About 25 percent of Bay Area homeowners are interested in building accessory dwelling units on their properties, according to a recent poll. But where will the funds come from to help them finance and build those units, otherwise known as “granny flats” or “in-law apartments”?
To help spur construction of such small-scale, affordable housing units, JP Morgan Chase has awarded a $3.5 million grant to a pair of nonprofit lenders: Housing Trust Silicon Valley, based in San Jose, and Genesis LA Economic Development Corp., based in Los Angeles.
“We’re imagining that people will build these accessory dwelling units and rent them to the kindergarten teacher at their kids’ school — or to a grown child who’s just starting out in the work force but can’t afford housing here,” said Kevin Zwick, CEO of Housing Trust Silicon Valley. “There’s a lot of people who’d want to take advantage of this, but the process of building, owning and renting out an accessory dwelling unit can be more complicated than it seems.”
To be evenly split by the two lenders, the grant provides seed money for a pilot program expected to get off the ground early next year. Low-cost flexible loans would be made to homeowners in exchange for their promise to rent the accessory dwelling units at affordable costs to low- and middle-income earners.
The Housing Trust and Genesis would use the $3.5 million in funding to attract additional capital from foundations, banks, corporations and other sources, thereby creating even larger funds to assist homeowners in building accessory dwelling units.
The goal is that the San Jose and Los Angeles efforts will become statewide models, stimulating the creation of similar programs in other cities, said Alice Carr, head of community development banking for JP Morgan Chase.
Statewide support for accessory dwelling units — known as ADUs — has been growing.
A bill sponsored by Sen. Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont, became law Jan. 1, easing parking requirements for adding such units, while reducing some of the impact fees — most notably for utility hookups — that often have added a deal-breaking $10,000 to $60,000 to an accessory dwelling unit project.
The Bay Area Council, a key proponent of the bill, conducted the aforementioned poll. The council has estimated that if one in four of the Bay Area’s approximately 1.5 million homeowners were to build ADUs, that would add around 400,000 new units to the region’s chronically constricted housing supply and help tamp down the never-ending rise in housing costs.
Housing Trust Silicon Valley and Genesis LA Economic Development Corp. are community development financial institutions — nonprofit banks, essentially.
The bulk of the Housing Trust’s $1.75 million share of the grant will be used to make capital loans to homeowners — who can easily spend $100,000 or $200,000 on ground-up construction of an ADU. But the Housing Trust also intends to create an educational outreach program — involving classes, workshops and technical assistance — to help homeowners navigate the ADU process.
“They have to become a mini-developer,” Zwick said. “They have to understand the planning and design of ADUs, as well as the landlord issues and property management issues — and the community engagement issues” that can arise if neighbors object to additional cars on the street, to give one example.
Mostly, he said, the Housing Trust hopes to spur housing for “the missing middle” of wage earners, people who increasingly cannot afford to live in the region.
“This is a way to help utilize our existing single-family home neighborhoods and put some more rental housing within the footprints of those neighborhoods,” Zwick explained. “It helps maintain the neighborhood character while providing more affordable housing opportunities to people who are in danger of being displaced from the community.”
A portion of the grant also will be used to create a program and fund to encourage the preservation and renovation of small-scale, multi-family buildings — typically older, garden-style apartment complexes of between five and 20 units, Zwick said.
Often, such complexes are too large for mom and pop landlords to handle and too small for large affordable housing developers to think about — another piece of the “missing middle” of the region’s housing crisis.
