Ep 54: Accessory Dwelling Units and State vs. Local Control with Vinit Mukhija (pt. 2)

In our last episode we talked with Vinit Mukhija about how informal and incremental development is reshaping single-family housing cities in the Global North. This time Prof. Mukhija is back, getting into the weeds of the policies and politics driving those changes. What are the keys to successful accessory dwelling unit and second unit housing policy, and how do we find the right balance between local control and the intervention of state legislatures?

Show notes:

• Mukhija, V. (2022). Remaking the American Dream: The Informal and Formal Transformation of Single-Family Housing Cities. MIT Press.
• The Los Angeles Times You Do ADU Newsletter.
• Floor plan of Lennar’s “Home Within a Home” new-build housing with interior second unit.
• A history of state ADU reform in California: Casey, D. (2021). A Guide to Ending Single-Family Zoning: Lessons Learned from 39 Years of ADU Legislation. California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund.
• Furth, S., and Remington, J. (2021, April 27). Ordinances at Work: Seven Communities That Welcome Accessory Dwelling Units. Mercatus Center.
• AARP. (2021). Accessory Dwelling Units Model State Act and Local Ordinance.
• Another resource on ADUs: AccessoryDwellings.org.
• Peterson, K. (2018). Backdoor Revolution: The Definitive Guide to ADU Development. Accessory Dwelling Strategies, LLC.
• Crane, R. E. (2020). Is Granny in that Flat? How Regulations Shape the Construction and Use of Accessory Dwelling Units in Los Angeles. University of California, Los Angeles. 
• Marantz, N., Elmendorf, C., & Kim, Y. B. (2023). Evaluating California’s Accessory Dwelling Unit Reforms: Preliminary Evidence and Lessons for State Governments. NYU Furman Center.
• Durning, A. (2020, February 21). One of North America’s Boldest Housing Initiatives Has Reached Its End: Did It Work? Sightline Institute.

Transcript

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Shane Phillips  0:04  
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. We're back for the second episode of our two part interview with Vinit Mukhija, Professor of Urban Planning here at UCLA, and author of a new book on the remaking of single family neighborhoods. Last time we focused on the history of informal housing in the global north, where even in cities like Los Angeles, unpermitted homes and living spaces are very common, and the efforts to legalize these spaces and bring them into the formal housing market. This time, we're digging into the weeds of the accessory dwelling unit, and second, and third-unit policies that are allowing homeowners to build more homes legally on their properties. We've already talked about some of the housing needs and political and economic pressures driving cities in this direction. But we want to make sure we also cover some of the most important elements of successful ADU policies with respect to design and development standards, parking limitations on how units can be used and who can live in them, and other policies like that. Since Vinita book touches on it and it's a theme we come back to again and again on the show, we're also going to challenge each other a bit on the question of local control versus state preemption of housing and land use policy. Paavo and I come down more on the side of state intervention than Vinit does. But as you'll hear, we still find plenty of areas of understanding if not always agreement. The Housing Voice podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies. With production support from Claudia Bustamante, Jason Sutedja, Divine Muttoni and Phoebe Bruce. As always, you can email me with questions or show ideas at shanephillips@ucla.edu. Now, let's get to part two of our conversation. Vinit Mukhija is Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA and he is back for part two of a discussion about his book Remaking the American Dream: The Informal and Formal Transformation of Single-Family Housing Cities. Vinit, welcome back, I think that's the first time I can say that to the Housing Voice podcast. 

Vinit Mukhija  2:18  
Thank you, Shane. 

Shane Phillips  2:19  
And Paavo is once again co-hosting with me, we are remote this time, though. Hey, Paavo.

Paavo Monkkonen  2:25  
Shane, good to see you. Good to see you, Vinit. And am I on tour duty today? 

Shane Phillips  2:29  
Yeah, I think you're on tour duty. We already got it to her from Vinit, and we gotta fill this space. So where are you taking us?

Paavo Monkkonen  2:36  
I am ready, because I have a great place to visit with a good anecdote about remaking the American dream in this or in this case, remaking the Turkish dream. So I would like to take both of you to Istanbul, which is an amazing city for many reasons, mostly the cats. The cats are amazing. The history is amazing. The people are fantastic, the food's delicious. I had the pleasure of visiting last summer. My dad's sister married a guy from Turkey in the 60s, and has lived there basically since then. I have a Turkish cousin and a wonderful Turkish family so I went with my brother and we visited ... and we went to their house a couple of times in a neighborhood called Suadity... S-U-A-D-I-Y-E. People at home, stop what you're doing, get on Google Earth and look at this neighborhood and called Suadiye because it's really fantastic urbanism. It's like 10-storey apartment buildings, metro Station cafes. I really liked this. Like I'm not a fan of setbacks in general. But in this neighborhood, the use of setbacks and 10-storey buildings with a lot of greenery makes a really nice streetscape. It's got a ferry station, it's got a metro station. And so I would like to take you there and hang out and eat some good food. And the anecdote that I'll share is my uncle. When we were hanging out, they just moved, they downsized to a smaller flat because their daughter moved out into her own place. And he was saying, "Ah, we've lived in this neighborhood for 20 years. It was always so nice. One of the things that we really liked about it is that a good level of density was all the buildings were mostly eight storeys. But then they changed the rules, and they allowed developers to build up to 12. storeys and that's just too much neighborhood ruined". Eight storeys was great, 12 storeys was too much so it just really like, you know, obviously sunk in for me, how much kind of what we take as a normal density is just based on whatever we're used to. And then the change is the problem, not the actual level of density.

Shane Phillips  4:36  
Yeah. Is this is that neighborhood kind of along the river that divides the city or...

Paavo Monkkonen  4:42  
No, it's on the Asian side, kind of down in the in the eastern part along the coast. And yeah, it's fantastic. There's some islands off the coast of Istanbul, the princess islands, my family has a little small condo on the island. We got to go hang out there's, great city.

