Tacoma’s code allows ADUs on residential lots that exceed minimum sizes set by zone. In “R-2,” a sin

Why are accessory apartments and cottages so rare? One reason, no doubt, is that many homeowners do not want to host an ADU. But a more pernicious reason is that winning approval to rent out an ADU in most cities requires running a harrowing gauntlet of rules. For every decision that Vancouver, BC, has made to welcome secondary suites and laneway houses, other cities have made the opposite decision.
Aided by collaborators at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality's Green Building Team (DEQ), we evaluated how welcoming cities across Cascadia are to ADUs. The cities we studied include the 30 most populous municipalities in the region, from Vancouver, BC, with more than 600,000 residents, to Idaho Falls, with almost 60,000. DEQ also gathered information from 16 smaller cities in Oregon, ranging from Corvallis, with more than 50,000 residents, to Damascus, with only 10,000. Together, these 46 cities hold 5.9 million hotels in san jose costa rica northwesterners, a large share of the region's metropolitan dwellers.
For each city, we attempted to answer questions about seven major legal barriers to ADUs: How many ADUs are allowed per lot? How many additional off-street parking spaces does the city require for each ADU? Does the city mandate that the owner of an ADU live on the lot where it is located, either in the house or the ADU? How many people may live in an ADU, in its accompanying house, or in both combined (that is, how do the "roommate caps" or occupancy limits about which we've spilled hotels in san jose costa rica a lot of ink affect ADUs)? How big may ADUs be? In how much of the city may owners install ADUs? And must ADUs match the exterior design of the house they accompany?
Seven questions and 46 cities yield a table of 322 cells, each of which we attempted to fill through close reading of city land-use codes and consultation with city staff. DEQ and Sightline cooperated on this research. One result of many hands participating is that a few errors may have found their way into the table, especially concerning smaller cities. Please let us know of any that you see, so we can update hotels in san jose costa rica the table. At publication time, 24 cells remained filled only with question marks. Almost all of these unanswered questions concern the smaller Oregon cities at the bottom hotels in san jose costa rica of the table, and many of them are about how occupancy limits apply to ADUs. Some city codes are silent on this question.
Distilling elaborate rules from 46 cities into a single hotels in san jose costa rica table leaves out many details. Many of them are evident in the more-thorough version of this table maintained by DEQ on its website . There, you can read the relevant portions of, and find links to, many city codes. The appended  ADU Gauntlet table does, however, convey what a would-be developer or homeowner must do to win a permit for an ADU.
No city is typical, because rules vary widely, but the city of Tacoma sits in the middle of the pack in many respects and therefore exemplifies as well as any city the gauntlet Cascadia makes ADU proposals pass through. It illustrates the gauntlet and also shows how to read the ADU Gauntlet table. In Tacoma, ADUs are legal either one AADU or one DADU per residential building hotels in san jose costa rica lot. Tacoma mandates one separate off-street parking space per ADU. Typically, a parking space plus the driveway to get to it gobble about 300 square feet of surface area. The owner of the primary house must live on-site, either in the house or the ADU, and no more than four people may live in the ADU. Also, the ADU must have at least 300 square feet of floor area per resident, which means that the minimum size of an ADU is 300 square feet. This rule bans many of the tiny, tricked-out houses that Sightline has written about elsewhere .
Meanwhile, Tacoma caps ADU size at 1,000 square feet. (Notice that this maximum size actually reduces the legal number of residents from the officially stated hotels in san jose costa rica four to three, because of the 300-square-feet-per-person rule. To house four people, you'd need 1,200 square feet.)  Furthermore, the 1,000-square-foot maximum notwithstanding, a Tacoma ADU may never be larger than 40 percent of the size of the ADU and house combined. So, for example, a 1,200 square foot house may have an ADU no larger than 800 square feet (1,200 + 800 = 2,000, of which 800 is 40 percent). At 800 square feet, an ADU may no longer house more than two people, because of the city's 300-square-feet-per-person rule. What's more, an ADU may not exceed 10 percent of the size of the lot it is on: on a standard 5,000 square-foot lot (common in many Northwest cities), hotels in san jose costa rica Tacoma therefore caps ADUs at 500 square feet. At 500 square feet, occupancy may not exceed one person, because of the 300-square-feet-per-person rule.
