The county will waive permitting fees and streamline construction for junior accessory dwelling units next year in hopes of mitigating an affordable housing crisis exacerbated by the North Bay fires.
The Board of Supervisors last week gave a green light to the Community Development Agency to waive building and safety and planning division permit fees for installing JADUs in 2018. The planning division permit fee is $515, or more if a coastal permit is required.
The county doesn’t have any hard data on the number of people displaced by the fires who are searching for housing in Marin, but, said Brian Crawford, the county’s director of community development, “With the recent North Bay fires and the stress of lost housing stock, we think it’s a good time to step up the effort and encourage and invite property owners to create these units.”
A JADU is a rental inside a home that includes a wet bar and is less than 500 square feet; owners of JADUs make a legal commitment to live on the property.
“Usually, we’re working with someone who has to remodel part of their house to convert to the 500-square-foot limit,” Tom Lai, assistant director of community development, said last week. “[Now] we’ll use a ‘same day express permit,’ where the application is not routed to Environmental Health, Public Works or planning for review.”
The county can’t waive fees for reviews conducted by the fire department, and the fee waiver requires that JADUs not be rented out on a short-term basis during 2018, with the hope that new rentals end up as more permanent housing.
The move was part of an ongoing effort to combat the lack of affordable housing that has included updated rules for building second units, now officially called accessory dwelling units, or ADUs. Those units can now be up to 1,200 square feet, a substantial increase from the previous limit of 750 square feet.
“Marin is a very slow-growth county, and the pace of housing construction has not kept pace with the overall growth of our economy,” Mr. Lai said. “What’s happened is our existing balance between jobs and housing has worsened; this was a crisis even before the North Bay fires.”
Supervisors praised the initiative and discussed the possibility of extending it another year. Supervisor Dennis Rodoni, a former contractor, requested a review of the JADU program in six months. “I want to track this and make sure this is working, so we don’t have to tweak it,” he said.