Shane Phillips  5:01  
So Vinit last time we talked about informal housing and how it's much more prevalent in the Global North than many people may appreciate, even in affluent cities like Los Angeles. And that was the focus of a lot of our conversation. We talked about why people build or convert space into housing illegally or without permits, and how that informal status can put both landlords and tenants at risk in different ways. And we talked about how the financial benefits of informal and smaller-scale incremental housing, things like backyard units, and garage conversions tend to accrue disproportionately to wealthy and white households. And we also talked about how formalization and legalization reforms may be helping change that somewhat, still a long way to go, but kind of moving in the right direction. What we didn't talk about so much is what the actual policies enabling this transformation look like, for example, what it took for California to go from producing less than 1000 accessory dwelling units or ADUs in 2016, to over 23,000, more than a quarter of our statewide production, which is sad that that's over a quarter. But it is a very large share now, in 2022, we also didn't get into the role that local and state governments have played in facilitating those transformations. And so that's what we'll be doing today, including, I think, a bit of friendly debate about the value of local control of housing and land use policy versus state intervention that takes away some of that control and asserts minimum standards across jurisdictions. Oregon, California, and other state legislatures have been wading into housing policymaking in ways that they have not for decades, if ever, doing everything from eliminating single-family zoning and parking mandates to adopting rent stabilization protections statewide. There is the flip side to that, I'm not sure if we'll really get to it but I just want to kind of acknowledge that you also have more conservative states like Texas, and North Carolina that are engaging in what's known as state preemption, prohibiting cities from doing things like enacting rent control, or other tenant protections from implementing inclusionary zoning, or other policies that they don't like. So state intervention can definitely cut both ways. And we'll see if we can kind of bring that into the conversation too. Before we get to all that, though, there is a question... I think is more kind of on the topic of our last interview, but we didn't get to, and I want to spend a little bit of time on it. It relates to this idea of the American Dream, which is in the title of your book, and how it's been evolving. So even a couple generations ago, people were saying, and you point this out in your book, that allowing informal housing, second units, ADUs, anything that really involves dividing up land to fit more households, amounted to "carving up the American dream". They argued, and in some cases, still argue that this type of housing or by building this type of housing, we were conceding to a lower quality of life for future generations, with less privacy, smaller homes and yards, all those things. And for people who are used to fenced-in detached homes on 5000 or 8000, square foot lots, I think you can see how they might view second units and having that be your option for an affordable place to live or living in a converted garage also as moving in the wrong direction. And I don't think it's totally unreasonable to be concerned about expectations shifting downward in that way. And I do want to be clear, this concern is not unique to second units or ADUs at this kind of incremental development. You see here the same thing with proposals to re-legalize single room occupancy hotels and cohousing and micro units and so forth. But I just want to hear you know, as we kick this off, how do you think about this idea that allowing this kind of incremental, often inexpensive, and fairly bare bones development is a compromise that we shouldn't make that it is, again, "carving up the American dream"?

Vinit Mukhija  9:15  
Thanks, Shane, and thanks, Paavo. Thank you for having me back. Looking forward to your conversation. I was looking at these questions, and one of the first thoughts I had Shane was, I should have called the book 'Sharing the American Dream' rather than remaking the American dream because a lot of what happens in it is this idea of sharing single-family lots. I think we should be extending that to sharing neighborhoods, sharing cities sharing suburbs. But you're exactly right. And some of the earliest criticism is about carving up the single-family lots. I think that one of the biggest challenges that ADUs have faced is the cultural idea of single-family living and that is so strongly held that in part governments, local state that is in a way one of the biggest hurdles they face in changing regulations at the single family lock level and as well as single family neighborhood level. And I look at some of the interesting stuff that's happening in LA Times where now we can sign up for a you do ADU, newsletter is the regular You Do ADU columns, ADUs have become an integral part of LA Design Festival. And there always some units on display as part of that, commercial builders like Lennar are marketing their multi-generational housing as 'Next Gen -  The Home Within a Home'. So I think there is a recognition that this is against the grain of what we are used to. But it's necessary, and it requires some interesting way of making it acceptable. It also reminds me of what happened in Seattle, where I think it was Mayor Greg Nichols at that time, who was very keen on using the term 'backyard cottages' as a more acceptable terminology. So there is definitely a barrier on the cultural side that has to be addressed and is being slowly addressed across market actors, local governments, nonprofits. There are a few other things which are about standards. You know, we talked last time about Vancouver allowing six-and-a-half feet heights in their secondary suites, because that's the height of the existing space. And that's the only way secondary suites could be done affordably. So I think standards have to keep up in some ways with pragmatism of what supportable but they often, especially I think about the global south examples they've been often set as aspirational ideas rather than what is going to be affordable. And when it's not affordable, then it becomes affordable through the informal market some ways.

Shane Phillips  12:34  
Well, I'm glad you brought up the Lennar example as well, because that's something I was made aware of maybe a year or two ago how I think we mostly think about ADUs as this thing that is added to single-family neighborhoods that are well established and have been around a while. But there are builders who are sort of taking advantage of these rule changes, where we kind of don't have single-family zoning exactly anymore, and they're incorporating those at us into their units from day one. And one way of thinking about this, I don't think this addresses the whole issue. But I do think ADUs have been framed not just as a way to provide kind of lower-cost housing, and accommodate more people, but also as a way to accommodate multigenerational households, to give people more choice, to improve the quality of their own housing and their own living environment for their own families and friends and so forth. And so I think that's maybe part of why they've been more successful than a lot of other reforms, as well as; it's not just doing something for someone else, it's also doing something for yourself. And I think the reality is you got to usually make a case, kind of a selfish case, for people for why they should care about this kind of thing.

Vinit Mukhija  13:48  
I think that's exactly right. I know you have a question later on about the various what advocates call "poison pills", in terms of restrictions. And one of the poison pills, as you know, is age restrictions that is sometimes imposed, because the earlier version of this is Granny Flats and Granny Flats would suggest, "okay, it's someone from the household, but also above a certain age". But on the flip side, this is something that has allowed, as you correctly know, the idea to become taken up by owners as well as become more acceptable by neighbors.

Paavo Monkkonen  14:34  
Hmm... I'll just say I'm glad you didn't name it 'Sharing the American dream' because I think that's, I mean, I think, you know, we do want to remake the part of the American dream that was exclusion, right? I mean, I think that's an element of the single-family neighborhood that it's only accessible to people of a certain type, certain means and so I think remaking it and redefining it is really what needs to be done.

Shane Phillips  15:00  
So as we talked about last time, unpermitted ADUs and informal second units are commonplace in California and have been around for decades. But a series of state bills starting in 2016 has really turbocharged the market for formal legal ADU conversion, and construction. LA is very much leading that trend and is now producing about 4000 or 5000 units a year. I have a bunch of ADU related questions coming up and comments. But I think a good place to start maybe it's just a sketch out the landscape before 2016 in California. And, you know, we can focus on some specific jurisdictions if you like. But I think a lot of what we see here in California does apply across North America to varying degrees. ADUs were legal in quite a few places prior to 16 but they weren't that commonplace. So what were some of the places that did allow them, to what extent were they present and legal and being built new and all these kinds of things? And how did they make that possible? Like, what did things look like before the state got involved?

Vinit Mukhija  16:11  
Yeah, so before California's 2016 state interventions, and this would be Senate Bill 1069 that Senator Bob Wieckowski did, in some ways, collaboration with Karen Chappell of Berkeley and Assembly Bill 2299 that Assemblymember Richard Blum did in collaboration with our Dana Calf and Jane Blumenfeld at City Lab at UCLA. The state had already said in California, that we would in a way allow ADUs, however, local governments would decide.... 

Shane Phillips  16:52  
I should say, I kind of implied that the state had not been involved before 2016. But in fact, they passed the first ADU law was 1982... 

Vinit Mukhija  17:00  
Yes! 

Shane Phillips  17:00  
...they kept trying, it just wasn't very effective until 2016. Yeah, I'm sure they kind of created some of that framework, put something on the ground for cities to build upon.

