(This article was contributed by Sophie Hayes, a journalism student at the University of Washington.)
The city’s Office of Planning and Community Development is encouraging what they believe could be one solution to Seattle’s housing crisis: backyard cottages.
Backyard cottages, or detached accessory dwelling units, are small homes built on already-existing lots. Homeowners in single-family residential neighborhoods in Seattle have had the option to build them since 2010. Some homeowners rent them out for additional income, while others use them to expand their living quarters.
Councilmember Mike O’Brien is spearheading the project and aims to make the process of building backyard cottages easier.
O’Brien has heard from homeowners who are interested in building a backyard cottage, but aren’t able to due to various restrictions, he said. He’s also heard from people who would want to live in one. “I see it as an opportunity to add some more housing supply to desirable neighborhoods,” he said. “It seems like a win-win and there seem to be regulations that may not be necessary and getting in the way of that happening.”
While backyard cottages have been legal citywide since 2010, only 221 have been built. Seattle has 40 percent fewer homes on the market than it did a year ago, and housing prices have risen 12 percent.
Portland’s backyard cottage industry has been successful in the city’s easing of restrictions. In the midst of the housing crisis that Seattle is facing, backyard cottages are seen as one solution to providing more housing options and helping homeowners remain in their homes through additional rental income.
On Feb. 3, the Office of Planning and Community Development held a community meeting at the Wallingford Senior Center. The second of two meetings collecting community input, Wednesday’s meeting was a chance for the Wallingford community to weigh in on policy changes regarding backyard cottages that the city is considering. While the basement only had seats for about 30, nearly 100 people squeezed in to hear O’Brien’s responses to questions and concerns from community members.
The room was split between those who want to see more backyard cottages in Seattle and those who fear that backyard cottages will change the dynamics of their neighborhoods. Hands shot in the air after the conclusion of each comment, people hoping they would be called on next.
To qualify for building a backyard cottage, the property owner must reside in the main home, though the cottage can be rented out. This is one of the current restrictions the city is considering removing.
It was also a point of contention at the meeting: some community members fear their neighborhoods could become dominated by renters, while others need the additional income.
“I think it’s a great idea, but I’m also very involved in our neighborhood block watch,” long-time Wallingford resident Margaret Ford said. “While we welcome renters into our neighborhood, they’re just not involved.”
O’Brien doesn’t “subscribe to the view that renters are a bad thing.” People living in neighborhoods, regardless if they rent or own, are beneficial to Seattle’s neighborhoods, he said.
Carol Sterling agrees with O’Brien. She is considering a backyard cottage, but is unable to because of the owner-occupancy restriction. She rents the property that she would build the cottage on to her kids. Because she doesn’t live there herself, she can’t legally build a backyard cottage.
“If we want to keep the city vibrant and alive and have young people who can afford to live here, we have to think a little differently,” Sterling said. She hopes to eventually retire in her home and to secure affordable living for her kids. “If I could put a custom cottage in the backyard, then I would be able to meet all those needs.”
The city is also considering removing the parking requirement for backyard cottages. Right now, building a backyard cottage also requires the construction of an off-street parking space.
This was another point of conflict at the meeting. Some claimed that parking in their neighborhoods is already too crowded. Others said that because so many people don’t own cars and instead rely on public transportation, a parking spot shouldn’t be required.
Other discussed policy changes to allow backyard cottages in more places, include: reducing the minimum size of lots that are allowed to build cottages, allowing both an attached dwelling unit and backyard cottage on the same lot, increasing the height-limit for cottages, and increasing the percentage of yard coverage a backyard cottage can take up.
In 2014, the city council adopted a resolution that called for policy changes to increase production of backyard cottages. The city will begin to draft legislation in late February or March after community input is collected.
So when those backyard cottages become party central or drug central or otherwise unfriendly to the neighborhood social fabric, how is a renter supposed to tell the problem in the backyard to cut it out? And if the owner lives out of town/state/country, how can they meaningfully fix that? Also, no parking space? Hahaha – right. We’re going to all have to walk blocks to get to our homes soon.
