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Comment by Macha | Hacker News Reader

"Granny flats", they're called here, but they fell out of fashion because:

(a) New houses tend to be built in housing estates as either terraces or semi-detached without the land to add on a granny flat like in a lot of the pre-1950s houses that had them added on later.

(b) A lot of them were rather shoddily built.

(c) The end of single-income households for most of the populace means that even if someone was living in a granny flat, the younger generation would not be around to offer company/assistance because both are working.

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The main reason is that zoning makes it impossible to build them in most places. That has recently changed in CA and the amount of permits submitted for ADUs has increased by multiple magnitudes in the last 5 years (in certain locales, LA being one).

And even when it's legal, it's often not "by right". So you end up with restrictions against e.g. renting out both the main house and the ADU.

I know this isn't the discussion but felt relevant to add - I think they should be legal to build and live in as a primary residence, but if the plan is just to rent it out then I think there should be restrictions. That seems like it would incentivize people to do more rent-seeking and build multiple smaller houses instead of selling the land to someone that wants to actually live there.

Not sure how popular this opinion is on here but I generally think we should be disincentivizing rental properties as long as we have a shortage in the housing market. Otherwise land and rental prices just rise because it makes more sense to rent than to sell. My naïve solution is something like "You pay 60% property tax on your primary residence and add 40% for each additional one". Then if you wanted to own and rent 8 houses you could but you'd be paying 300% property tax on the 8th house, which would change the incentives so it makes more sense to sell than to buy up properties and plan to rent them out

Unless this was paired with some serious house building incentives, I think this will enable the 20th-40th percentile by wealth to buy houses, at the cost of preventing the 0th-20th percentile from ever moving out of their parent's house.

So you'd have the bottom 20th percentile unhappy because of the limits to their living situation, and the 80th percentile upwards unhappy because of the reduction in their rental income. I can't see it being politically viable.

Definitely agreed it's not politically viable haha, just seems like a good solution to the issue of housing affordability.

Also as some others said it would need to be paired with building incentives to also make it easier for people to build homes, but in the short term the benefit would be incentivizing people to sell rental properties at a lower price and promote home ownership.

I agree people won't be happy about reduction in rental income, but I don't think we should be incentivizing people to use housing as a way to make money - that's basically going to guarantee that prices are higher than they should be because the whole goal is to profit from it.

Some restrictions might be appropriate, but a lot of people don't have the savings to buy even a small house and need inexpensive places to rent, so more in-law apartments in cities would help a lot.

You don’t have to do any of that. Rentals provide a huge value to society. There is a large portion of the population in any given city that would prefer renting over buying.

To fix our housing issues we just need to make it easier to build homes. That is it.

> (b) A lot of them were rather shoddily built.

Yeah, I don't think my mother-in-law suite has a true right angle in it anywhere other than my IKEA bookshelf :V

Not terribly surprising it was a DIY build by my landlord's father back in the 60s.

They didn't _quite_ "fall out of fashion" - they were made illegal by a certain group of people, in order to reduce the relative power/independence of other groups of people.

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