SAN DIEGO — Hundreds of accessory dwelling units, also known as ADUs, are being built across the City of San Diego right now, but industry analysts say they will do little to solve our housing crisis.
“It's just a small Band-Aid approach where we're adding little tiny increments of housing - but this isn't a long-term solution,” said Nathan Moeder, with London Moeder Advisors.
Moeder, a real estate economics expert, said ADUs are generally one-bedroom or studio units.
“Most of these units are small and when you look around at the people who are building ADUs, it is people who want to add a small unit in the backyard and they just want to have one occupant with no pets, that's their ideal occupant," Moeder said.
In 2022, San Diego permitted 651 ADUs. In many cases, neighbors were not happy to see them going up, especially those built next to property lines, overlooking once-private backyards.
“This is like a disease,” said a man bicycling past an ADU in the College Area. “It's our neighborhood and people don’t want to live next to a dump like this.”
Moeder also points out that the rent in these new places usually isn't cheap.
“You're still talking $2,000 plus for an ADU unit,” he said. “If you go to the North County, you're talking close to $3,000 for just a single occupant unit.”
He added that ADUs are a needed product, but for a very tiny, targeted audience. Instead, Moeder would like to see the city come up with solutions to stimulate the building of affordable places with more bedrooms.
“What we're missing, and where the big crisis is, is family housing,” he said. “Two bedroom, three bedroom units to replace single family homes that are no longer being built.”
With San Diego running out of space, he thinks we should build more townhomes not only are they more affordable for families, but developers can still make a profit building them, giving them an incitive to create more larger units.
It's estimated that San Diego needs to be building around 15,000 new units a year.
Last year, the city approved just over 5,300 and the overwhelming majority of those were for people in the highest income levels.
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