Chattanooga made it legal to build backyard cottages and garage apartments during Mayor Tim Kelly's first term. Now City Hall is getting outside help to actually get them built.
Kelly announced Friday, Oct. 16, that Chattanooga is among the first local governments chosen for a new Bloomberg Philanthropies housing initiative, Chattanoogan.com reported. Up to 30 governments nationwide will receive money and expertise to increase housing supply.
Chattanooga's piece of the effort will focus on accessory dwelling units, or ADUs. These are the small homes, converted garages and basement apartments that share a lot with a main house.
What the city gets
According to the announcement, Chattanooga will receive between $450,000 and $750,000. The money is meant for three things:
- Testing technology to clear approvals faster
- Hiring architects to draft permit-ready plans
- Hiring staff for a "strike team"
The city will also get hands-on help putting the changes in place from Accelerator for America and other specialists, including Public Digital. Chattanooga officials will be able to compare notes with peers in other cities in the program.
The city laid out what it expects to show for it. "Within two years, Chattanooga will produce results," officials said, "cutting approval timelines in half, doubling pipelines of Accessory Dwelling Units, and posting gains on citywide supply."
Kelly was blunt about why the city applied. "We were excited to get the legislation passed to allow Chattanoogans to build Accessory Dwelling Units during my first term, but I have been disappointed by the relatively small number of units added to our housing stock thus far," he said. He said the Bloomberg effort would help the city learn from reforms in Austin and turn "a right on paper into more homes on the ground."
Borrowing from three cities
The initiative is built around ideas from three cities, according to the announcement.
San Diego sped up permitting by going digital after Mayor Todd Gloria set a 30-day limit on approvals. Homes cleared for construction jumped 82% in one year, and nearly 8,800 were permitted the following year.
Austin allowed up to three homes on most single-family lots, including backyard units, and cut the minimum lot size from 5,750 to 1,800 square feet. The announcement says roughly 120,000 homes have gone up there since 2015.
Atlanta pulled every agency with a hand in housing into one unit to unstick stalled projects. The announcement says that effort put more than 2,000 affordable units back in motion, with upward of 14,000 built or underway toward a 20,000-home goal.
The announcement also points to the federal ROAD to Housing Act, which it says creates incentives for these same kinds of reforms: faster permitting, pre-approved housing plans and putting public land to use.
"City halls are taking local action to increase the housing supply and ease the shortage that is driving up rents and leaving the dream of home ownership out of reach," Michael R. Bloomberg said in the release.
The program will run through the Bloomberg Cities Idea Exchange. According to the release, more than 1,000 city halls in 95 countries take part in that network, with nearly 200 replications of local programs complete or underway.
Why it matters for Contractors
ADUs are small jobs, but there can be a lot of them, and they suit residential remodelers, small builders and specialty trades. Kelly's own words show the problem: the right to build has been on the books, but few units have been built.
The two pieces of this grant that matter most to builders are permit-ready plans and faster approvals. Pre-drawn plans that the city has already reviewed can cut design costs and weeks of back-and-forth for a homeowner, which makes it easier for a contractor to close a sale. Cutting approval times in half, if the city gets there, takes a big chunk of uncertainty out of a small job's schedule.
Contractors who build or want to build ADUs should watch for the city's permit-ready plan sets and any new online permitting tools as they roll out. Those who know the current process well may also want to share what slows them down, because the city's strike team will be looking for exactly that.
The national numbers in the announcement explain why cities are trying. Starter homes under 1,400 square feet have fallen from more than a third of new single-family building in the 1970s to about one in ten today.