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Mother-In-Law Units Helping to Fill Housing Demand
Tuesday, July 21, 2020
One of the trends in attempts to provide more affordable
housing is the growth of accessory dwelling units (ADUs) such as granny flats,
garage apartments, or in-law suites. These aren't a new thing, Freddie Mac
points out, in a research paper on the subject, that Fonzie occupied an
above-garage apartment at the Cunningham home, but they have been somewhat
invisible, and often illegal. The invisibility was often linked to their illegality.
Zoning laws passed during the postwar rise of suburbs often limited
construction of high-density housing and because so many ADUs were built against city ordinances,
without required permits, little research literature was published. Freddie Mac
could account for only three or four papers in the 1980s and 1990s and they
were mostly small in scale and based on limited data. The data for
the new paper was gathered from property descriptions on Multiple Listing
Service (MLS) boards. It looks at the growth of these units, the various structural
types of ADUs in use (both permitted and illegal) and discusses the measurable
benefits of having ADUs in our communities.
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