Please support the most flexible options for increasing the number of new Accessory Dwelling Units!

By More Options for Accessory Residences (MOAR), a group of citizens concerned with the future of the city, housing availability and affordability. We have diverse backgrounds, experiences and housing situations, but we’re all Seattleites who want our city to allow more options for accessory residences.

An option for everyone

For the last decade, backyard cottages — also known as Detached Accessory Dwelling Units, or DADUs — have been popping up all over Seattle’s neighborhoods. Based on their success, making backyard cottages and mother in law apartments easier to permit and build was one of the important recommendations of the City’s 2015 Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) Final Report (labled SF1 in the report).

After Councilmember O’Brien introduced land use code revisions to open the door for more of this important housing type, a small, wealthy group of Queen Anne homeowners successfully derailed the ordinance. Now the City of Seattle has studied in depth the environmental impact of accessory dwellings.

The outcome of the study is clear. From Erica C. Barnett’s excellent article

…its 364 pages are a strong rebuke to anyone who has ever argued that single-family zoning is a natural feature of the landscape in Seattle, and that legalizing apartments in single-family areas will lead to displacement, environmental degradation, and drive up housing costs for low-income renters. The document places Seattle’s current zoning debates squarely in the context of history — not just redlining, which has been documented elsewhere, but post-redlining decisions that made apartments illegal on two-thirds of the city’s land and shut non-white, non-wealthy residents out of those areas almost as effectively as formal redlining did in the middle of the 20th century.

Because of their size and location, backyard cottages are an almost invisible form of increasing neighborhood density. They have many other benefits:

• They begin to undo past exclusionary land-use wrongs by opening up our city’s parks, schools and other amenities to people that could never afford to rent or buy a multi-bedroom single family detached home in the same neighborhood
• Many older Seattleites who want to age in place see backyard cottages as a solution. Backyard cottages help people finance their retirements, or facilitate multi-generational living arrangements, or downsize while maintaining neighborhood connections.
• They are a perfect size for our smaller households (2.1 people according to the latest demographics) and are relatively more affordable
• An investment in DADUs is a powerful disincentive to future tear downs and the greater environmental, visual and noise impact of out of scale McMansions.

A Call to Action:

In order to support Accessory Dwellings during this housing shortage, please cut and paste the language below into the online forms and in emails to Council:

online form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdGm0qliWID1Te4zFbexQ5nXRkPYN-Szfxzpi43yuXQ_-htNA/viewform

Via email: ADUEIS@seattle.gov
In writing to: Aly Pennucci, PO Box 34025 Seattle, WA 98124–4025

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Please support the most flexible options for increasing the number of new Accessory Dwelling Units.

I am concerned that Seattle is faced with a housing crisis, increasingly unaffordable housing, a long history of codified inequity through land use planning, and inaction on climate change.

The recent Draft EIS has concluded that the environmental impacts of reducing regulation of Accessory Dwelling Units are non-significant. The benefits of ADUs could be widespread, if we select options that maximize the production of this very adaptable and accessible form of dwelling.

I support more Accessory Dwelling Units and would like to see the final EIS recommend:

• Elimination of the parking requirement for ADUs regardless of number. Providing parking is often expensive, unnecessary, and in many cases infeasible. This will prioritize vegetation and open area over vehicle storage.
• Elimination of minimum lot size for ADUs. If you can put a house on it, you should also be able to create an ADU by right, within the same bulk restrictions allows by the zone. Fourteen percent of Seattle lots fall below the current lot size threshold and they are often in neighborhoods with the best access to transit, schools, parks and jobs, exactly where most people would like to live.
• Striking the owner occupancy restriction. Owners of Seattle backyard cottages surveyed by OPCD stated the greatest barrier to creating a DADU was the owner occupancy requirement. Both Portland and Vancouver do not have owner occupancy requirements and have not experienced widespread problems with speculation while maintaining high percentages of owner occupancy without need for regulation. Finally, the underlying rationale that renters or landlords are not adequately invested in their communities is an outdated and classist prejudice, especially considering the majority of Seattleites are renters, there are very few new opportunities to own. Seattle’s houses are filled with renters (27%) and Seattle’s Single Family zones are filled with thousands of grandfathered lowrise multi-dwellings.
• Freedom to choose best fit and type when creating accessory dwelling units. Allowing owners to make two accessory dwelling units either both as attached to the primary dwelling or one attached, one detached, or both in a detached structure, in front or to side of primary residence. Flexibility is key, as long as the overall form fits within the bulk of currently allowed Single Family Zoned structures.
• Incremental increases in size and height allowances and options for roof features such as dormers and green roofs. These cottages are still 10 feet shorter than what is allowed for the primary residence.
• More allowable rear yard coverage. Having increased rear yard coverage allows additional flexibility in design, to preserve trees, yard space, or existing accessory structures.
• Increasing the allowed gross floor area for detached accessory dwelling units for 1000 square feet and attached dwellings units to 1500 square feet. This small increase will lead to more two bedroom plus dwellings for the larger Seattle households. Separating non-livable space from the accessory dwelling unit’s gross floor area calculation will increase the number of dwellings that can be constructed on top of or adjacent to existing garages by allowing for more flexibility on constrained sites. Requiring occupancy separation and separate entrance to living and storage spaces would reduce illegal conversions.
• Reducing pre-development costs and streamlining permitting by dedicating specialized reviewers to ADU/ DADU projects. With three dedicated staff positions, DCI could reduce the turnaround on permit reviews to a matter of weeks rather than months. If the city pre-approved stock plans with a list of available zoning departures, such as 2 extra feet of allowable height for sloping lots, residents who want to build an ADU have a clear and predictable pathway through permitting.
• Studying how limiting new principal structures to .5 FAR can incentivize the creation of additional attached and detached accessory dwellings, and limit displacement/ demolition/ gentrification. Additional FAR bonuses for green building, specific site conditions such as alley and corners should also be a component of this study.
• Do not apply Mandatory Housing Affordability. Many of the ADUs we have are used for family, or rented well below market. Adding a potentially five figure fee at their creation for affordable housing elsewhere would drastically reduce the ability of everyday people to make their own contribution to affordable housing on their own land.

Matt Hutchins, AIA is an architect, advocate for More Options for Accessory Residences (MOAR), and serves on AIA Seattle’s Housing Task Force and the City of Seattle’s Southwest Design Review Board. His firm, CAST architecture, is working on urban infill and affordable housing projects.