Editordude: We repost David Garrick’s account of yesterday’s important Planning Commission hearing on reforms to San Diego’s ADU program because it accurately reflects the response by the commissioners, although it totally downplays the role that citizens and community groups played in getting the Commission to consider the reforms. Stay tuned for more on this from the Rag.
By David Garrick / San Diego Union-Tribune / May 1-2, 2025
The San Diego Planning Commission harshly criticized a controversial city incentive for backyard apartments Thursday and said reforms were needed to stop the incentive from damaging neighborhood character.
The commission voted unanimously to recommend a two-story cap for all new backyard apartments — also called accessory dwelling units, or ADUs — and directed city officials to explore three other specific options in an effort to shrink the homes’ impact on neighborhoods.
Those options are capping the number of backyard apartments allowed per property, setting a minimum square footage per unit and changing city development rules to limit the bulk and scale of such apartments.
City planning staff agreed to flesh out those options before the City Council is scheduled to finalize a rollback of the incentive in June. While the council has final say, advice from the commission typically carries significant weight.
The council voted 6-3 in March to eliminate the program in some single-family neighborhoods — depending on zoning — and to direct Mayor Todd Gloria to propose other changes to shrink the incentive’s impact.
Those proposed changes are what the commission was debating Thursday. They generally praised the mayor’s proposal but said it wouldn’t go far enough.
Gloria’s proposal would require larger buffer zones called setbacks between property lines and backyard apartments. It would also ban most ADUs in very high fire-severity zones and create a new parking requirement for ADUs that are not near transit.
Commissioners said they were skeptical of whether Gloria’s proposal would solve the most glaring problems created by the incentive, which is the most aggressive in the state.
The city’s ADU incentive goes beyond what state law allows by letting property owners build a potentially unlimited number of such units.
For every ADU a property owner is willing to build that is deed-restricted for low-income or moderate-income tenants, they can build one bonus ADU and charge market-rate rent for it.
While in most case this has led to property owners building between one and three ADUs, in some unusual cases property owners have used the program to build more than a dozen ADUs or more.
“This is not the way I envisioned ADUs would work,” Commissioner Ken Malbrough said. “I want housing, but I don’t want to ruin neighborhoods.”
A 17-unit accessory dwelling unit bonus program project is being built on Almayo Avenue in Clairemont on Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2025. The original lot housed a 1,018-square-foot single-family home. (K.C. Alfred / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Commission Chair Kelly Moden agreed.
“I don’t believe that the ADU bonus program, as currently designed, develops thoughtful homes,” Moden said. “I feel like the intent of this policy has been exploited, and we need to put some guardrails on it.”
Commissioner Jeana Renger said she was frustrated that developers were taking advantage of a program primarily intended for people who own just one house and live in it.
“The intent of the bonus ADU program was to encourage gentle development, but as we’ve seen in examples, that’s not really the reality,” Renger said. “Because I’ve seen so many examples of outliers, I think there is an obvious need for accountability and more thoughtful planning.”
Commissioner Dennis Otsuji said the character of many neighborhoods has been damaged.
“I don’t think the visual impact of these projects has been addressed strongly enough,” he said.
Malbrough initially proposed a hard cap on the number of ADUs allowed per property, an idea recommended last month by the Community Planners Committee, an umbrella organization for neighborhood groups across the city.
A majority of the commission expressed support for a hard cap.
But after the commission debated a cap of four housing units per property, which would amount to a limit of one bonus ADU, and then debated a cap of five homes per property, which would mean two bonus ADUs, Moden convinced her fellow commissioners that it would be hard to agree on a specific cap.
Moden also said a better option would be to let Heidi Vonblum, the city’s planning director, take the direction given by the commission and transform it into a menu of specific policy proposals for the council to consider.
Vonblum said she got the message the commission was sending Thursday — that it wants policies that create firm assurances that no more outlier projects with upward of a dozen ADUs will be built in San Diego.
She had previously proposed strengthening the only current significant limitation on property owners under the bonus ADU incentive.
Under current city policy, property owners can’t exceed the maximum square footage allowed per acre — called the floor-area ratio — for the particular zone.
Vonblum had proposed capping the allowable square footage per property under that calculation at 10,000, even when the calculation would otherwise allow much more square footage.
Commissioners said they were worried developers would find loopholes around that approach and that a hard cap, or something like it, is a better option.
A multi-story, multi-unit accessory dwelling unit (ADU) bonus program project is being completed behind a single-family home on Adams Avenue in El Cerrito on Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2025. (K.C. Alfred / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
After the meeting, the Community Planners Committee’s chair, Andrea Schlageter, said it was encouraging that the commission had praised her group’s proposed cap.
“Hopefully this will push the City Council toward a cap,” she said.
Schlageter suggested the four-hour public hearing before the commission’s vote could also help. Dozens of speakers criticized the incentive, and no one praised it.
“It’s very clear how frustrated everyone is,” she said. “It really illustrates how much this is affecting day-to-day life.”
The council has generally been ardently in favor of incentives that help solve the housing crisis, despite backlash from residents dubbed NIMBYs — “not in my backyard” — by their critics.
But the bonus ADU incentive seems to have generated a different kind of opposition, partly because the outlier projects can appear so out of place that it’s hard for opponents of rolling back the incentive to defend them.
Even Circulate San Diego, a group that has strongly supported housing incentives, said this week that the city’s bonus ADU program must be reined in.
“San Diego has an opportunity to prevent large outlier ADU projects, while simultaneously making it easier for homeowners to build an ordinary small-scale ADU if they want to,” said Colin Parent, Circulate’s chief executive.
