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Comment by brvsft | Hacker News Reader

ADUs seem like a bandaid solution for lack of housing supply in desirable areas. Not that I think they shouldn't be legal, but we're talking about paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for what amounts to a shed in someone else's backyard just because you want to live in Seattle, SF, etc.

It's so bizarre, and if this solution is taken to its logical end, you literally have cities full of single-family homes with a class of SFH owners, and their second-class ADU "owners" who live in the fancy shed behind their home. I'm curious how the inevitable legal disputes between these two classes of owners will be treated in the coming years.

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They are absolutely a bandaid for the politics of homeowners and their rule of housing supply.

Homeowners can see themselves benefitting from ADUs, so they support them. Apartments, townhomes, etc. only weaken their market power, make homeowners think about traffic, etc.

The politics of housing is completely broken because the incentives are broken, and so is the political discourse, which is dominated by creationist-level magical thinking that vacancies, or foreign buyers, or AirBNB, or "financialization" or literally anything could be the cause of the problem rather than a shortage of housing stock.

ADUs are one relatively small tool for providing additional supply of housing in places where it is politically hard to do so. There is no way they will solve the problem on their own, but they do help, and we need all the help we can get.

As far as being "sheds", plenty of them are quite nice and well done. Small yes, but small units are perfectly appropriate for, say retirees, or students, or many other demographics.

In a different time, they were called "Granny units". A place where someone who doesn't need much can live, and remain local to their entire support system and social network.

> In a different time, they were called "Granny units". A place where someone who doesn't need much can live, and remain local to their entire support system and social network.

Yah, but this is different from when we have a separate marketplace of these units. They're going to end up unbundled from the nearby house pretty quickly.

It's an odd political outcome, but serves as a model for other housing shapes.

The state defined specific things a city has to approve and a timeline they have to approve it in. Poof, we have ~100,000 new homes and a cottage industry building them that didn't exist beforehand. It's hard to blame the housing shortage on anything other than NIMBY municipalities.

We already have townhouses (that share a wall but own their own land) and condos (which share land and the building). There are also well-established legal precedents for things like easements (e.g., for access, water, sewer, see [1]).

I'm not saying this is a good idea, but is it really that different?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easement

Zoning is probably the difference.

In Seattle, ADU/DADU are built in Single Family House zone, you can tear down a single family house, build 1 main + 1 ADU + 1 DADU which is total of 3 without zoning change, then you can sell all 3 of them as Condos, require buyers share something like water bill.

Townhouse has to be build on the areas that are up zoned by the city.

I know at least two properties with ADUs larger than their primary residences.

But that’s atypical, so it’s irrelevant. Most ADUs in California cities are things like converted garages and similar sized units.

ADUs are atypical to begin with, so the entire subject matter is irrelevant!

> and their second-class ADU "owners" who live in the fancy shed behind their home

The primary home is not upper class; it’s the worse of the two units. It just becomes two houses without backyards. I’ve seen such houses for sale in Seattle. An old house with a big yard on a 5000 sqft lot turns into an old house + a new house, both without backyard. The new unit is not second-class; it is a nice house but just without backyard.

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