The city of Atlanta’s first-ever Affordable Housing Week concluded with a seminar on how to create accessory dwelling units (ADUs) that spotlighted the often prohibitive challenges to building backyard tiny homes, garage-topping apartments units, and guest houses on land typically designated for single-family residences.
“They are extra difficult to permit and actually construct,” Jim Cheeks, the chief executive of homebuilder Fortas Homes, said of ADUs on Feb. 16. “And financing is one of the most difficult things when doing accessory dwelling units.”
The vast majority of residential land in Atlanta is zoned for single-family development, the suburban-style practice of building one house — and absolutely nothing else — on one parcel.
Housing experts, however, say that one key way to confront the city’s persistent housing affordability crisis is to embrace density and build more dwellings on less land. ADUs offer a solution that’s often seen as less intrusive to single-family residential neighborhoods than, say, apartment buildings.
On the few properties where they are allowed, ADUs are required by city law to span no more than 750 square feet. The limitations hardly end there, a panel of housing industry professionals made clear during the city planning department’s event last week.
“ADUs are so important,” said Sanaa Shaikh, an architectural project manager with Kronberg Urbanists + Architects. But they’re still rare, she said, because of the multitude of regulations imposed by the city’s housing and zoning codes — and because there is often community resistance in longtime single-family areas.
ADUs can only be 20 feet high, they can’t cover more than 25% of a backyard, and they must be detached from a single-family home. It can be hard to find an architect who understands Atlanta’s complex and restrictive zoning laws and a contractor willing to build one, Shaikh said.
Even if a homeowner or…
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