In the state of California, it’s becoming harder and harder to find a place to live if you can’t afford a condo or a house. Most Californians cannot. The problem is statewide but it’s particularly acute in the coastal cities.
In Malibu, for example, most people who work here can’t afford to live here. The state talks about affordable housing but in Malibu, it’s difficult to find any kind of housing—affordable or unaffordable.
Every year, we build about 100,000 new units statewide. With our growing population, we actually need about 180,000 new units yearly just to keep up; you can see we are slipping farther and farther behind. This is not just some sort of academic exercise they worry about in think tanks; it has real world implications. Millennials are putting off marriage until they are well into their 30s—which means they are not buying houses, not having children (when they do, they’re having fewer children), not buying furniture, not buying cars—and about one-third of them are ending up in their parents’ spare bedroom. Worst yet, many are just leaving the state for places where housing is cheaper.
The housing also impacts manufacturing. It may not seem that way from Malibu, but LA is one of the great manufacturing centers of the country. However, our workers have to live somewhere. Many are traveling long distances to get to work, spewing auto fumes all the way. If you’re a manufacturer and want to expand, many workers are just moving to states where housing is cheaper.
Our government is struggling to find some workable solutions. One solution is rapid transit, which is why they’re pushing light rail, bullet trains and more buses. Another is redevelopment of the urban areas and increasing urban density, which is why downtown LA development is booming. Then, there is mixed use, where retail, housing and employment are in the same area—even in the same building. They are already looking at ways to convert all of that rapidly emptying retail space into residential spaces. Then there is something that’s been around for years—granny flats.
It’s been legal for years to have second units in an R-1 zone. The problem is that most city councils, planning commissions and planning departments hate them. The groups do everything possible to block granny flats and make it unaffordable. Basically, we were all raised in the tradition of moving out to the suburbs, keeping out the riff-raff in favor of little suburban cottages with a plot of land, clean air, setbacks, front lawns, commercial walled away from residential, and good schools away from the grime and danger of the city. All this, of course, dependent on the marvel of clean technology, the automobile.
Granny flats, or mother-in-law flats if you prefer, is one of the ways to ease the housing shortage and allow for cheaper rentals. Here at The Malibu Times, we used to run a bunch of rental ads for small units, usually granny flats. Sometimes, those ads would run for weeks before they found a tenant. Today, an ad comes out on Wednesday, when the newspaper and website listing hits the streets, and on Thursday, the listing owner calls to say they have a new tenant and pulls the ad off the website.
The new granny flat law, which actually became effective the beginning of this year and has apparently been supplemented by some new housing legislation the governor has just signed or is about to sign, changes the granny flat rules. I’ve gotten this information from other sources, so it’s by no means complete; don’t take this as gospel. Check with a real estate lawyer and the local planning department. The new legislation:
• Prohibits cities from requiring additional parking spaces for units located within a half-mile of public transit, which I assume means the buses on Pacific Coast Highway plus some other exceptions.
• Eliminates sprinkler requirements if the primary house doesn’t have them.
• Requires city staff approval without discretionary review by governing body (no planning commission, no city council).
• Gets rid of municipal fees charged to connect to local water and sewer systems for existing structures and reduces them for newly constructed units.
• Apparently allows tandem parking.
• Allows you to put in a kitchen.
• It’s unclear to me how you can now convert your garage into a rental unit but it is something they deal with.
• Increased floor area of an attached accessory building unit cannot exceed 50 percent of the existing living area, with a maximum increase in floor area to 1,200 square feet
Like any new legislation, it probably raises as many questions as it answers. You’re going to have to fight the city and planners to get that granny unit. There are probably going to be some lawsuits—cities usually don’t give up without a fight. The list of things that have been changed is really a check-off list of all the ploys cities have used in the past to block granny units. I’m sure they’ll be inventing new ones as I write this but the directive from the legislature is clear. In time, hopefully sooner rather than later, granny flats will become more common.