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It’s been a dozen years since the Census Bureau first reported that California had the highest U.S. poverty rate when the agency factored in the cost of living — something it had not previously done. Since then, lawmakers have taken increasingly bold steps to address the main cause of this problem: the extreme cost of housing. In trying to limit the hurdles to building new shelter, one of the few such steps to almost immediately pan out was making it much easier for homeowners to add a single “accessible dwelling unit” — a small, detached house with its own entrance — on their lots. Last year, more than 23,000 ADU permits were issued across the state, a huge jump from the nearly 5,000 seen in 2017.
This history is what makes the current ADU debate in the Legislature so baffling. At question is how much funding should be given to the California Housing Finance Agency’s ADU Grant Program, which provides up to $40,000 to homeowners who meet certain requirements to cover permit and planning fees and other pre-construction costs. Because of slumping state revenue and concerns about whether the grants made banks less interested in providing ADU construction loans, the $100 million in funding that was initially allocated for the program — and quickly doled out — seems unlikely to be matched as state lawmakers wrap up work on housing measures before adjourning next week.
In an era in which government-built “affordable housing” routinely costs $700,000 per unit or more in California, facilitating the construction of ADUs — which can cost as little as $100,000 — should be an obvious decision. We’ll see if the Legislature figures this out in coming days.
