Reply to Say it with me: ADUs drive housing prices UP not down

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Reply to "Say it with me: ADUs drive housing prices UP not down"

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[quote=Anonymous]I get the arguments in favor of ADUs on this thread and elsewhere and am generally in favor of more density and more housing.

BUT I have personally observed OP's point in practice. I live in a neighborhood with rising housing costs, but not rising as rapidly as some nearby areas do to school quality. We own a condo here. We've seen two single family homes near out condo put in ADUs in the last few years (both installed by developers who had bought and renovated the properties). Neither of those ADUs is being used as a long term rental -- both are used as AirBnBs or in-law units.

The installation of those ADUs raised the sale prices of those two properties exponentially. Without the ADUs, even with the full renovations, they would have goon for around 850-950k. With the ADUs, they both went for over 1.2m. Those are the highest sale prices in our neighborhood by a mile, even compared to SFHs that are larger than either of these.

But it has not resulted in more housing, since the ADUs are not being used as housing. Instead, they are contributing to noise issues, parking concerns, and maybe even crime because of the transient nature of the AirBnB rental. So these ADUs hiked the average cost of buying a home in our neighborhood without improving housing availability for renters at all. Plus, they've done nothing at all to address the factor most depressing prices in our neighborhood -- the poor school, since both homes attracted investor/developer buyers, but no families with school age kids or likely to have them in a few years.

It's not the panacea people think it is. I hate to say this because it's not actually good for MY property value, but the better move is to tear down those SFHs and put up multi-family housing, which would actually lower prices (including the value of my own condo) by creating more housing for people, and the people buying those condos are more likely to invest in local schools and other infrastructure than the AirBnB tenants or someone's ILs who are staying with them for a few months.[/quote]

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