Tomorrow — Friday, August 23 — is the deadline for the OB Rag’s “Worst ADU in San Diego” contest. If you haven’t yet sent in the address of a local ADU eyesore, time’s running out.
This contest set out to convey how the modest “granny flat” concept has spawned grotesquely large buildings on small lots. Along the way, it opened a heated debate about the social and ethical aspects of building massive ADUs:
If you question this practice, does that make you “anti-housing”? How many of these units are truly affordable? Should that matter? Is greed good? Is the Golden Rule dead and buried?
We’ve called this the “worst ADU” contest. But it might be more accurate to call it the “worst Bonus ADU” contest.
By concocting an extra “Bonus ADU” program, Mayor Todd Gloria perverted the state’s original ADU program to make San Diego an outlier in urban densification. You can read all about it in a November 2023 CalMatters article, “Not your grandma’s granny flat: How San Diego hacked state housing law to build ADU ‘apartment buildings.’”
Ever the climber, Gloria seemed eager to burnish his statewide YIMBY credentials. His reach may now be expanding. Reports have him prowling around Chicago looking for openings in a future Harris administration.
But Gloria is still our mayor, and we can still hold him accountable for turning San Diego neighborhoods into political collateral damage.
Take another look around your block. If you spot an oversized ADU, write down the address, take a picture, and send it to us at obragblog@gmail.com. Deadline is tomorrow, Friday, at 5:00 p.m.
How can we help stop future projects, especially like the one adding #22 ‘ADU’s’ to a single street without parking????? How horrible! I am sure SD Mayor and council did not account for HUMAN GREED. :(