A Voice of San Diego analysis of county data reported to the state revealed those ADUs or granny flats made up half the homes the county reported as affordable to low-income and middle-class San Diegans the past four years.
The rise of ADUs has coincided with the state-mandated implementation of environmental rules that the region’s homebuilding lobby has blamed for dramatically slowing development. Meanwhile, state and local policies and programs, including a now-expired county fee waiver initiative, made it easier to build ADUs.
The result: More ADUs popped up in the unincorporated county as permits for larger homebuilding projects slowed. Those ADUs have proliferated without the major blowback that’s played out in the city of San Diego over larger-scale ADU developments. ADUs also fueled the county’s reported progress delivering affordable homes needed to meet state housing production goals despite uncertainty on their rents – or even whether they’re being used as housing.
Every eight years, the state gives cities and counties housing development targets to help attack the statewide housing crisis.
The county’s goal for unincorporated areas is to permit 6,700 homes by 2029. From 2021 through 2024, 1,552 of the 5,244 permitted homes the county reported to the state were ADUs.
The share of permits going to ADUs has grabbed the attention of both county supervisors and the local Building Industry Association.
BIA CEO Lori Holt Pfeiler argued that ADUs are one of the few housing options that can proceed as the county grapples with how to implement its controversial vehicle miles traveled policy, which is meant to minimize driving and greenhouse gas emissions.
“The reason why the county’s numbers are so high with ADUs is that’s really the only thing you can get through the process,” Pfeiler said.
Ahead of an April Board of Supervisors meeting where officials reviewed the county’s progress on state housing goals, county staff noted in a report that 45 percent of permitted housing units in 2024 were ADUs. They added that granny flats made up 84 percent of the homes they considered affordable to middle-class San Diegans that year and more than half of those considered attainable for lower-income residents.
County Board Chair Terra Lawson-Remer, who cheered the county’s overall housing production progress in a press release, reacted to the surge in ADUs at the April meeting by questioning whether the county should dial back incentives for ADUs.
“I am concerned that a lot of what we’re counting as a success are these ADUs which doesn’t seem to me to be the kind of solution we need,” Lawson-Remer said. “I would like to better understand, and maybe this is a report back: Are there incentives we’re currently directing toward ADUs that could be better directed elsewhere, not towards ADU construction? Cause that’s not gonna solve our housing crisis. That’s not a single-family home. That’s not affordable homes.”
Supervisor Joel Anderson, who often differs with Lawson-Remer on housing issues, continued her line of questioning: Why were there so many ADUs?
Rami Talleh, deputy director of the county planning and development services, said the spike in ADU permits followed state moves to increase zoning code flexibility. He didn’t mention a county program that ran out of funds in early 2024 that waived ADU permitting fees starting in 2019 or almost permit-ready ADU plans the county offers on its website.
Anderson then questioned how the county tallies and classifies housing units like ADUs as affordable if their owners aren’t pledging to offer them up to low-income or middle-class San Diegans.
Talleh’s response spotlighted an uncomfortable reality: The county’s decision to label certain ADUs affordable in its reports to the state is more art than science.
In a recent interview with Voice, Talleh said the county has tried multiple ways to estimate the affordability of ADUs in recent years since none are deed-restricted, which is essentially a promise to set rents at certain rates over the long haul.
For 2024, Talleh said the county used Zillow data on 30 existing ADUs in unincorporated San Diego County to come up with an estimated breakdown of rents that the county applied to newly permitted ADUs.
But what about those ADUs San Diegans plan to use to house family members, vacationers or home offices?
Talleh said the state Department of Housing and Community Development directed the county to a 2021 UC Berkeley Center for Community Innovation study that surveyed ADU owners in different parts of the state, including San Diego, to gauge rents and how they were being used.
The study found that 18 percent of ADUs served as “no-cost housing” for family or friends, but researchers wrote that a “large margin of error associated with the median rental price” for ADUs in San Diego and Orange counties made it “difficult to make claims about affordability.”
Despite that caveat, Talleh said San Diego County officials decided to assume that 18 percent of ADUs permitted in the county in 2024 would serve as no-cost housing and thus assumed they would be considered very-low income housing. Units the county labeled “no cost” made up the vast majority of the 102 ADUs it classified as very low income last year.
That and other assumptions also led the county to estimate that 30 percent of ADUs permitted in 2024 could be considered affordable to low-income San Diegans and 38 percent to middle-class residents.
In San Diego, rents can be up to $1,448 for a single person in a studio apartment who is classified as very low income and up to $2,746 for a middle-class resident in a studio apartment.
Talleh acknowledged the county’s method of gauging whether permitted ADUs meet these rent levels isn’t ideal.
“The data is minimal in general when it comes to approaches to do this kind of work,” Talleh said.
The county isn’t the only local jurisdiction grappling with this problem.
Del Mar, where ADUs have been the primary source of housing production in recent history, has struggled to get data from ADU owners about how they use them.
Amanda Lee, the city’s principal planner, told Voice the state at one point barred the city from making such reports mandatory. The city now plans to send out new requests early next year after new ADU regulations were finalized this summer and is eyeing potential incentives for ADUs affordable to low-income residents.
Paul McDougall, housing policy manager at the state housing department, confirmed that his agency reviews methodologies that counties and cities apply to estimate how ADUs are being used.
In response to questions from Voice, McDougall wrote that ADUs are valuable to include in housing data submitted to the state even when there’s imprecise data on them.
“ADUs, regardless of deed restrictions, are a valuable housing choice that have multiple benefits such as furthering fair housing, providing more housing choices in single family areas, facilitating infill development, allowing naturally occurring affordability, accommodating special needs and assisting in the affordability of homeownership,” McDougall wrote.
Catherine Ferguson, a new mother who is building an ADU for her family on her parents’ unincorporated property east of Escondido, agreed.
Ferguson, 34, said an ADU will allow her family to own a 1,200 square foot home – and stay in San Diego.
“ADUs are an important type of housing stock for people like myself who can’t afford single family homes in this market,” Ferguson said.
But Ferguson, a land use attorney who serves on the YIMBY Democrats of San Diego County board, is skeptical of the county’s approach of tallying ADUs that haven’t committed to affordable rents, making it uncertain they are actually accessible to low-income San Diegans.
“Unless it’s deed restricted, I don’t know how you can count it as affordable,” Ferguson said.
Pfeiler and Stefanie Benvenuto of the BIA are skeptical too.
They think the county should continue to support ADU development but also ease the path to building other types of housing that can pledge to serve low and middle-income San Diegans at a larger scale.
“Relying on the backyards of the unincorporated residents of the County of San Diego to address the affordability crisis of San Diego is not going to work,” Benvenuto said.
This story first appeared in the Voice of San Diego. Read the original here.
