Decentralized, incremental, and bottom-up: ADUs are the best solution to provide missing affordable housing options, and are the antidote to sudden, disruptive neighborhood change. Their scale and form seamlessly integrates into the village development pattern of the historic “Artist Colony” era of Laguna from the 1900’s to the 1930’s that we all treasure as a community. Numerous duplex, cottage and courtyard apartments are well documented in the city’s Historic Registry, that were essentially ADUs long before the term came into being. They are a valuable source of income for their landlords, who are usually established residents, as opposed to developers who may have no ties to the neighborhood or even the city. ADUs add pedestrians to the sidewalks, customers to local businesses, and dollars to the tax base that pays for city services. And they do all of this while making more efficient use of infrastructure that already exists. A street lined with attractive single-family homes with ADUs half-hiding in the backyards still looks and feels and operates a lot like, well, a street lined with attractive single-family homes.
In an unbelievably tone-deaf council hearing, Councilmembers Toni Iseman and George Weiss were more concerned with their property values than the unprecedented state-wide housing affordability crisis, caused by restrictive zoning that was originally designed to segregate and red-line urban minorities from affluent neighborhoods. For the past several decades, they have used arbitrary and subjective criteria to continue this legacy, excluding outsiders to the effect of keeping the city 90% white. I was appalled when Iseman suggested collaborating with the cities like Carmel and Maibu to come up with ways to “protect the community”, dog-whistling that regular folk are not welcome in the ivory towers of the coastal elite.
Their attempts to undermine the inclusionary intent of the State Legislature only underscores their intent to pull up the ladder from all but the wealthiest 1%. The public comments from the Village Laguna “usual suspects” rang hollow, nominally professing to support affordable housing, yet in practice they have opposed all of the recent low-income and senior-citizen dedicated developments for threatening “neighborhood character”, and are now opposing and stalling the approval of this ADU ordinance, seemingly unaware of the fact that the longer they stall means that the less-restrictive state guidelines prevail. Their alarmist rhetoric accused the humble ADU of being a unique threat, attempting to put occupancy restrictions on them that aren’t even applied to large party mansions. However, to their credit, I agree with their suggestion of providing pre-approved architectural plans. I believe that their fears are misdirected and I hope that they would certainly prefer the incremental construction of ADUs over high-rise housing projects.
These kinds of exclusionary attitudes are incompatible with a progressive city like ours. Fortunately, the state has already recognized that subjective housing restrictions are creating a feudal economy in California, as outlined by Chapman University urban policy professor Joel Kotkin. Legislation to expand the right to housing is just beginning, with bills like AB 1279 and SB 50 coming down the pipeline. Our city needs to decide if they will be ahead of the curve or dragged along kicking and screaming. ADUs will not destroy but strengthen single-family neighborhoods, enabling existing homeowners, senior citizens, millennials, multi-generational households, and historically excluded people to share in the Laguna Dream.
Christopher Moore, Laguna Beach