Tacoma's code allows ADUs on residential lots that exceed minimum sizes set by zone. In "R-2," a single-family zone that covers substantial areas of the city, for example, the lot has to be at least 5,000 square feet. Many older lots in Northwest cities including Tacoma are smaller hotels in san jose costa rica than that. Furthermore, Tacoma specifies that an ADU must be on a lot that has a detached single-family house on it. The code is ambiguous, but it's possible that the city means to ban installation of ADUs during construction of new single-family houses. Many cities do this: Bellevue, hotels in san jose costa rica Washington, mandates a delay of three years between the completion of a house and the permitting of an ADU. But simultaneous construction is the smart, economical way to add ADUs, and it's commonplace in some Cascadian communities such as Whistler, BC. There, as many as 75 percent of new single-family houses go on the market with ADUs already in them. In Tacoma, that pattern may be illegal.
Finally, Tacoma requires that the exterior design of ADUs match the houses they accompany—a harmless-sounding provision that turns out to be especially pernicious to ADUs' affordability, as explained below.
Tacoma's tale is not too different from the stories of most Cascadian cities: ADUs are legal but restricted to within an inch of their lives. You can construct the story for your city by studying the  ADU Gauntlet . A speedier way to understand the gauntlet is to review the seven questions in the table, which reflect the main regulatory barriers to ADUs.
Until the 1980s and 1990s, many communities hotels in san jose costa rica across Cascadia banned ADUs outright. Only Idaho Falls and Salem, Oregon, still do that, but Burnaby, BC, comes close: it allows secondary suites only for family members. The other 43 cities we reviewed allow ADUs, although seven of them—including Langley, BC, and Everett, Washington—permit in-home apartments but not detached units. Vancouver and Richmond, BC, lead the pack, by allowing two ADUs per single-family house: one indoors and one in the backyard. The suburban city of Nampa, Idaho, goes further still. It does not restrict the number of attached ADUs a house may hold and allows two detached units in addition. Yet, Nampa undoes all the benefits of this policy with a separate rule, which says that all ADUs on a site must be rented to the same party. How many households want to rent multiple units on the same site?
Across the region, the trend toward legalizing ADUs continues to inch ahead. Vancouver, BC, legalized in-home units in stages starting in the 1980s and finished the job in 2004, then allowed laneway houses in 2009. Most Washington cities legalized ADUs in the 1990s to comply with the state's growth management act. Seattle did so in 1994, legalizing detached units in 2009, initially only in limited numbers and later without limits. Portland unlocked the door to ADUs in 1981, but it didn't open the door until reforms in 1998.
Off-street parking requirements are nearly ubiquitous in municipal land-use codes. They're a colossal impediment to compact communities. They're mostly insane and counterproductive , if politically entrenched, and they will figure in future articles in this project. For now, just notice that one way a city can legalize ADUs but pinch their number is to require a complete, additional, hotels in san jose costa rica off-street parking space for every in-law hotels in san jose costa rica apartment or garden cottage. At many houses, especially those in dense, in-city districts where the demand for housing is strongest, installing another off-street parking space is expensive if not physically impossible. Look at the  Street View of Kitsilano again (or think of an urban neighborhood you know well), pick a house, and try to figure out where you would put a pad of pavement at least eight feet wide and twenty feet long, plus connections to the street by a curb cut and driveway. What's more, you cannot just put this pad anywhere. hotels in san jose costa rica Many cities specify that all parking be beside or behind the house, not in front of it. Eli Spevak, a Portland mini-house developer, says, "Excessive parking requirements are the most common 'poison pill' included in many communities' ADU regulations."
Of the 46 Cascadian cities we reviewed, 36 require at least one additional off-street parking space per ADU in most or all cases. Two thirds of the people who live in these 46 cities are in parking-mandate hotels in san jose costa rica cities. (Another 7 percent live in cities that do not allow, or barely allow, ADUs.) This sea of parking-pushing cities makes those few municipalities that break the pattern stand out like islands. This archipelago of sanity includes six outposts: Vancouver and Victoria, BC; Portland and Corvallis, Oregon; and Nampa and Meridian, Idaho. These places trust citizens to decide for themselves whether they want parking spaces with their accessory housing.
Another poison pill that many localities drop into their ADU rules is a requirement of owner occupancy: property owners must live on ADU sites, either in the primary or secondary unit. This rule gives bankers the jitters, which prevents many homeowners from securing home loans to finance the ADU construction. hotels in san jose costa rica Owner occupancy sharply limits the value appraisers can assign to a house and ADU and makes the property less valuable as loan collateral. If a bank forecloses on a house and suite