Deena Hitzke knows all about the affordable housing crisis in Tucson, where the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is up around 14% since last year.
She’s the director of elder services at the Administration of Resources and Choices, a Tucson-based nonprofit that provides resources for elderly victims of abuse and distressed homeowners.
It's part of Hitzke's job to help displaced elderly people find homes.
“We have noticed a growing homeless population among elders, many who have an income average of $700 a month. So, they’re really cost-burdened and often forced to live with an abusive partner or adult children,” said Hitzke, who added that the shortage of affordable housing in Tucson can leave seniors living in unsafe apartment complexes, potentially vulnerable to predatory neighbors.
The shrinking affordable housing market in Tucson is why Hitzke, along with more than 60% of about 275 Tucson residents surveyed, are in favor of a proposal that would allow homeowners to build accessory dwelling units with a full-sized kitchen — which city code hasn’t permitted since 1948 — and rent them out at a relatively low cost. An ADU (also called a casita, mother-in-law suite or cottage) is a small apartment, either attached or detached, to a host home on the same property.
There are already plenty of these structures, some up to code and some not, in backyards across Tucson, and Hitzke says it’s “an excellent solution for elders.”
“More of the people we’ve placed in ADUs have been able to sustain that much longer for safety reasons, but also because they’re happy and content with the place,” she said. “Usually the person who owns the property living in the main house will help them out a little and a natural caregiving relationship emerges.”
A “serious” affordable housing plan
Increasing the affordable housing supply for Tucson’s aging population — and everyone else struggling to keep up with the rising cost of living — while mitigating urban sprawl is the ideal result of passing the ADU proposal.
Last November, Mayor Regina Romero and the Tucson City Council directed Planning and Development Services to draft an amendment to city code that would permit the dwellings. Since then, the Planning Commission has held multiple public work sessions, including one late last month.
It will hold at least one more public hearing on Sept. 15 before sending it to the city council for a vote.
Arthur C. Nelson, a professor of urban planning at the University of Arizona’s College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, has studied ADUs as an affordable housing solution since the 1990s. The benefits to the community, he said, are multifaceted, and include both cheaper building costs compared to constructing a new building and boosted economic development as a result of increased population density.
“ADUs are one approach,” to housing affordability, Nelson said. “But if local governments don’t have them in their suite of approaches, then they’re not serious about meeting affordable housing concerns.”
Over the past decade, other cities such as Portland, Minneapolis and San Diego, have adopted accessory dwelling unit policies with those goals in mind. But with only dozens or hundreds of those dwellings permitted per year in cities with a policy in place, “it’s not a huge development boom,” Daniel Bursuck, a lead planner for the city, said at the most recent ADU work session.
No tools to stop Airbnb?
Some of those cities, like Minneapolis, don’t require homeowners to live on the property because when it did, “it was severely limiting people and their ability to build these,” Bursuck said. He also noted that Flagstaff currently has an ADU policy with an owner-occupancy requirement, but is considering removing it.
As it stands now, Tucson's proposal does not include an owner-occupancy requirement.
And the absence of an owner-occupancy requirement coupled with a 2016 Arizona law stripping local governments of their ability to regulate Airbnbs and other short-term rentals, could make it easy for wealthy investors to undermine the intent of the ADU proposal.
“We know that’s an issue — that these could be rented on Airbnb, but I’d say that’s an issue across our housing stock in general,” Koren Manning, a planning administrator for the city, said. “Some of them definitely could be rented on Airbnb. We don’t think that would be the majority, but at this point we don’t have the tools to stop that.”
That concerns residents like Lee Marsh, president of the Rincon Heights Neighborhood Association.
The 30-something software developer owns a duplex near the UA campus with his partner, Theah Erickson. The couple is already renting out half of their duplex, and they’re interested in converting the carport in the back of their property into an accessory dwelling unit should the proposal pass.
“We’d be able to charge some rent — we wouldn’t have to charge too much — to get an adequate return on investment,” said Marsh, who estimated the ADU build-out would cost around $80,000. Although he likes the idea of adding another revenue stream — he and Erickson want to retire early — he doesn’t want to build one if the larger ADU program doesn’t actually increase affordable housing stock in Tucson.
“If the ultimate outcome of this is that these big property management companies come in and start putting an ADU on every single one of their properties and start charging even more for rent, then I don’t think it accomplished the goal we’re after here.”
That's why both Marsh and Erickson are in favor of an owner-occupancy requirement, even if it’s a temporary measure.
“I think that’s an adequate obstacle to prevent this from being a glut for profiteers who want to build a bunch of mini-dorms," said Marsh, who lives across the street from a student apartment complex and next door to a group of small houses rented out to college students. “I definitely think the ADU proposal can be part of the solution, but it will depend so much on how it’s implemented.”
“A counterbalance”
That’s where a partnership between the Pima County Community Land Trust and Cuadro, a drafting and design firm in Tucson, could come in.
“We need to diversify, and not just be putting low-income people in big public housing projects. We need low-income folks in established neighborhoods and to give them more housing options,” Sharayah Jimenez, principal designer for Cuadro, said.
She's been analyzing affordable housing in Tucson since the Great Recession, and thinks ADUs are a way to make that happen.
Jimenez recently received a three-year grant from the Vitalyst Health Foundation that will support ways “to ensure permanent affordability.” Some of those solutions, she said, could include incentives for homeowners to build ADUs or bring existing structures up to code in return for a commitment to offering affordable housing.
Another practice some municipalities have already implemented is allowing the community land trust to buy land from a homeowner. That arrangement lets the owner keep their home and gives them enough cash to build an ADU they might not otherwise be able to afford. It also allows the trust to preserve the price of the land in the interest of housing affordability for up to 99 years.
“There are a lot of people in the community right now who have the means to build a structure, but there are also way more people who don’t have the financing options to build something like this. This type of model makes it so people can afford to build their own structures," said Rachel Beaty, program coordinator for the Pima County Community Land Trust. “The added benefit is that the community land trust grows, too. So, we’d have more properties and homes locked into affordable rates.”
Jimenez and Beaty both recognize some of the challenges Arizona’s limits on regulating real estate investors will present, but to them, that’s what makes passing the ADU proposal all the more urgent.
“We want to get into neighborhoods and help try to stabilize them before a nonprofit like the community land trust can’t even afford to buy into them,” Jimenez said.
According to June's monthly report from the Tucson Association of Realtors, the supply of single-family homes for sale has decreased 46% since June 2020. The average sale price of one, however, is close to $400,000 — up 30% from last year.
If the ADU proposal passes in a market like that, “Without a program like ours to counterbalance the people who can do it on their own, you are going to see just what people are fearing: little casitas rented out through Airbnb,” Beaty said. “The people we’re trying to serve are trying to meet a need with their family.”
Deena Hitzke, the elder services worker who thinks ADUs are a sustainable housing option for aging Tucsonans, also happens to be a homeowner who could benefit from an ADU incentive program.
She has a dwelling behind her house, but her family's been using it for storage after finding out it would cost thousands of dollars to bring the one-bedroom apartment up to code.
“I feel horrible that I have the capacity to provide probably two or three people a place to live and I can’t afford to do that,” Hitzke said. “There’s so many barriers in the way that I’ve given up on it. But I feel guilty because I keep running across people who would be great tenants.”
