Not many people know about it yet, but the city is moving ahead with a plan to legalize detached mother-in-law apartments in single-family neighborhoods, and a demonstration project has already been completed on North Capitol Hill.
Those who do know about the idea don't seem overly concerned, though, according to Jory Phillips, a senior planner with the Department of Design, Construction and Land Use.
Detached accessory dwelling units (DADUs) as the rental properties are also known, share the same lot as a primary house, which has to be occupied by the owner for most of the year, according to the new land-use regulations.
The DADUs are billed as a way for homeowners to make extra money for mortgage payments and as a way to increase housing options, Phillips said.
DADUs are an offshoot of a move to legalize attached mother-in-law apartments in the early 1990s, he added. Anecdotal evidence at the time indicated that there were thousands and thousands of the apartments already in existence in Seattle, but that turned out not to be the case. "Most estimates were grossly overestimated, tenfold, in fact," Phillips said.
Only around 1,200 permits for attached mother-in-law apartments have been issued since the practice was first legalized in 1993, according to DCLU figures, and the legalization efforts were made so that the apartments could be regulated, Phillips noted.
There was concern in many neighborhoods at the time that legalizing attached mother-in-law apartments could cause parking problems, although permits for the units required that one off-street parking place be included for each one.
It is possible to obtain a waiver for the parking requirement because of topography, for example, but the waivers don't apply for the University District or Alki, Phillips said. "Those two neighborhoods felt they had parking problems that were too significant."
However, regulations for all attached accessory dwelling units do require minimum setbacks from property lines and a maximum square footage of 1,000 feet for each mother-in-law apartment.
Roughly the same regulations and standards apply to DADUs, Phillips said. The lot has to be a minimum of 3,000 square feet, and only 35 percent of the lot can be covered in structures, which is the same standards apply to DADUs, Phillips said. The lot has to be a minimum of 3,000 square feet, and only 35 percent of the lot can be covered in structures, which is the same standard in single-family zones, according to the regulations.
Like the attached apartments, the DADUs are nothing new. "From a planning perspective, detached ADUs have been used historically in Seattle," he said. "They are not a new concept by any means."
The existing DADUs are spread fairly evenly throughout the city, but the DCLU decided to set up four demonstration projects to evaluate the finished buildings and to gauge their effects on neighbors, Phillips explained.
Besides North Capitol Hill, the demo projects are located in the Magnolia, Licton Springs and Green Lake neighborhoods, and the individual projects were chosen after four rounds of design review, she said.
It wasn't always an easy process, according to Brom Wikstrom, a disabled Magnolia artist who converted a two-car garage on his property into a DADU. "The city made us jump through all sorts of hoops you wouldn't believe," he said.
In fact, Wikstrom added, the DCLU turned down the first design he came up with, saying the project needed to follow the "cottage style" of architecture. It took about a year before the two-bedroom building was completed, he said.
So far, Wikstrom lets friends and relatives stay in the place only on a temporary basis, he said. "It worked out real good for us. Of course, we overextended our loan," he smiled.
Wikstrom hasn't heard any complaints from his neighbors, and the DCLU also sent out impact surveys to neighborhood residents within 300 feet of his home and to neighbors within 300 feet of the other three demo projects. "The results we got back were very, very positive," Phillips said.
That's true for Capitol Hill, where 56 percent thought the project was good, while 14 percent thought it was bad. In Magnolia, 65 percent of the neighbors thought it was a good project, while 16 percent thought it was bad.
Green Lake drew a 59-percent positive response and a 19-percent negative response, according to the same survey results, but the DADU concept fell a bit flat in Licton Springs. There, only 33 percent of the neighbors thought it was a good idea, while 47 percent thought it was bad.
The public-involvement process began last February when the city's Planning Commission hosted separate focus groups for the general public, for those familiar with "innovative housing concepts" and for those from the design and development community, Phillips said.
The DCLU followed up on those a short time later with a public forum, where the results from the focus groups were discussed, he said. The information from the forum was subsequently posted on the DCLU Web site.
The director of the DCLU has issued a Determination of Non-Significance for the proposed DADU ordinance. "The next step is for the mayor's office to forward it to the (city) council's land-use committee," Phillips said.
Following that will be a 30-day comment period and then a public hearing where neighborhood residents will be able to testify in front of the full city council, he said.
