Making Accessory Dwelling Units easier to build
Examples of Accessory Dwelling Units, or ADUs. Image taken from the American Planning Association website.
On the American Planning Association’s website, Accessory Dwelling Units, or ADUs, are defined as “a smaller, independent residential dwelling unit located on the same lot as a stand-alone (i.e., detached) single-family home.” ADUs, unlike second units, do not have their own addresses, but they are often used to house relatives or short-term tenants closeby.
As an elected official, I really want to increase the supply of housing. ADUs add more housing. So I would like to make them easier to build. But Medford currently has a lot restrictions around ADUs.
Medford’s ADU zoning currently resides in Section 94-8.2 of the municipal code. The good folks at Housing Medford and I looked at the ordinance and spelled out a few things we didn’t like, a few of which are as follows:
The owner of the property needs to live on the property to build an ADU.
Currently, to convert a garage into an ADU, or build any type of detached ADU, a homeowner needs to get permission from the Community Development Board. This can take a lot of time and, due to advertising costs for the meeting, money.
The permit granted by the CDB lasts five years. It’s unknown what would happen to the ADU if this permit were to expire without renewal.
Building an ADU in one’s house means that they cannot increase the gross floor area by more than ten percent. Therefore, people with basements can create larger ADUs than those without.
Only one ADU can be built on a given lot, which doesn’t take into account the variability of housing stock. Really big houses could likely accommodate two ADUs without adversely affecting the property.
A condition from Mass General Law (“The accessory dwelling unit shall not be larger in floor area than one-half the floor area of the principal dwelling, or 900 square feet, whichever is smaller”) is re-written in Medford’s ordinance, and this effectively bans basement ADUs on small houses. (Unfortunately, Medford can’t do much about that because it’s state law.)
The first bullet point listed above, specifying that the property owner needs to live on the property to build an ADU, is both the most restrictive rule and the one most strongly opposed by housing advocates. Similar policies have been opposed by the Brookings Institute, Governor Healey, California, and Seattle.
City staff, however, contend that there is a significant short-term rental issue in Medford, and it’s very hard to enforce existing regulations on that. By removing the owner-occupancy requirements, they fear that developers would be further incentivized to buy up property in Medford, add an ADU, and make more money off it as an AirBNB. And they do have a point, because unregulated AirBNBs are a problem in the Medford.
With policy advocates, Council, staff, and the consultants helping us with the zoning overhaul, I’m looking at a few possible compromises to all of these, including other mechanisms to enforce current short-term rental ordinances, and regulations, without full restrictions, for building an ADU in a non-owner-occupied building. For instance, one could require administrative review instead of a special permit for ADUs in owner-occupied property and a special permit instead of a complete ban for non-owner-occupied property. These changes are going to come up later in the year as part of the zoning overhaul.