If it has O’Brien’s name on it, chances are it is going to fly in the face of a Wallingford neighborhood lifestyle we all thought we were buying into when we purchased our homes over the years. Good luck.
Well, nobody owe you “the lifestyle you thought you bought into”. Societies change, and Seattle is changing very fast right now. Nobody get to keep everything constant, and the dialogue should be about how we prefer the changes and what we want to trade off, not how to freeze in time.
Fantastic! We’ll put two loud ones on either side of you. Thank you for volunteering!
TJ I agree with you 100%. The anti-growth folks (or the growth but not near me folks) are living in a fantasy world. Seattle is going to grow. We can’t stop it. All we can do is decide whether it’s sane, with more density, fewer cars and more transit or insane, with sprawl, skyrocketing housing costs and gridlock.
People who want peace, quiet and stability should consider moving further away from the city.
too bad this article is so devoid of the spirit of Wallingford. I was there. There is lot more to this story–like giving 10 minutes for public comment and being so unprepared for the level of interest in the topic.
and people wonder why the volunteer bloggers get burned out.
As a renter in Wallingford, a landlord who’s worked in various Seattle neighborhoods, and a 5+ year resident in Wallingford, I am sick and tired of homeowners assuming renters will NOT be involved in their neighborhoods, and fed up with the stereotypes of renters turning their apartments/homes into drug dens and party shacks.
I don’t know who His Nibs is, but to lump all renters into this below-standard-subcommunity is off base and untrue.
Agreed! I am a long term renter and won’t be in a position to buy any time soon. All of my friends are also long term renters, with only 1 owning a house (and that’s in Maple Valley). We are all young professionals with families and we all love being involved in our communities. I’ve lived in my building for 10 years, and most of my neighbors have also been there for that long or longer (I’d say at least 60% of them). I think they need to update their demographic.
I’m sick and tired of watching the Uber pick up the AirBNB renters standing on the curb 4 times a week. I don’t know who “Neighbor Lady” is, but to assume that His Nibs is lumping all renters together is off base and untrue.
Let’s also do away with the off-street parking spot requirement too so that the renters will park on the St. & force out the homeless living in vehicles strewing human waste, garbage, drug paraphernalia, thievery, etc., about. Another lose/lose solution!
The yes/no renters thing is a spin that O’Brien managed to put on it.
Currently, you can have renters next door; you can have two families next door via ADU. If you have two renter families next door, what’s the difference? (He asks.)
There is a difference, and one or two questioners tried to talk to him about it, but he seemed neither able nor willing to hear. If you were at the meeting without any previous consideration of the issues, he might have succeeded in making it look like anti-renter.
I mean, it’s a grey area and of course the nature of rental properties is part of the issue, but the logic above is not sound – the conclusion does not automatically follow from the premises – and in my opinion it reflects a sort of willful blindness.
It is my understanding that if the community chose to do this, it could get parking stickers for people who live in the neighborhood. Not everyone who is clogging the parking in Wallingford is from another neighborhood, but several are and reducing this number could help people who own homes here and who rent here.
I love the idea of a special school, such as John Stanford, as I also went to a school for gifted students when I was in the 3rd to 7th grades; however, the teachers took public transportation and so did the parents. Why we need to provide parking for teachers, parents and UW students is outrageous. I assume you have to live in the neighborhood to have children at John Stanford, so why do you need to park near the school? Isn’t it enough to drive your children there (this is still a luxury compared to most schools in large cities)? The notion of accessory units should not have to depend on the serious parking problems in Wallingford, but it does. Finally, there are several houses (I will provide addresses) that have absentee landlords that are allowing people to use their garages not for parking, but storage and their renters are parking on the street when, by law, they should have a parking unit for each renter.
I am curious why we are removing ‘restrictions’ on inbuilding. The developer in my neighborhood is having no troubles getting around the ones we already have to build the million dollar house next door. Cutting down legacy trees, burying houses in three stories of shade, cleaning mud off trucks into the storm drain, building just over the legal line here and there and here.
My suggestion is the one I’m practicing NOW: talk to the guy. Talk to your neighbors. It’s not a neighborhood if you don’t talk to them. And even Mr Maserati has been willing to deal. He thinks it’s funny.
