Building coliving in California just got easier

How to build 4 units on a lot

Phil

Sep 20, 2021

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Great news for anyone who’s into housing affordability and housing creativity.

SB-9 passed in California. The law allows more housing units to be built on existing lots.

Here’s the formula for turning a single family home into 4 homes (courtesy of the wonderful Alfred Twu).

Alfred Twu @alfred_twu

CA Senate Bill 9 allows up to 4 homes in most single-family zones, regardless of local zoning. You can use #SB9 to split your lot, add a 2nd home to a lot, or both (split lot & have 2 homes on each lot for total of 4). Here's a how-to guide & thread: sites.google.com/view/alfredtwu… 1/

Diagram showing how SB9 can be used on a 40x100 lot. Illustration of a lot, with a house, with a duplex, and with a duplex and lot split. Labels: No parking required if lot is within a 1/2 mile of a rail or ferry stop, or a bus line with service at least every 15 minutes during rush hour, or within a block of a carshare vehicle, New lot created from lot split must contain 40-60% of the original lot. Two homes allowed per lot. The second unit can be in a new building, or created by dividing a house into 2 homes.Buildings must still follow local zoning rules such as height and yard requirements. However, you can get exceptions if there is no other way to build 2 homes of up to 800 square feet each (enough space for a 2-bedroom house).

The full guide is here.

Anyone who has tried to build cohousing or coliving in California knows that zoning is a huge impediment. It can be very hard to house multiple unrelated people on a single piece of land.

Phil Levin @levin_phil

The blue areas are the only places in the Bay Area where it is legally permissable to build multifamily (aka affordable) housing. Your high rent is a direct result of this exclusionary zoning. belonging.berkeley.edu/single-family-…

Alfred’s 4-unit formula is now one of the simplest way to make your coliving dreams happen in California cities. If I was starting Radish today, that’s exactly how I would do it.

Here are the steps:

Person A buys a single family home
Person A splits the lot
Person B buys the new lot and builds a home
Person C builds an ADU on Person A’s lot (perhaps shared via an LLC or TIC?)
Person D builds an ADU on Person B’s lot

And also it makes getting a loan easier. Now banks are just lending to a person (or people) buying a single family home. That’s something that do all day long at low interest rates. No need to deal with exotic commercial loans.

Of course, the details are more complicated. But it allows coliving to happen in a series of small, predictable steps. And makes the “tiny homes on a plot of land” vision much more doable.

Go forth and split those lots.

1 Comment

schafer

Writes the Change

Sep 20, 2021Liked by Phil

Thanks for laying this out so simply. There's an opportunity to lay this out quite simply for groups trying to do it. I'd like to understand the remaining frictions preventing folks from going after this. If anyone wants to share more, hit me up!

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