Vinit Mukhija  17:12  
You know, and in some ways, their first intervention was, because I'm guessing there must have been some state legislation that said you can't do ADUs because the first intervention was to remove that. But what they had done prior to 2016 was allow local governments to come up with the various rules, under what conditions ADUs would be allowed. And they were hardly any, honestly, good examples of local governments allowing ADUs. So it was a struggle. It was a struggle on a number of regulations that we'll talk about through the rest of the discussion. But the places that had done something interesting on the ADU front were to take an example of Minneapolis started looking at ADUs in mid 2013. It used to have a pilot program that was limited, but it wanted to expand the idea of ADUs. And its planners said, "okay, let's look at the local governments that are leading the way on this". And they picked Santa Cruz, Portland, Oregon, Seattle, and Vancouver, British Columbia. So those were in some ways what we're considering is the cutting edge of ADU regulations. And Minneapolis kind of quickly moved from ADUs, allowing them in I think this was as early as 2014 to ending single-family zoning as well as single-family neighborhoods by 2018. But their inspirations were places like Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver and to some extent Santa Cruz in California.

Shane Phillips  19:10  
But even those places didn't have, you know, a ton of ADUs, right?

Vinit Mukhija  19:14  
The place that had the most was Vancouver. Vancouver's story is interesting, in the sense, they had a whole number of unpermitted secondary suites in their single-family houses that they had been allowing and providing exemptions and extensions. And in 1988, they decided that as part of the municipal civic election, they would ask residents, whether they wanted to discuss the issue of changing zoning in their neighborhoods as part of the municipal election. And about three-fourth of the city said, "yes, let's discuss this". And they were the majority in three-fourths of the neighborhoods. So from 1989 to 1992, they had neighborhood-level discussions, some of these were quite hostile. You would have wealthy homeowners come and sort of complain that, why would people with unpermitted units get to participate in this discussion, why would they get to decide? Why would renters in these units get to be part of the decision-making groups, but they said, "No, everyone who was a resident would get to vote, and if they were voters, they would get to vote on it". And of those three-fourths of the neighborhoods, within them, about two-thirds of the people said, they were in favor of changing the zoning. So as a result from sort of 1992, Vancouver became the first place where almost half the single-family neighborhoods could have a secondary suite, which by that time, they had already made a distinction between what they called family suite and a revenue suite. So family suites, they said they would allow everywhere, it was the question of these revenue suites, that half the city said, "well, we want to have those." What happened then was it became time to close the existing unpermitted units in the neighborhoods that didn't vote for it, they got 10 years to phase them out, they got a little more extension, because these are hard to shut down them in their housing, a lot of people. So by 2004, the city kind of decided or realize that opposition to secondary suites had kind of dissipated. neighborhoods that didn't have secondary suites felt, I mean, these are not so bad. There's revenue to be made on secondary suites. So in 2004, they changed everything, and citywide second units were allowed. They built on it, and by 2009, about 94% of the single family lots in the city could have a third unit, which they called a laneway apartment. And that was 94% because Vancouver has this interesting structure where most, but not all of the single family lots back end to an alley.

Shane Phillips  22:42  
Right. So that's where the laneway comes from, because they're oriented on that alley, which I guess I call a laneway.

Vinit Mukhija  22:49  
That's exactly right. Moreover, they decided that because these units still had a secondary suite, they had garages. And the city was very smart in a way of saying, "if you can work the garage, to a laneway, you don't have to replace that parking". So in a way, there was less parking requirement for a lot with three units than a lot with two units. 

Paavo Monkkonen  23:14  
Interesting. 

Vinit Mukhija  23:15  
So that became an incentive and made it easier. And then this is post 2016. But by 2018, they implemented another policy called Making Room, which allows every single family lot to have a duplex and every duplex to have a secondary suite. So in a way, they kind of raised it up to four units. And Seattle in Portland were doing their own things. Around 2016, Portland had become the most perhaps liberal city, the city with the most liberal ADU regulations. 

Shane Phillips  23:57  
You know, it's interesting that just in those examples, you hear this slow build up, where that often starts with ADUs. And that's kind of the first step in this transformation and opening up single-family neighborhoods, but then you have things like the duplex on the corner. It's not just the adu anymore, but it's also the laneway house, or it's the secondary suite or the duplex and each one gets a secondary suite. It's this process and each step is a little bit controversial. But once you sort of you get your foot in the door, that next step isn't as bad as if you just went straight from "well, it's single family only, and now we're going to propose duplexes and each one gets a secondary suite"; like that jump is much larger and much less likely to actually happen. I don't think we're gonna get into the details on California's whole process here and how they legalized everything because there were so many laws that have been passed since 2016. Those two that you mentioned were really the things that kicked it off, but there have been I think literally dozens at this point, just tackling all kinds of different things. And so maybe our way of talking about this is just talking about some of the policies that are high level. And we'll just, you know, want to flag for the listeners that many, if not all of these have been incorporated into California law and the laws of other states and cities as well.

Paavo Monkkonen  25:18  
Before that, Shane, could I ask a question about Vancouver, specifically, I think it's it's funny how those those nice Canadians are the ones to frame this about money in a way that we don't in the US. I hadn't heard revenue suites before when I visited a friend of Vancouver, many, many years ago, they called them 'a mortgage helper', which I thought was funny. But I wonder with the owner occupancy thing in the neighborhood where I was hanging out when I went there, it seemed like a lot of the essentially threeplexes, they were owned by somebody that didn't live there. Do you have any sense of how much that changed the amount of owner occupancy when they allowed, essentially threeplex without owner occupied? I mean, has anyone done research on that, it'd be super interesting to know?

Vinit Mukhija  26:01  
You know, it's a great question. I don't. I really don't know. And it is true that initially, these were pretty much a renter in the secondary suite, and the owner living above. And that's why that allowed local governments, especially like the fire, to worry less about the fire safety requirements in the basements because they felt, okay, the owner is living above the base. 

Shane Phillips  26:30  
It's just a renter that's in danger

Vinit Mukhija  26:32  
 They'll be careful about the entire unit safety, right because it's going to come to them. So that allows them to be a little less restrictive on the requirements without necessarily compromising safety. But you're right, I think the nature of that has changed. But what I've also found was, I came across examples, and I'm trying to remember if we discussed this the last time, but the local cooperative, VanCity, was giving out what it called 'mixer mortgages' to multiple buyers, with the idea that people were buying these three units, in partnership. So you, in fact, have some situations where all three have owner-occupants. 

Paavo Monkkonen  27:25  
Yeah. 

Vinit Mukhija  27:26  
But I suspect you also have several where you have investors with their units. 

Paavo Monkkonen  27:32  
Yeah, I mean, just because without changing the building size, you're going from a neighborhood where previously I'm, I'm a rich family, I wanted 2500 square foot house. But now that houses three 800 square foot units. And so you know, the rich families maybe don't want to have... they want more space right?

Vinit Mukhija  27:50  
You know, that's a good point, Paavo because when they set up what they call 'Making Room' to allow duplexes with their own secondary suites, they increase the density, but they did not increase the equivalent of FAR...

Paavo Monkkonen  28:06  
Right, right, 

Vinit Mukhija  28:07  
...which made even it more likely that you would have smaller units, perhaps more affordable because of that. 

