SUITE Success

As the American family evolves to include single parents, grandparents, stepchildren and adult children who have returned home, the venerable “granny flat” has been reborn with a new, broader identity as the accessory apartment or second unit.

In California, 44 cities and 17 counties, under a state mandate, have adopted ordinances allowing accessory units in single-family homes--either within the house or standing alone--in established and new neighborhoods.

Several Northern California cities have been especially supportive of second units.

Among those with ordinances permitting second units on single-family properties are Belvedere, Corte Madera, Fairfax, Larkspur, Mill Valley, Carmel, Novato, Ross, Sausalito, Sacramento and Tiburon. About half allow detached structures; the others require attached units.

In Southern California, Los Angeles discourages granny flats, under the pressure of politically powerful homeowner associations that fear the effect the units might have in established neighborhoods.

San Diego is revising an ordinance to allow them, and Orange, Riverside, San Juan Capistrano and Encinitas have laws that encourage them.

In the vanguard of the granny flat resurgence are several Southland home builders, led by Taylor Woodrow Homes. The developers have found that buyers want accessory units to accommodate their families as they evolve.

And several architects of merchant-built housing say they are drawing more tract homes with second units.

According to some experts, second units--whether used as rentals, for family or as offices--are an economical way for homeowners to get more out of their homes, and for communities to get more out of their neighborhoods, without the need for new roads and utilities.

“A typical accessory apartment within a home can be created for about one-third the cost of building a conventional rental unit,” said Patrick Hare, a Washington, D.C.-based land use planner and granny-flat advocate who consults with developers and city planning departments across the country.

“And one-third of the homes in the United States have enough space for a rental unit, space that families aren’t using,” Hare said.

“While a lot of homeowners reject granny flats out of hand, they actually make the single-family home work better for families. It allows them to buy sooner, by subsidizing their payment with a rental unit, and it allows them to stay longer--they don’t have to move as the house becomes too much for them.”

Southland home builders are finding that accessory units make good business sense in their new developments.

“There’s clearly demand,” said architect Bob Hidey, whose Newport Beach firm designed plans for about 1,000 new tract homes in 1996.

New projects designed by Hidey with second units include California Pacific’s new development on the Newport Coast in Newport Beach, Catellus Development’s Ridgecrest development in Diamond Bar, Shappell Industries’ Fairway Bridge in San Ramon in Northern California, and Taylor Woodrow’s Mahogany in Irvine, Bellacere in San Juan Capistrano and Marfiore in Carlsbad. These granny flats range in size from 250 to 1,000 square feet.

“In excess of 50% of the projects we’re doing, we are providing a separate suite that has its own access. It’s not always, as at Mahogany, on the second floor, but they’re configured to have separate, isolated entrances,” Hidey said, often on the first floor, as a unit that will serve an elderly relative.

“In many communities today we’re responding to an Asian buyer and they want separate units because they have more elderly folks living with them.

“On plans, we don’t show them with kitchens, but we make it very easy to bring in a kitchenette after the fact. It’s not always a requirement. These are really designed for extended family conditions.”

While most cities don’t allow builders to include kitchens in accessory units, homeowners often bootleg them in later, since plumbing and power are easily accessed.

Demand for accessory units has been so strong that some new developments have changed project plans in mid-stream.

“Originally, a little more than a third of the 54 homes at Mahogany provided a granny suite,” Hidey said. “As we moved forward, we tried to place as many into the project as we could. With three of the buyers, we have come back and added square footage to that suite.”

Santa Barbara architect Berry Berkus, who has designed hundreds of Southland tract homes, said he did his first accessory units at Huntington Harbour in Huntington Beach about 1970.

Those homes came with detached apartments with sinks and refrigerators--but not ovens, which would make them count as second units. Over the years, granny flats have often come equipped with utility service and plumbing, so that owners can add kitchens or baths later.

Two trends in the 1960s helped boost the popularity of accessory units, Berkus said. Housing prices, particularly in California, went up much faster than personal income, so it took two wage earners to make a mortgage payment on a single-family house. A granny flat can be rented to help subsidize a house payment.

Also, with burgeoning numbers of home-office workers, Berkus has designed detached granny flat/home offices for developments in St. Louis and Denver and, recently, a project called Desert Horizon in Palm Desert,

“We were concerned that people didn’t really want to go to work in a bedroom,” Berkus said. “They wanted a place dedicated to work. They wanted to be able to walk out the door and go to work, even though they were in the same compound.

“We’ve been doing project after project with accessory units. . . . We felt it was a great flexible room. It could be anything from a guest-house to work-at-home space to a place for teenagers visiting from college.”

Planners and architects disagree on the best location for accessory units in relation to the main house.

Architect and planner Peter Calthorpe of San Francisco advocates granny flats situated on alleys.

In a development for Pulte Homes at Laguna West in Sacramento, Calthorpe said, “our granny flats were over the garage, which was a detached building in the rear, sometimes accessible by alley, sometimes by an old-fashioned side drive. They had plumbing, but we left them unfinished, for the owner to complete.”

Berkus, however, doesn’t think alleys make for good neighborhoods.

“The alley creates a non-defensible space, front and back,” he said, explaining that, from a security point of view, it is more advantageous to have a tenant or stay-home worker coming and going and parking their car in front of the house.

But Berkus and Calthorpe agree that granny flats are on the rise in California and around the country, and Calthorpe believes good public relations can help make accessory apartments acceptable in more neighborhoods.

“I think you have to reach community consensus,” he said. “What happens is, people start to see that their own goals can be achieved. Some may see them as an option for work-at-home space, or guest space, as opposed to rental units for different income levels.”

Hare also expects the number of granny flats to continue growing, in California and across the nation. Even if the number of granny flats grows modestly as a portion of total housing stock, it can provide a significant volume of new affordable housing.

“The typical installation rate is one accessory apartment per 1,000 single-family homes a year,” he said. “If we [can raise that to] 10 a year, that’s a huge increase.”

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Patrick Hare’s book, “How to Create an Accessory Apartment,” is available by mail for $15. Write to him at 1246 Monroe St. NE, Washington, DC 20017.