Expediting granny flats can help ease S.J. housing crisis
Building backyard homes as rapidly as possible would help alleviate San Jose’s housing crisis that is plaguing teachers, nurses, seniors, restaurant workers and so many other residents.
The city should move forward with measures Mayor Sam Liccardo announced Tuesday to streamline San Jose’s permit process for accessory dwelling units (ADUs). The primary goal is to help homeowners and developers obtain building permits for their projects as fast as a single day and, on what the city is calling ADU Tuesdays, within 90 minutes. Yes, it may soon be possible to get a building permit faster than it takes to get a driver’s license at the DMV.
The focus on building what are affectionately called granny flats is a simple matter of math.
The average cost of building an apartment building in San Jose is a jaw- dropping $650,000 to $700,000 a unit.
The city and Santa Clara County offers subsidies to lower that cost, but still coming up with the necessary capital to build the thousands of housing units San Jose needs is a substantial challenge for even the wealthiest developers
he cost of a granny flat for a homeowner is about $200,000 to $250,000, and the advent of pre-fab ADUs can cut that price in half.
If the City Council approves — and it should — a program to offer forgivable loans worth as much as $20,000 to residents willing to rent backyard flats to low-income residents, the cost could fall even further.
ADU applications had been increasing in San Jose even before Tuesday’s announcement as homeowners opted to build flats in their backyards or convert existing garage space.
The city this year already had issued 191 permits by the end of June, surpassing the 190 that San Jose issued for all of 2018 and the 91 in 2017.
A recent online survey indicated that roughly one-third of the 3,600 registered San Jose voters who responded were interested in building an ADU in their backyard. According to the city, more than half of San Jose’s 180,000 single-family homes would qualify.
Liccardo estimates that fewer than 1 percent of the city’s single-family homes have backyard flats, which is comparable to the numbers in other West Coast cities such as Portland and Seattle. But further north, in Vancouver, British Columbia, officials say 33 percent of homes have ADUs. That has added 25,300 housing units to Vancouver’s supply.
The city accomplished the goal by instituting incentive policies starting in the 1980s, including no requirements of an off-street parking spot for each ADU and no requirement that an owner live on site. Interestingly, Vancouver’s approach came about primarily because young residents were having an increasingly difficult time paying a mortgage without the additional income a backyard flat provided.
It’s imperative that San Jose make progress on the mayor’s goal of building 25,000 units — including 10,000 affordable homes — by 2022. Easing the process by which residents can build granny flats should be a key strategy for achieving those targets.