Challenging Mayor Gloria’s Bogus Claims About ADUs

By Geoff Hueter  –Chairperson, Neighbors For A Better San Diego

Partly thanks to a recent CBS8 news story about neighbors fighting back against multi-unit ADUs in the College East area, Neighbors For a Better San Diego has a lot of engagement. (An ADU is an accessory dwelling unit, sometimes called a “granny flat.”)

In the news story, Eric Rosenzweig was interviewed and spoke for many residents when he outlined the very negative consequences of building eight-unit apartments in older neighborhoods that were designed, engineered, and built for single-family homes.

Eric and our board member Paul Krueger highlighted these concerns in their interviews with CBS8 reporter Heather Hope.

Mayor Todd Gloria and his staff declined CBS8’s request for an on-camera interview in which they could address those concerns and promote what they see as the benefits of the current ordinance. (The Mayor and District 9 Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera have also spurned several requests to talk with neighbors in areas most impacted by multi-unit ADUs.)

You’ve heard the arguments before, but they’re always worth repeating:

• So-called “by-right” development rules allow investors to build multi-unit, multi-story ADUs without any design standards. There’s no notice, review, or input by neighbors most impacted by these structures.
• The ADU ordinance allows the construction of ADUs in high-fire risk areas, posing a significant threat to lives and property, and hindering our fire department’s effort to prevent and control urban wild-fires.
• Developers of these small one-two bedroom/one bath ADUs don’t pay the Development Impact Fees (DIFs) required on most other residential and apartment construction, which contributes to the city’s $4+ billion infrastructure fund deficit. DIFs are a crucial source of funding for street and sidewalk repair, water and sewer line maintenance and replacement, new police and fire stations, parks, playgrounds and other amenities, already lacking in our older neighborhoods.
• Not a single unit of very-low or low-income rental housing has resulted from the city’s ADU “bonus” program, despite repeated claims that the “bonus” density clause would “reduce racial and class housing inequities”.
• The purchase of single-family homes by investors and land speculators — and the conversion of those properties into multi-unit apartments — shuts out first-time and move-up buyers and permanently shrinks the city’s already limited supply of for-sale single-family housing.
• State codes and our city’s ill-defined “Transit Priority Area” map exempt builders from providing off-street parking for any of the additional residents.
• Developers are “clear-cutting” mature shade trees and other landscaping on these properties, in direct conflict with the city’s much-publicized commitment to aggressively expand our urban tree canopy to fight global warming.
• The current ADU ordinance lacks any short- or long-term review of the cumulative, negative impacts that multi-unit ADUs have on public safety and quality-of-life in our single-family neighborhoods.”

Instead, the Mayor’s communications staff gave CBS8 a written statement, which yet again demonstrates their lack of understanding of their own ADU ordinance, its negative impacts on our residential neighborhoods, and its failure to create any truly “affordable” rental housing.

Here’s the text of Mayor Gloria’s response, crafted by Communications staffer David Rolland:

“We have to build more housing. From addressing homelessness to ensuring our children and grandchildren can afford to stay in this city, the answer is building more housing that San Diegans can actually afford.

That means the City must incentivize building affordable housing in locations where it makes sense, such as near transit corridors, and ADUs are an important part of this strategy. The price of not addressing our housing crisis is far higher than the impact of a few additional granny flats on a particular street. Therefore, the City will not be entertaining a request for a moratorium on ADUs.”

This most recent statement from the Mayor defending the ordinance confuses two important, but distinctly different issues: our city’s lack of affordable rental apartments, and the cost and scarcity of for-sale homes and condos.

The “affordable housing” that David Rolland refers to (which our data confirms is NOT affordable by any standard) are Accessory Dwelling Units. These small, one- or two-bedroom rentals do not contribute anything to our region’s limited and very expensive inventory of for-sale condos and homes.

The multi-unit ADUs currently being built by investors and land speculators are not a solution to the lack of for-sale housing, and in fact, are actually shrinking our available stock of for-sale housing by converting existing single-family homes into multi-unit rentals.

Furthermore, the city’s ADU ordinance has not “incentivized” the construction of affordable rentals. Our data confirm that developers/ speculators have not built a single unit of very-low or low-income rental housing in their multi-unit ADU projects. Instead, they continue to game the “bonus unit” aspect of the ordinance to build effectively market-rate rentals.

Referring to a six-unit project on a single-family lot in Talmadge, Jared Basler, a consultant for ADU developers, admitted in a public forum that the project is “absurd, from an affordability standpoint.”

Most importantly, the Mayor’s office distorts the facts to claim that the widespread pushback against the current ordinance is fueled by the construction of “a few additional granny flats on a particular street.”

As the CBS8 story explains, Eric Rosenzweig is protesting the construction of an eight-unit ADU rental complex on a single-family property abutting his home, based on the property being on a mesa overlooking but not accessible to the trolley. (Another, equally ill-conceived development is going in across the street.)

Projects like these — built without parking, reasonable setbacks from neighboring properties, landscaping, or the payment of much-needed Development Impact Fees — cannot be farther from the accepted definition of a “granny flat.”

The vast majority of San Diego ADUs are built by homeowners. Eric and other homeowners in his situation have never opposed the construction of an ADU and/or a Junior ADU on anyone’s property.

And, contrary to the Mayor’s mischaracterization of our efforts, Neighbors For A Better San Diego has never sought a blanket moratorium on ADU/JADU construction that conforms with state legislation, which was properly designed to regulate and promote “granny flats” as a source of housing for family members or extra income for homeowners.

We have, however, advocated for sensible revisions to the city’s poorly-written ADU code, which wrongly encourages investors and land speculators to transform single-family lots into multi-unit apartment complexes in neighborhoods designed, engineered, and built for single-family homes.

If Mayor Gloria is serious about encouraging more ADUs, he should create incentives that would assist homeowners instead of promoting policies that are only feasible to investors.