Paavo Monkkonen  28:14  
Right. 

Vinit Mukhija  28:14  
But it would make it more likely that someone who wants to housing 500 - 3,000 square feet, they might go to another neighborhood. 

Paavo Monkkonen  28:24  
Right, interesting.

Shane Phillips  28:25  
So on the policy elements, you know, when I'm asked about ADUs, which happens fairly often, I actually refer people to resources from two different organizations. One is the Mercatus. Center, a free market-oriented think tank at George Mason University, and the other is AARP, the retired persons organization, very different organizations but they come to very similar or the same conclusions about what makes for a successful ADU policy. And I think their different perspectives or the different kinds of philosophies are what makes the shared recommendations really compelling. And I'll make sure to link to their publications in the show notes. They have three policy elements, or at least there are three that I want to highlight here that I want to focus on, and have us talk about. So I'll just read them really quickly just summarizing. First is that cities or states should allow detached ADUs so as you said, not just attached or interior units, and that ADUs should not be limited to large parcels, sort of two recommendations that they combined into one. Next, both or all units, however many there are, should be available for rental, there should not be an owner-occupancy requirement for any ofADU units including the main building or the original building. And some view, as you mentioned, an owner occupancy requirement as a sort of a poison pill for this kind of legislation and we can get into why. And the third one is that adding an ADU should not trigger additional parking requirements. So let's just go through these really quickly and kind of why they matter and why they have risen to the top of the list for multiple organizations who are interested in advancing ADU policy. So on the first one, allowing detached ADUs, and ADUs on typical size lots, you know, at the average lot rather than exceptionally large ones, as you see in some places. I think they serve a few purposes; allowing detached at use, ofcourse, gives flexibility to homeowners, and I think it also helps them preserve a bit more privacy than an attached or interior unit. And as you said, maybe at least in the case of an interior unit, you don't have to kind of chop up the existing one and shrink the size of the original building. The parcel size aspect of this is I think about widening the scope of where ADUs can be built. And I think it has equity implications, because if you're limiting at use to large parcels, you're also likely limiting them to more affluent homeowners, just on average anyway. So what are your thoughts on this one? Has this come up in your own research as a really critical thing orr kind of, are we moving in the right direction on these policies?

Vinit Mukhija  31:03  
Yeah, I mean, this may be, I agree with you on all three of them as perhaps the three most important poison pills and ways of enabling or restricting ADUs. I do want to share Shane, maybe another resource like the others you mentioned, when I started doing this research, one of the best resources was a website called accessorydwellings.org. And it was run by Paul Peterson, Martin Brown and Eli Speedback in Portland, and Eli is one of the co-authors of the recent AARP document that you know that... 

Shane Phillips  31:44  
Yeah! 

Vinit Mukhija  31:45  
... and Cole has a wonderful book called Backdoor Revolution: The Definitive Guide to ADU development. And he does these great classes, among which I attended and tours, on how to build ADUs and how to get around other restrictions. And Martin has done excellent research on trying to understand... because one of the problems with ADUs had been because there were so few comparables, it was difficult for assessors to understand how an ADU affects the value of a single-family house. They sort of had an intuitive size, that sense of it, they could see it, but it was a professional problem of trying to figure out the effect of an ADU on a property. So that would be another resource that I suggest.

Shane Phillips  32:36  
Yeah, we'll add that to the list as well. 

Vinit Mukhija  32:39  
That size thing is crucial. And before 2016, with the I think it was the 2004 California state intervention, saying allow ADUs but local governments get to choose. And Pasadena was one of those that had, I'm trying to remember now, I think it was almost 10,000 square foot. So they were essentially saying normal lot sizes, 5000 if you want to add an ADU, you should be 10,000. So it was just a way of limiting the number of lots that could have ADUs and the higher you do it, the more difficult it's going to be. And if we want these to be more prevalent and more affordable, it makes sense to keep reducing the size. And we see in places like Portland, Seattle with 4000 square foot lots, you can fit in three units fairly comfortably four becomes a challenge within existing envelopes, but three to four can work in 4000 square foot lots rather easily. The same was the concern with detached, I think part of it was trying to just limit the possibility. This is the prejudice related to owner occupancy of a renter who was not part of the family living in these units. If it had internal access and attached, most likely it would be a family member or someone in there. And then if it was outside, it could be a tenant, and then are just the stranger worried what kind of tenant? So that's just simple prejudice. But that's I think the driver, it was sort of depicted in the idea of it's a form idea of not allowing detached, but I think the driver really was fear of tenants.

Shane Phillips  34:37  
And so the second one, I think this is probably the most interesting to me, is this idea of allowing each unit to be rented separately not requiring an owner to live in one of the units. And part of why this one's interesting to me is it at first blush, it doesn't seem like a big deal. And I think that's part of why these ended up In a lot of policies early on is, you know, like, we prefer that homeowners be the ones to benefit from this. And I don't know, like, there's definitely the prejudice element of this as well. But it doesn't seem like too big a deal maybe. But then you think about what it would be like or what it is like to build an ADU and having to go through that process of getting the entitlement and permits finding a contractor. potentially having that construction going on in your backyard for a year or more. Some people will go through that, and that's great. But a lot of people will not understandably, and it's nice to just have this alternative path where when someone moves, they can just sell their home to someone, a developer, for lack of a better word, who will build the ADU, and then just sell both, or maybe sell them separately or rent them out or whatever. But there's just a business model there that you can kind of iterate on and become more efficient with in a way that when every project is being built by individual homeowners, each of which has to learn this process on their own from scratch. It's just very hard to scale this up. Am I capturing the reasons that owner-occupancy requirements are considered a poisoned pillar or is there more to it?

Vinit Mukhija  36:18  
You know, Shane, my understanding is it's largely by having the idea that we don't trust tenants, tenants can be noisy, and if the owner is living on the lot, they will control their tenant. And so in a place like Santa Cruz, when they started leading the ADU reforms in California, 20 years ago, the biggest thing people worried about was owner occupancy and all these and essentially having two units with students. And so they were very concerned that it is all about owners. And interestingly, I mentioned Minneapolis; Minneapolis, they did a survey in 2014, to try to get the input on ADUs. You know, they did a lot of public workshops, five, and the survey, not a big response. But two things struck me in that survey; 90% said yes to ad use, and a small majority, I think 54 55% said yes, but with owner occupancy. And I think it's all about tenants, they can be noisy, it's just simply that -  it's people are not thinking about the scale or equity.

Shane Phillips  37:33  
And well, and I think it's important to distinguish here, I was mostly focused on sort of the effect of the owner occupancy requirement as opposed to the motivation. But you're right, I think that's an important motivation, probably the primary motivation for why those policies are put in place. Is my argument or my assumptions about why it's considered a poison pill, are those basically accurate or is there more to it?

