It All starts With a Good Idea
Faced with a housing shortage of crisis proportions, Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, decided not to wait for the market to sort things out. Not that the market seems up to the job, anyway: Nearly a third of L.A. residents already spend more than half their income on rent. Garcetti’s idea: to use the powers of his office to dramatically increase the city’s housing stock, by building, among other things, the ingenious homes known as accessory dwelling units. ADUs are free-standing bungalows that have roughly the same square footage as two-bedroom apartments, and that fit—here’s the mind-bending part—into existing backyards. Neither banks nor builders nor zoning regulators were ready for ADUs, but Garcetti jawboned the former and politicked the latter into supporting them. Now the affordable little homelets…
