I live in one of these in LA. Half the people I know do the same.
bought your house back in 2000? Build a bungalow in your back yard and get someone else to pay your mortgage.
Or, you know, pay $1000/sf for a unibomber shack. For another million dollars you can roll up two more and build your dream home in a neighborhood where the grocery store is named after the local street gang.
Sounds like LA is five years behind Portland zoning wise. There are some strange constitutionally based tax policies that get in the way of some peoples desires to build ADU's here but there is a fair sized industry devoted to them here. Tiny Houses are the new fad, trying to solve the housing crises 150 sq ft at a time.
I may be misremembering, but I thought there was some initiative in Portland where you could volunteer to have the city build a tiny house on your property and then house some homeless people for a set period of time, at the end of which you become the owner of the tiny house (and it is vacated). I think there were something like 12 available spots, and a few thousand applicants. People really dig their teeny tiny dwellings out here, for whatever reason.
I'm not sure if that program ever got off the ground. We passed a great big housing bond last year to boost affordable housing and have for the most part city council has been unable to agree on how most of it should be spent. I think that consensus is that ADU and tiny houses are just a small part of the solution to the lack of affordable options. Zoning and tax issues are problems that the city can't seem to come to terms with. There are height restriction in various areas of town. Downtown you can build a 40 story building but only if you've pre-leased or sold a certain percentage of the building before you build. The 40 story limit is really only for a small area of downtown. There is a lot of talk right now about allowing taller buildings downtown. It will be a battle between rich people who don't want their view of the mountain obstructed and rich people who own property or development interest. A bigger section of town has a thirty story limit and the limit decreases as you get out into the neighborhoods where there is a functional limit of five stories. If you build more than five stories you have to build parking. Most builders don't seem to want to build parking so there are a lot of five story condos. A city block sized condo project with no parking fucks over traditional neighborhoods. All the condos are retail on the ground floor and apartments up above. A normal neighborhood has enough parking for the people who lived there already and when you add a shit ton of retail and residential parking on to the cozy city streets it's a cramped traffic clogged mess. There are neighborhoods that fight tooth and nail to keep ADU's and tiny houses out. They go after historic designations and what not to keep anything new or different from being built. Tiny houses are little semi-permanent houses on wheels. because they are on wheels they get around a lot of the zoning bullshit. Some neighborhoods hate the idea others have embraced them. The state constitution caps property tax increases to 4.5%. We bought our house four years ago for $270k, it's now worth about $400k. Because property taxes have limited increases we aren't paying taxes like this is a $400k house. If you significantly renovate your house your property taxes get reset to the market value. Building an ADU resets your taxes to the market rate and now you also need to pay taxes on the ADU. This can be a few thousand extra a year. Add that few thousands to the loan that you took out to build the ADU and you are loosing money for having built an ADU. There is talk of only taxing the ADU at a reset rate to encourage infill. We had a terrible fucking mayor who couldn't do a single thing right who left office about a year ago. The new guy might be a little bit better, he at least talks a better game but only time will tell if he can figure out how to apply the extra $250 million in housing funds we've given him in a useful way. I'm not optimistic. I don't know how much local government you've soaked up in the time you are here. I added context for anyone else that might read this post. I had high hopes for Chloe but I think she's been mired in silly scandles and hasn't really gotten anywhere with housing. There city council is going to see some change this cycle and I hope it's for the better.