.Oakland Rewrites Planning Rules in Hopes of Kickstarting Backyard Cottage Boom

The Oakland City Council this week gave final approval on new legislation that is intended to spur the construction of secondary housing units, also known as backyard cottages, throughout the city. The move is intended to help ease the affordable housing crisis by providing new, lower-cost rental housing stock and to benefit the environment by housing more residents near transit. Secondary housing units most often take the form of unattached, small cottages located on the same lot as a single family home.

The new rules ease height, floor space, and set back limits, and loosen parking requirements that are thought to have been a disincentive to homeowners who previously wanted to build a new backyard cottage. The new rules also allow homeowners to convert existing structures in their yards into housing.

The policy change was supported by Mayor Libby Schaaf and the entire city council and passed it unanimously.

But critics say the city council’s new rules contains poison pills that will effectively block the construction backyard units in a  important amendments that could undermine the goal of addressing the affordable housing crisis through a boom in backyard cottages.


[jump] A pro-housing group called Urbanists for a Livable Temescal Rockridge Area (ULTRA) wrote the city council in January pleading with the councul to withdraw amendments to the new rules that had been pushed by other Rockridge and Temescal groups. ULTRA argued that the amendments would effectively block the construction new secondary units. The council, however, ultimately declined to remove the amendments. One of the amendments requires that property owners

would reduce the geographic areas in Rockridge where the new rules apply. According to ULTRA’s letter, Rockridge residents lobbied the city council reduce the area along Telegraph Avenue where parking requirements would be relaxed to accommodate new backyard cottages. The council shrank the area from one-half of a mile along Telegraph Avenue to just one-quarter of a mile, but left every other transit corridor in the city at one-half mile. And Rockridge residents also lobbied to amend the rules so that residents of new backyard cottages built in neighborhoods with existing residential parking permit requirements cannot obtain a parking permit, unless they use one that is issued for the existing primary residence – not their cottage. Many of the streets in the Rockridge neighborhood require a residential parking permit.

“[T]he practical effect that very little of this housing will be built in Rockridge,” wrote ULTRA. “What we have here is yet another example of a privileged community within our city using the city code to further entrench their privilege.”

Another feature of the new rules criticized by affordable housing advocates was the refusal by the city council to bar newly built backyard cottages from being rented out as short-term hotel accommodations through web sites like Airbnb. Berkeley, by contrast, chose to ban rental of newly built backyard cottages as short-term hotel accommodations when it eased zoning rules last year in a similar effort to spur construction of new affordable housing.

“This had turned into the Airbnb enabling legislation,” Kevin Ray, an Oakland resident who lives near Lake Merritt, said during public comment at the city council meeting on Tuesday night. “Take the time to address the issue of short-term rentals before opening the gates to the economic forces of the latest tech bubble.”

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