Vinit Mukhija  38:00  
I think it's a poison pill, because I may want to add an ADU. And I may need to sort of leave my house for a couple of years, I may want to sell it, it just makes it more difficult for me to sell it if it comes with the owner occupancy requirement. I might be fine, I could probably maybe find someone or any seller could find a new buyer who would be interested in that. But it just precludes universal buyers and makes the property less valuable so it becomes a disincentive. Moreover, we know that there are rental properties out there with an ADU and a main house and the owner doesn't live there. And one of the biggest hurdles in the legalization of those units used to be the owner occupancy requirements, that in California, one of the bills that did this was Senate Bill 13, again by Bob Wieckowski. It did two interesting things. It put in a five year moratorium on enforcement of unpermitted units, and it put in a five year holiday on owner occupancy. So from 2019 to 2024, and I think there's a Assembly Bill by Assemblymember Ting right now 976, that would sort of remove all local authority to impose owner occupancy, which will become an issue from January 2025 onwards.

Shane Phillips  39:33  
Yeah, it strikes me is hard to enforce as well. And yeah, it's kind of chilling just to have people... this is making me think of SB nine that just passed a couple years ago here in California, which does have an owner-occupancy requirement. Everyone knew that would undermine its adoption or in-use and whether that's the reason or it's other things,  it certainly has not been used very often in the state, but the thing that stood...

Paavo Monkkonen  39:59  
Come on, there's 13 projects.

Shane Phillips  40:01  
Wow, we're killing it. But what really stood out to me was how you have to sign an affidavit that you intend to live on the property for at least three years following construction or certificate of occupancy or whatever. And all it really says is like I intend to, it doesn't even require that you do, so you're not actually locking yourself in. But you are at risk of perjury, like you by signing that affidavit, if it is somehow found that you lied, you are at very, like real and severe legal risk. And that's just like not something most people are going to do. It's just not worth even the smallest risk of committing perjury or whatever, just to build a backyard unit

Vinit Mukhija  40:49  
Strikes me because of the language you intend to, my guess would be that's not the real barrier that has stopped, and that has led to so little construction, because it seems like that is fairly easily overcome. The risk of being indicted on perjury seems fairly marginal to me.

Shane Phillips  41:13  
I think if push came to shove, yeah, I don't think the Attorney General is pursuing that case. But I don't know I think people are pretty risk averse when it comes to that kind of thing. But you may be right, but let's move on. So the last one was parking. This one is pretty straightforward. I don't think we really have to debate this one. It's really just, it's hard enough to fit parking. It's even harder when you're adding housing that might be taking up space that could have been parking, or maybe was the garage or something. And you mentioned that things like utility connection fees, impact fees, this is something that California has really limited in a way that we haven't for larger projects. But we've kind of recognized that, especially for the smaller projects, homeowners as developers, being able to afford or just the barrier to entry that a 20,000, $50,000 fee, or combination of fees represents is just going to pull back a lot of people from moving forward. So the state, I would argue they should do this with more than just ADUs but they've at least started with a to us by saying, "we're like capping how much you can charge under certain circumstances", you don't have to pay at all for connection fees, I don't think, they've just really restricted what cities can do and what they can charge to try to make this as painless and affordable as possible for people building these projects.

Vinit Mukhija  42:32  
They have, and because there's been so much movement on ADUs and parking reform in California, it's not even that the challenge was you had to replace the parking, but our rules were so confounding that you had to replace covered parking. So then to make it even more difficult. It was as you said, this is sort of obvious barrier, and it's like, you know, if we wanted to devise a system in which we didn't want to see ADUs, this was one of the first thing we would pick and say, okay, particularly since one of the easiest place or ways to do might be the garage. And this would make... it was just designed to prevent ADUs and highly effective.

Shane Phillips  43:22  
Is there anything else that you think is important on the policy side that has really been critical for enabling ADU construction or conversion, anything we missed?

Vinit Mukhija  43:33  
One of the earliest ones at the state level was to say "no, this can't be conditional use permits, because that would take up a lot of time". And I think many states, many cities, it's still a conditional use permit as the pathway and that, especially if a homeowner wants to do that, that's a big hurdle to overcome.

Shane Phillips  43:56  
And just any kind, not necessarily even a conditional use permit, but just any kind of discretionary in many cases yeah,  and the state requires that they be approved by right in a strange...

Vinit Mukhija  44:08  
State and local government, yeah, that yes! The other problem especially was if you have setback requirements, and a garage was converted. So that was a big hurdle in converting garages, some places have done that. Seattle did this for a while, and I'm not entirely sure, I think they removed it, but they allowed a footprint of the garage to stay but then anything new had to follow the setback.

Shane Phillips  44:38  
I think California does the same thing. And it results in some goofy, you know, people keep up just like the walls of the original garage because you can't tear it all down. Because if you tear it down, you're starting from scratch, but like the walls kind of build around them, you know, and it's so...

Vinit Mukhija  44:53  
Yeah, and this is sort of the opposite of a nice thing like a laneway apartment that you want and Paavo was talking about setbacks. In some ways, you don't want setbacks on some of these things, you have now to encourage them. You might say don't have a window, overlooking your neighbor, have it the other way around. I think those would be fair restrictions. What is potentially happening and I think this is a challenging area for planners is we are seeing more what we might call green regulations, energy efficiency, green building codes, these things can add up costs. There are questions of safety, what kind of sprinkler systems are required, the old system, Santa Cruz, one of the things that made them a good example was they were able to convince the fire department that at least, let's have sprinkler systems in anything that's built new, don't also make it a requirement for the existing buildings, because that used to be the way and I'm not entirely sure where California is now on this, but sprinkler system is another problem. Fire access, emergency egress but the big ones I think, are apart from the ones you noted, I would just say setbacks.

Paavo Monkkonen  46:17  
Yeah, I mean, and I think I was surprised to not see just development standards in general on that list, because, you know, the volume thing seems like it matters a lot. And I was wondering, Vinny, allowing ADUs up to 600 square feet in size seems like pretty small, in a place like California. And so I think now it's 1200 square feet. Do you know if that made a difference? And I mean, it'd be interesting to look at, of the recently built ADUs, how many are maxing out allowable square footage?

Vinit Mukhija  46:48  
And my impression is many are, I don't know but I think definitely, the more we allow...

Shane Phillips  46:56  
The more flexible it is...

Vinit Mukhija  46:58  
 It's going to be more, and one of the big problems in Portland when it had what were considered some of the most liberal regulations for ADUs, was a ceiling of 800 square feet. 

Paavo Monkkonen  47:11  
Right. 

Vinit Mukhija  47:12  
So removing that has made the difference. I think Minneapolis went to 1600 square feet, or 1/3 of the lot size, whichever is less. So I think those can certainly be if not restrictive on building, restrictive on who can live in them.

Paavo Monkkonen  47:33  
Yeah, but we don't want families in our neighborhood, we want a granny or yeah, a quiet student. I mean, I think that it's and it's funny because you bring up the fire safety thing to you know, and then just thinking about minimum quality regulations in general. It's like, yeah, we want fire safety. That's extremely important. But like the density stuff is in the you know, the height and all this other stuff is just so arbitrary. 

Vinit Mukhija  47:55  
It is

Shane Phillips  47:56  
You know, eight stories is fine, but not 12.

