It’s been a home for decades, but legal only recently
On paper, the converted garage behind the Martinez family home in the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles is a brand-new unit of housing, the product of statewide legislation that is encouraging homeowners to put small rental homes on their property and help California backfill its decades-old housing shortage. Two stories tall with 1,100 square feet of living space that is wrapped in a curved exterior wall, adorned with pops of pink around the windows and decorative white squares, it looms over the squat main house as a statement of something different behind a chain-link fence.
The inside tells a longer story. For years the unit was illegal, built clandestinely in the mid-1990s by Bernardo and Tomasa Martinez as part of a $2,000 project that turned the garage into a cold but habitable unit with a bed and bathroom. The family rented it for $300 to a friend, then $500 to Bernardo Martinez’s brother, using the money to offset their mortgage and weather unemployment during the Great Recession.
Eventually the unit housed their son, Luis, who lived there several years later while he was getting a master’s degree in architecture. Luis Martinez designed the latest conversion and, during an interview on the driveway, noted that the garage may have become a legal residence in 2020, but it has long been someone’s home.
“The city rules are finally catching up to how these places are being utilized,”
Luis Martinez said.
Until last year’s renovation, the Martinez family’s backyard home belonged to the shadow inventory of unpermitted housing that has swelled across Los Angeles and other high-priced cities as affordable housing shriveled. Amateur developers build them for profit. Homeowners build them for family or to help with the mortgage.
In a tight and expensive housing market, where homes are desperately needed but also hard to build, people of every income level have decided to simply build themselves. The result is a vast informal housing market that accounts for millions of units nationwide, especially at the lower end.
Los Angeles County, home of 10 million people, has at least 200,000 informal units, according to researchers at University of California, Los Angeles. That’s more than than the entire housing stock of Minneapolis.
‘Horizontal Density’
Looking to add units, the state legislature has spent the past five years passing a flurry of new laws designed to increase density and speed the pace of new construction. The laws have vastly lowered regulatory barriers that prevented backyard homes and essentially ended single-family zoning so that duplexes are allowed in most neighborhoods across the state. A byproduct of these laws is that there is now a path for existing units to be legalized, a process that can require heavy renovations and tens of thousands of dollars. Cities including Los Angeles and Long Beach have also created ordinances that clear the way to legalize unpermitted units in apartment buildings.
As a designer who specializes in residential structures, Luis Martinez has lived this at home and has now made it his career. His design business, Studioo15, has surged over the past two years as residents across Los Angeles have used the new state laws to add thousands of backyard units. Yet about half of his clients, he said, are people like his parents who want to have existing units legalized.
Bernardo and Tomasa Martinez, both in their early 60s, immigrated to Los Angeles from Mexico in 1989. Working in the low-wage service sector she was a waitress; he worked as a laborer loading a truck they settled into a two-bedroom house in South Los Angeles that had four families and 16 people. Luis Martinez, who crossed the border as a child, was surrounded by love and family, in a house where money was tight and privacy nonexistent.
Eventually the family was able to buy a small threebedroom home in Boyle Heights, on the east side of Los Angeles. It sits on a block of fading homes that have chain-link fences in the front and a detached garage out back. To supplement the family income, the Martinezes converted the garage into a rental unit without a permit. Bernardo Martinez and a group of local handymen raised the floor and installed plumbing that fed into the main house, while Luis helped with painting.
Luis Martinez remembers that nobody complained, probably because the neighbors were doing the same thing. “It was normal,” he said, “like, ‘I live in the garage,’ and some garages were nicer than others.”
Luis Martinez went to East Los Angeles College after high school, then transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, where he got an architecture degree in 2005. In the years after graduation, when the Great Recession struck, his father lost his job and, after a spell of unemployment, took a minimum wage job mowing the lawn at a golf course. To help with bills, they rented the garage unit to Bernardo Martinez’s brother for $500 a month. “With the minimum wage, you can’t afford to pay a mortgage and food for everybody,” Tomasa Martinez said.
The point of informal housing is that it’s hard to see it is built to elude zoning authorities or anyone else who might notice from the street.
Jake Wegmann, a professor of urban planning at the University of Texas at Austin, describes this as “horizontal density,” by which he means additions that make use of driveways and yard space, instead of going up a second or third floor. Because both the tenants and owners of these units don’t want to be discovered, there is essentially no advocacy on behalf of illegal housing dwellers, even though the number of tenants easily goes into the millions nationwide.
Their presence is often logged in the form of proxy complaints about city services. “We talk about there not being any parking on the street, we talk about sewer pipes deteriorating, we talk about there being overcrowded schools, but oftentimes unpermitted housing is underlying all this,” Wegmann said.
When cities pay attention
Through 10 years as a code compliance officer for the County of Los Angeles, Jonathan Pacheco Bell estimates that he entered about 1,000 different homes, most of them in the unincorporated areas around South Los Angeles. He handed out violation notices and watched illegal housing get destroyed or vacated.
But, after a decade of enforcement work, he said he came to accept that zoning codes become something of a fiction in the face of an affordable housing crisis. Many informal units are substandard or unsafe. But most, he said, are not. And until recently, the county’s policy of removing them was, in his view, creating more problems than it solved.
Pacheco Bell is now a consultant who gives frequent talks at planning conferences. In those presentations, he tells the story of a family he cited in 2016, just as the state laws on accessory dwellings were changing. The family patriarch had died in a bus crash in 2009 and, to supplement her income, the widow hired a neighbor to build a backyard home. It cost $16,000 to build and she was able to rent it for $500, providing years of income for her family and one unit of affordable housing in a region that badly needed it.
Pacheco Bell showed up after an anonymous complaint. The unit had plumbing and a kitchen. There was a crucifix on the front door, magnetic letters on the refrigerator and a child’s homework assignments taped to the wall. The home was usable and well-maintained but was in violation of zoning codes because it was too close to a fence. Pacheco Bell wrote the unit up and returned a few months later to confirm it had been demolished. Walking around the backyard, and seeing the outline of the home and the rubble, made him question the job he was doing.
“And as a planner I had a crisis of consciousness, like ‘How many people have I made homeless?” he said.