo County grand jury.

“This problem is most acute in Atherton, Hillsborough, Portola Valley and Woodside, where some residents are up in arms over the state-mandated housing requirements, and the city governments, trying to appease them, are proposing counting on ADUs to meet as much as 80 percent of their affordable housing targets,” it wrote in a report released in June.

The report also points out that an over-concentration of ADUs in predominantly white communities can lead to greater segregation and exclusion. Since homeowners often rent ADUs to family members or friends, that increases the likelihood that the renters will be white as well.

The grand jury recommended that San Mateo County and its cities stop counting ADUs as affordable housing until they develop a monitoring system that verifies how they’ll be used.

Atherton — ranked as one of the wealthiest communities in the state — disputed the jury’s allegations; the town’s mayor told a reporter with The Almanac that the grand jury used “too broad a brush” and noted that other types of affordable housing developments are on the drawing board.

Atherton officials also said they are “tentatively” planning to support a regional ADU monitoring effort, The Almanac reported.

But isn’t it a little late for that? Monitoring should have been in place from the start, not put in place a few years later as an afterthought.

How big is the problem?

Unfortunately, there have been a lot of assumptions made about the affordability of ADU rentals, but little research to back that up — even in the middle of an ADU boomlet. In 2021, one in seven new homes built in California was an ADU, and that number is expected to increase.

UC Berkeley’s Community Center for Innovation released a report in 2021 described as “the first-ever statewide ADU-owner survey” that included responses from 752 homeowners.

Among its findings:

• The median rent was $2,000 per month

• 61% were one-bedroom; only 21% had two or more bedrooms

• 86% had one or two tenants

• Only 11% provided housing for school-aged children

• 16% provided no-cost housing to a family member

• 8% of the units were used as short-term vacation rentals

While it’s dangerous to draw too many conclusions from such limited data, it’s clear that ADUs alone aren’t enough.

They aren’t suitable for large families.

A significant number don’t end up on the open rental market, but are instead used as family housing or even home offices.

And some do wind up as short-term rentals, cutting into the permanent rental housing communities need.

Another thing: ADUs aren’t a replacement for the type of affordable housing that nonprofit builders can provide. We’re talking multi-family projects with playgrounds, meeting rooms, daycare centers — the type of housing that gives tenants a sense of community.

Affordable units may end up existing ‘solely on paper’

Still, state and local governments should continue encouraging homeowners to add accessory dwelling units. They are an excellent way to increase the state’s housing supply quickly and relatively inexpensively, and frankly, the state needs all the housing it can get.

But let’s face reality: Some ADU owners will be inclined to charge whatever the market will bear.

Absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it is egregiously misleading to count that as “affordable” housing.

Here’s how the San Mateo County grand jury explained it: “Without accountability through oversight and regulations, low-, very low-, and moderate-income housing now planned in some San Mateo County jurisdictions may end up existing solely on paper and never in operation.”

California needs to step up its game by requiring all jurisdictions to have an effective monitoring program in place before they are permitted to count ADUs as affordable.

There should also be auditing to ensure affordable ADUs that are built meet the criteria.

And at some point, could we have a more comprehensive survey of ADU owners?

California has an affordable housing crisis on its hands, and accessory dwelling units are one way to alleviate it.

But pretending that high-rent, backyard bungalows are “affordable housing” only masks the problem.

Don’t let that happen, California.