Paavo Monkkonen  48:01  
The good old days of eight stories

Shane Phillips  48:03  
I did want to, I skipped over this but I did just want to give a shout out to Rebecca Cranes' research on how ADU owners in LA actually use their units. She surveyed about 300 people who own or built or convertedADU in their yards. And we talked about not having an owner-occupancy requirement and allowing units to be rented, I think even allowing short-term rentals is something that is certainly debated and I think is a really interesting conversation. She found in her research that about 75% of those surveyed use their units as some kind of long term residence whether that was for themselves, or family or a renter. But I do think that by allowing units to really be used for pretty much whatever you can imagine whatever you would like. And whether it's an office, a guest house, long term, short term, rental, whatever, in the long run, these units, even if you build them as a short term rental, and you're like, "this is how I'm going to make the most money. It's how I'm going to justify the construction because it's expensive and time-consuming so I'm going to make more money by doing short term rentals". I think in the long run, a lot of these do end up just being used as long- term rentals, because it's so much less work. Maybe you can't like, you're not maximizing the amount of money you can make but I do think there's a cost to being more prescriptive about how these units can be used, because I think in some cases, they won't be built at all and th ueynits that might have been built for one use but eventually they become long term housing. So just wanted to point that out, and we'll include that research in our show notes as well. I think this is my last question on ADUs before we talk about local control state intervention. I mentioned that almost 24,000 ad use were permitted in California in 2022 but over 7000 of those, almost a third, were just in the city of LA which has 4 million people about or 10% of the state's population. So there's a really disparate portion a share of ADU construction happening in LA specifically, why do you think that is? I've never really gotten a great answer on why this is the case.

Vinit Mukhija  50:10  
Yeah. Shane, I have a few hypotheses on this. And one, links to the state and local discussion we are going to have. I think LA was interesting in at least trying to build some buzz about ADUs with the pilot project that the mayor's office was doing with LAMAS, the series of events that will help with it, what CityLab was doing at UCLA, the discussion. So there was, you know, this is something we were seeing in LA times, we were discussing, so there was some headstart, and that headstart may have led to some tweaks in our regulations that are helping a little bit. But there was discussion about this that has helped destigmatize ADUs. The second is, I think you've noted is the presence of these unpermitted units in LA. So you know we talked last week that I think that I estimated about 50,000, or 10% of the units had an unpermitted unit. So I think there was a cultural acceptance of ADUs that was already happening. And third is a factor that I think helped those prevalence of unpermitted and is enabling the permitted ones is for a place with this much housing demand as we have, we have some of the biggest lot sizes, because our valley, it's 7500 square feet, most of the city's lots, other , are 5000. So these are fairly big lots that make it a bit easier to add ADUs. So I think it's where in that sweet spot of housing demand, as well as lot sizes, that makes this much more easier undertaking than perhaps other places where you may have the lot size, but not the demand, or you have the demand, but a much smaller lot size.

Paavo Monkkonen  52:17  
Shane, I should have done the math on this before. But do we really know that they built this because LA also permits way more multifamily than any other city? You don't know. And it's just because it's big and has a fantastic professional City Planning Department?

Shane Phillips  52:33  
I was going to actually say I think I hadn't thought about this before but the fact that it is such a big city probably does play some role... 

Paavo Monkkonen  52:40  
Changes the politics. 

Shane Phillips  52:41  
Well, no, what I'm getting at actually is from the like business side, if you're a ADU developer, you probably don't want to try to operate in every market, and learn all the different rules. And like there's some standardization happening because of the state. But there's still a lot of variation. And so if you're going to invest the time to figure out the process, do it in the place with 4 million people not 30,000 because it's going to take just as much research, and it's going to be just as much of a process to get through. So it may be something where over time other cities kind of catch up. And we're just ahead because a lot of the contractors and buyers or whatever started here.

Paavo Monkkonen  53:19  
And if people are interested in learning more about that variation, we can point them to this recent paper by Nick Marantz and Chris Elmendorf, where they look at ADU production in different cities across the state. And kind of estimate the expected amount of ADU production given demand in that city, and then see how much actual production there has been to try to get that kind of variation in how permissive cities are.

Shane Phillips  53:43  
So let's move on to this conversation about state intervention versus local control. In the book, you argue that California's approach to enabling ADU production may have caused us to miss out on some important benefits compared to places like Portland or like Minneapolis. So here in California, we mostly with a few exceptions, like Santa Cruz made ADUs possible through mandates on local governments imposed by the state legislature, whereas Portland and Minneapolis, and some other places achieved these reforms. I don't want to necessarily say from the ground up, but at least at the local level, they weren't forced to by the state. So with full disclosure that I'm going to push back on your perspective on this a little bit, I want to have you make that case for the local approach, just you know, to start out, what are the advantages that you see to having these efforts led or started locally?

Vinit Mukhija  54:41  
So like many planners, I perhaps romanticize local, but I do like the idea of seeing how we could have more recognition of local conditions how we could have dialogue, deliberation, mutual learning, bargaining at the local level. But this is juxtaposed with our reality of nimbyism as being a real problem, and that many or if not everyone tries to be rational self interest, and they are worried about traffic and their property values going down. So this is the place where we find ourselves and a reality, I think, that has to be negotiated in practice. And to some extent, I have participated in that state preemption and state intervention. I mentioned SB 13, previously, which was done by Senator Bob Wieckowski, which brought in the five-year amnesty and remove the owner occupancy requirements for five years. I co-wrote a Sacramento op-ed with Senator Wieckowski in support of that, and provided expert testimony to the state legislature in favor of it. And I think there is...

Shane Phillips  56:03  
Thank you for your service. 

Vinit Mukhija  56:04  
...there is definitely a need and role for state preemption, and we can talk about a few more areas where that is necessary. I find ADUs to be an interesting opportunity. ADUs to me on single family lots, they have some of the problems that we associate with traditional nimbyism; there is going to be traffic, there's going to be outsiders. Some people are worried about those outsiders, there are other outsiders. Unlike other nimbyism though, here the property owner is more likely to benefit with increased property values, and being the one who gets the rent. So it provides a interesting, one of the few cases where you have some of the adverse reasons that lead to nimbyism, but you're not like a condo owner, only likely to, you know, we tried to tell condo owners , :No, you'll benefit with the amenities that will come in the neighborhood", and that's a hard argument. But for the owner, it's easier to convey. As I think in Vancouver, half the neighborhoods that weren't interested in ADUs realized, "wow, these other places are increasing in property value, maybe we want to be part of it. I want to add an ad on my house now because my property value would go down, because it would go up". So I think this is where I see this opportunity of this unique, terrible part of American cities, which is dominated by single-family lots but where now the same people who own these lots could actually benefit from density increases? And could that be used to bring in a different culture of discussion. And I think people realize that there's the prevalence of informal ADUs because they're benefiting. I mentioned the Vancouver example, Minneapolis surveys. You know, I was thinking reflecting on your question Shane, that in some ways, in the best case scenario, I see that in Seattle, Portland, where they build on those reforms to go denser. But it is also true that maybe our state government has been able to do ADU reforms as a low-hanging fruit and build on it to do more ambitious reforms as state legislators have become more confident in preemption and intervening in local regulations. So I could see the advantage at the state level, but I feel like there are, it would have been one opportunity, an important one, given the nature of our cities, as dominated by single family housing, to perhaps changing the planning culture, by bringing people's own self interest as a way of motivating better cities.

