RE: City Officials Turn To Tiny Homes To Help With Affordable Housing Crisis
You are conflating tiny homes with mother-in-law apartments. A tiny home is a stand-alone unit that is not part of a larger dwelling.
A mother-in-law apartment is an extension to a larger home. Typically it would be a basement or second story that is partitioned internally from the home, has a separate entrance, and can be rented out as an individual unit.
I live in Salt Lake City. The arguments about changing neighborhood characteristics or affordable housing are a sideshow to distract from the real issues. In the neighborhoods under discussion, there is already an extreme shortage of parking. Public transit to those areas is very limited. Allowing mother-in-law apartments increases the urban density and puts strain on neighborhoods that can ill afford it.
Since most dwellings are not suitable for adding mother-in-law apartments (which require a separate kitchen), they make virtually no impact on the affordable housing situation. The solution to affordable housing would be to require every approved multi-housing development to have some percentage of units be affordable housing.
Currently this is only a requirement in areas that are already lower income. Making this a requirement in all areas (especially the ritzy upper east side) would have a much larger impact on the affordable housing issues and balance out some of the demographic and opportunity disparities in the city.
the mother in law ADU can be attached or detached and both are considered a "tiny home" residence
Okay, I reread the source articles, and the confusion between tiny homes and mother-in-law apartments is not yours but the news sources. The regulation being discussed covers both mother-in-law units and tiny homes built on the same property as an existing home. It does not cover tiny home neighborhoods or new developments.
News sources are pulling in the tiny home arguments and highlighting those because they make a more interesting story than mother-in-law apartments.
mother in law ADU can be attached or detached so that is why they might also be referred to as a tiny home which they technically are 👍😂
A detached ADU would be a tiny home, an attached would not. Unless your definition of tiny home is based on square footage only, in the which case any studio apartment below a certain size would also be a 'tiny home'.