Please refer to TJ’s comments above – no one owes you a thing. It’s your tough luck to be cast into shade! Live with it! Of course, TJ may feel otherwise…it’s hard to guess.
His Nibs –
I think your missing power and access as key features of your points.
Developers have a lot of power and access to resources that they will likely manipulate to develop wherever and how-ever.
Individual and family residents are facing rapidly rising housing costs in which they have little power or control over.
As a social worker in this city, it is unlikely that I will ever own a home. As a perma-renter, I think it’s a great idea to have tiny home-like cottages in backyards. It’s a great way to bring together homeowners and renters in a community, as the rental unit will be close to where the homeowner lives. These units *hopefully* will be more affordable for us bleeding hearts.
And I would hazard a guess that many, maybe most, of the people yelling at O’Brien in that meeting actually are for that.
A tiny cottage in the home owner’s back yard? Fine!
That can be done legally today. Some of the requirements are onerous. Parking is one where there’s probably significant community disagreement – it seems absurd to require on site parking for these, and not require it for apartment buildings? but there are street parking problems. The owner occupancy requirement is a big issue, O’Brien doesn’t want to understand why and the author of the article missed it too. There’s also talk about allowing them to be bigger, which clearly would make them LESS affordable, no?
Wallingford has both kinds of ADU, as far as I know they aren’t the kind of big problem small lot development was, it’s just about the details.
Ahem. “I think you’re..”
Doug’s comment “People who want peace, quiet and stability should consider moving further away from the city.” is pretty dismissive of a whole bunch of people who work in Seattle and would rather not commute for hours a day to get to their jobs, but moved to places like Wallingford because they were family friendly communities.Many teachers at our local schools could never afford to buy a house anywhere near to their place of work – this is a big departure from the days when teachers lived in the communities where they worked. Renters are getting priced out of the market and the idea that SFH should be torn down and replaced with apartments is NUTS. Those apartments are NOT affordable, nor can they accommodate the families that were renting those SFH. In addition, communities are more successful when they are comprised of a diverse mixture of people, not entirely made up of singletons who work in the tech industry and can afford the ridiculous rents or purchase prices.
I’m new to the neighborhood and struggled with whether or not to leave a reply based on the passion of the topic but we are new homeowners in Wallingford so we do have a stake in this. I don’t want to come off as sounding like an aging hippie but has anyone considered the environmental impact of adding these backyard cottages and the additional concrete footprints? When we lived in Hawaii, we weren’t allowed to pave more than 40% of our lot due to run-off into the bay. There was already so much existing damage due to roads, density of homes, vehicle emissions, and lost wetlands. I would think the same happens here with the run-off into Lake Union and the Puget Sound. There is already so much concrete and so many vehicles per lot. Covering natural drainage to add more foundations and off street parking space will just force more water to run into the drainage system and straight into Lake Union or possibly even a neighbor’s yard.
I think you’re right on the mark. The enthusiasts for covering the city with apartment blocks never see the environmental benefit that permeable surfaces (i.e. gardens/backyards/parking strips) represent. A smaller building like a backyard cottage could at least drain to the grass, a planting bed, or rain barrels (the same way a garage would) but that doesn’t really work with a larger building.
What actually happens is 46 times a year, subbasins 147A and B overflow, for a total of 18 million gallons a year. That’s “combined sewer overflow”, which includes raw sewage. Fecal coliform counts in Lake Union can exceed 1000 times water quality standards. Spikes last 48 hours. That’s from only western Wallingford and eastern Fremont, going to the outfall at the bottom of Stone Way.
So you might have a point there. Welcome to Wallingford, by the way!
Seattle Public Utilities is hard at work getting a giant tunnel/cistern thing in, to hold this stuff during rainstorms, but it will take about a decade.
Maybe I’ve missed the response to my question, but I wonder why we’re talking about changing the zoning at all while zones that were established decades ago (specifically along 45th) remain sadly underdeveloped? A quick drive along 45th through Wallingford is a sure indication that upzoning does not necessarily add housing.