Shane Phillips  59:12  
I guess, where I struggle is, you know, one, that just looking at our history, very few places, took on that mantle, and there wasn't a lot of local leadership, pushing to have those conversations and try to basically move their constituents a little bit from their priors and kind of make the case for, here's how we need to change or why we need to change and one way that we might go about it, that just didn't really seem to be happening in very many places. And so, I mean, that's one thing. This is always just this tension between pragmatism and idealism, and both have a real place in the work that we do. You can't kind of let go of either one fully, but when the reality is that virtually every single opportunity for engagement is dominated by a narrow set of very privileged people. And nothing has really happened for 30 or 40 years to accommodate more housing and increased density at the local level, you got to kind of just do something eventually, and I'm not sure we could have seated the hundreds of conversations you would need in all these cities across the state to make that happen. The other thing that your response raises for me is just this idea that ADUs may be a little bit unique in some regard in that they do benefit homeowners. And I don't know that we can necessarily rely on that self-interest in all cases, maybe more important is, you know, we're familiar with the home vote or hypothesis and this idea that homeowners are voting for their self-interest, and particularly their financial interest. But I find myself kind of believing that at different times. And then other times, it really does seem like homeowners are mostly just kind of like, they don't want things to change. And whether they can make more money or not is kind of beside the point, they would rather things just kind of continue as they are, and their neighborhood doesn't change, and traffic doesn't get worse and all that rather than maybe have the opportunity to make some more money, but on the other hand, have to accept these various changes. Like I don't know how we made ADUs work, and people decided like that change was fine. But those are the things that this raises for me. And I don't think there's an answer to these questions. And I don't think either of us is fully on one end of the spectrum or the other. It's just we're a little.... 

Paavo Monkkonen  1:01:42  
I'm on the far extreme, don't put me near the center on this question. Yes, the immediate state control of zoning

Shane Phillips  1:01:50  
I'm pretty farther 

Paavo Monkkonen  1:01:51  
And their thing is, look, if we had a very different setup for local government, we would be having a different conversation. Like local governments, most of them, especially smaller cities in the US are not set up to do anything.  They're set up to keep things running. Yeah, I mean, like if you look at the state legislature, these are professional politicians, they're expected to do something every year. There's a calendar, they propose bills, they debate bills, they pass bills, and they're kind of evaluated on how much action they take on. Whereas at the local level, like there's not a calendar, it's just like, "oh, do we need to have a budget or guess?" And like, "is there a problem we need to address? I guess, like, can we kick it down the road?" right, so I think we have very different structures of government at the state and local level in the US, that makes the state government better for questions around housing.

Shane Phillips  1:02:41  
And a lot of the smaller cities in particular, like they they exist to exclude, like that was in many cases, they keep other people out.

Paavo Monkkonen  1:02:51  
But Vinit, so not to put you on the spot but I was hoping, like so this idea of tailoring rules around buildings to local context, I can see like design guidelines differing from city to city. But are there like examples where you can you can convince me that like Covina is so different from another city, that it needs to have its own process around how big housing should be?

Vinit Mukhija  1:03:19  
Power, I was going to go in a different direction, not so much the looks, but Shane's question that we didn't get to was imagining neighborhoods where ADUs and second units and third units ended up creating a density that makes land assembly a little more difficult, that at some point, they can't get redeveloped at much higher density, that there are locations where we don't want two or three units like a Bundy triangle in Los Angeles. So I think what is problematic from a state intervention that says, "okay, every lot is now one unit or two unit or three unit" does maybe not so much look at the design side, but it sort of doesn't recognize that there are different densities that we should be.

Paavo Monkkonen  1:04:15  
I mean, there was SB 27, that did that. 

Shane Phillips  1:04:18  
But it didn't pass yeah.

Paavo Monkkonen  1:04:21  
But I don't think I mean, I think if a local government is not going to allow ADUs, they're definitely not going to allow 10 storey building,

Vinit Mukhija  1:04:27  
I think we want, if I were to design a system, I would certainly have state doing things. I would say do some meaningful reasonable planning. Don't come in and do this stuff where you can't do development charges, do something, fix something on the way we build infrastructure, think about reasonable stack sharing, do some of these things that can't be happening, and it might be the higher density. Push every local government to survey its voters on what should happen to single-family zones. Push local I'm going to talk to the neighbors and regional planning. Do something with CEQA, finally, get it resolved. Because part of what you were saying is, you know, look, these legislators have to show stuff they're doing, they do it. But I think some of the biggest stuff that only they can do doesn't get in the process. And that yes, if you ask me, "well Vinit, will this direction that we're going on, be more productive of building units in the next five years?". You're probably right, the other step would take a little more time a little more... But if you asked me, what would look down 30-40 years, I think that we're missing something where we could have used people's selfishness a little more creatively.

Paavo Monkkonen  1:05:49  
Interesting. Shane, do you want to elaborate on that question you had raised?

Shane Phillips  1:05:54  
Yeah, my question was essentially, from an urban planning perspective is ADUs everywhere, really what we want, because I think there are some places where it doesn't make sense to have six or 10, or whatever number of stories, large, dense buildings, and other places, many places I would argue that we really shouldn't be touching at all, not just like, currently undeveloped land. But I think kind of outer suburbs in these places. I don't think that's the place for densification. And I think, in an ideal world, and this is all like, acknowledging we're so far from an ideal world, which is why we have these universal state standards that are that are not perfect. But nonetheless, I think we have plenty of land to accommodate housing on the land we've already built, and specifically just on the fairly central land on the coasts, and so forth, if we really want to. And yeah, I just worry that by saying we're going to allow two or three units on every parcel, and just they're going to be somewhat randomly dispersed across cities and neighborhoods, it's not providing enough density to necessarily justify greater investment in transit in those neighborhoods, or parks or that kind of thing. But it's also potentially if you do rezone those neighborhoods in the future to allow for eight or 10 or 12 units, which would be more appropriate per parcel, if you've already got four there, it's just...

Paavo Monkkonen  1:07:22  
I got to disagree a little bit. I mean, I don't think that's a risk that is big enough that we should have delayed.

Shane Phillips  1:07:30  
I'm not saying we should delay. I'm just questioning, you know...

Paavo Monkkonen  1:07:34  
 I feel like you are 

Shane Phillips  1:07:34  
No, I think it's worth asking like whether, it's just to think about what is next. Something I've brought up that I've never really heard anyone else talking about with the housing element process, which is where every city has to plan for the next eight years, this is a state mandated planning process. We do those plans as though that eight years is like the end of time, and we're not going to have to create another plan and accommodate even more housing in the future. So we're planning for a few 100,000 units in our core areas and rezoning to accommodate those. But we actually probably should be doing higher densities in those locations, because we're going to have to accommodate even more than eight years after that. And if we all build it up to three or four stories, and all the most transit accessible locations are built to that, I realized this is like so far down the future, and like, it's just I think it's something we need to think about, and needs to be incorporated into our planning rather than just, it's just always that this eight year horizon. 

Paavo Monkkonen  1:08:38  
Yeah

Vinit Mukhija  1:08:38  
I think it I kind of agree with Shane in the sense, what could happen. All these lots of small specially, but someone has to come in and do likely land assembly to be able to build that much more density, it is easier to do that line assembly if there are less units on these lots than when there'll be three units, there'll be more holdouts with a little more. Then you have to have the new density much higher to create the incentive. The other thing, which is a little different, and I was thinking, you probably saw, this was two weeks ago, LA Times reporting on how we have State Farm and Allstate sort of exiting the insurance business in California because they think we don't have enough restrictions in fire zones, and then flooding zones. So I mean, I think we have to be a lot more smarter, have a lot more density in some areas, and be building much less in other areas. And I don't necessarily think that that is locally driven, but I think that probably needs some regionally driven form of government to come in and sort of think of those variations, and those cooperations across boundaries.

Shane Phillips  1:10:03  
I think how I'm thinking about this Paavo, and where we're kind of disagreeing a little bit, is just what I'm arguing here is basically pushing them to go further when they're working on this stuff. So it's not to say, don't do the ADU policy, because it's not ideal, and we should have higher densities in these urban and transit-oriented areas. It's saying, "okay, like we've done that, but we really, really, really do need to up zone these core areas more, because that's actually going to be better urban planning and are denser, more useful to people actually, in many cases". And it's not at all to say, like, let's hold things up until that happens or not do this.

Paavo Monkkonen  1:10:43  
Yeah, okay, let's do that. That's a great idea.

Shane Phillips  1:10:44  
We're always trying to be better, right, like support the progress we can make.

Paavo Monkkonen  1:10:49  
You know, the way I see it as this is, like Vinit mentioned the gateway reform right? 

Shane Phillips  1:10:53  
Yeah. And I agree, 

Paavo Monkkonen  1:10:54  
You know, if this is all we do, we haven't addressed the root of the problem here. But to the extent that this makes it more feasible to enact further reforms...

Shane Phillips  1:11:04  
And none of us are suggesting that this is the last step or anything. So maybe I can combine these last few questions, because we've taken a lot of time here. But we mentioned Seattle, and I think we should spend a little bit of time talking about Seattle's housing affordability and livability agenda, or HALA. It's something you talk about in the book, something I actually bring up pretty often as an example of successfully coordinating a lot of different interests, coming up with a consensus plan, and then actually doing a pretty good job of following up on it and implementing it, even without a state government looking over their shoulder. So could you say a bit about HALA, and what you see as its strengths and its shortcomings, it's not a perfect example, by any means. But I think it's one of the better examples of local control or locally driven reform, that maybe another positive story about it is Seattle, or the state of Washington, just this last year passed a missing middle housing bill to effectively eliminate single family zoning statewide. And they did some other things like that. And I think Seattle kind of spurred them in that direction. And if Seattle hadn't done what it's done over the past five or six years, Washington State might not be where it is today.

Vinit Mukhija  1:12:20  
I think that that is definitely possible. So 2014, I think I briefly mentioned this, Mayor Ed Murray set up the housing affordability and livability agenda committee. And they had a very interesting aim, it was to bring the housing supply advocates and the affordable housing or targeted just affordable housing advocates together to say we need supply we need targeting, how do we do both of this? So and they said, "okay, we will have a grand bargain". And I think that grand bargain is about some places will have a lot more density, but the nature of the city has to change. And that was the way it was set out. And their proposals included changing single-family neighborhoods with more ADUs, duplexes, but also interestingly, upzoning the neighborhoods that were in designated urban villages, and these were single-family neighborhoods, to low rise multifamily. And in some ways to get the housing affordable housing advocates on board, it would be done with mandatory inclusionary housing. Then they also would change ADUs rulings allow both attached and detached no owner occupancy, no parking requirements, and a clemency program for unpermitted ADUs in the city. I think it's smart in recognizing the most progressive cities, your two biggest groups that you need in the coalition, are the housing advocates, and the affordable housing advocate. So housing supply advocates, and affordable housing targeting advocates, and in some ways, you know, we have Minneapolis didn't have something like HALA but the success of its City Council was being able to put together these sets of demands together in an overall proposal. And that to me is a good way, iIt is slow, so you're right. You know, Portland tried to do something like that but those reforms got a little bit stuck and the state intervened. But it's so interesting because the state intervention with Tina Kotek as the speaker and now the Governor were very much inspired by what Portland was trying to do in rip. So they build on those and they say "okay, they is getting stuck or taking too long, we're going to do this". So there's just this interesting dynamic, where I think we want the local level to be active and discussing, and at the best, it will work and it creates examples. At the worst, it gets stuck, nothing happens, and then we're stuck where we are right now, where our mode is nimbyism.

Shane Phillips  1:15:27  
Yeah, I think maybe the the synthesis here, between our views is, sometimes the state does have to step in. But the more that cities, local governments are allowed to, or encouraged to, or actually carry through, doing their own things and trying their own things, the more options, policies, approaches that the state has to pick from when it does step in and applies these things more broadly. And it has these examples. And I think just one last thing maybe I can note is that thinking about the recent law in California that eliminated parking requirements near transit, being able to point to the experience of San Diego, which had done that just a few years prior, and saw its affordable housing production really skyrocket, that was very, very useful to have that case study in the state recently that you could point to at the local level and say, "this is what we're trying to achieve, and your concerns about undermining this or that are misplaced". Again, I think there's absolutely the role for the local governments, just how long do you wait for them to catch up? And I think the answer, given the severity of the crisis has to be not too long. But there's totally a lot of value, when they do do that work, and when it can learn from it and expand it more. 

Vinit Mukhija  1:16:48  
And you know, and a policy puzzle would be, are there opportunities to push for more of that? Is the housing element that California does a way of pushing for it? Or does it need some other strategies, including effective regional government to push

Shane Phillips  1:17:05  
Something the state can do to encourage cities to actually engage in these innovations and reforms or at least conversations

Vinit Mukhija  1:17:12  
Force not even encourage

Shane Phillips  1:17:15  
There you go, coming on to our side here 

Vinit Mukhija  1:17:17  
Forced to do not what to do? 

Shane Phillips  1:17:21  
Yeah. All right. We're gonna close out part two right here. Vinit Mukhija, once again, your book is Remaking the American Dream: The Informal and Formal Transformation of Single Family Housing Cities. Thank you, thank you again, for joining us on the Housing Voice podcast.

Vinit Mukhija  1:17:38  
Thank you, Shane. Thank you, Paavo.  Well, this was a delight

Paavo Monkkonen  1:17:41  
Thanks Vinit

Shane Phillips  1:17:41  
You can read more about Vinit's work on our website. lewis.ucla.edu. Show Notes and a transcript of the interview are there too, the UCLA Lewis Center is on Facebook and Twitter. I'm on Twitter at Shane D. Phillips. And Paavo is at el paavo. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai