Home not alone.

Apartments carved out of homes are one smart way to beat the low-cost housing crunch. So how come most states wont legalize them?

In a city near you, tens of thousands of otherwise upstanding citizens are engaged in criminal activity. The outlaws are everywhere: 40,000 families in Los Angeles, one of every three homeowners in Vancouver, 100,000 people in Ontario. And this time the criminals aren't nannies. They're grannies. Their crime has nothing to do with Social Security taxes; it's their apartments.

They are living in rooms, accessory apartments-rooms that have been added to, or carved out of a single-family home. Or perhaps they're living in a backyard cottage called "granny flats." (We know you're in there, pops, so come out with your hands up.)

In the vast majority of cities and counties in the United States, these add-ons run afoul of zoning ordinances, but thousands of cash-strapped home-owners are building them anyway. They know that neighbors are usually incensed by the idea, that civic associations often hate them too, and they know they are breaking the law. But they'll also tell you that these apartments are one swift and sensible way to ease the affordable housing crunch. As baby-boomers start retiring and the need for innovative housing solutions become more urgent, the logic of accessory apartments might just remain somehow irresistible.

These units can guarantee first-time home buyers rental income that will help them pay their bills. (In some parts of Canada, accessory units are called "mortgage helpers.") Empty nesters coping with college costs or other expenditures can trade what they have in excess--living space--for what they lack: money. Accessory units can also help divorced men and women saddled with a home they couldn't afford with one income. On the flip side, couples who aren't ready to own a home can rent an accessory unit in a neighborhood they couldn't otherwise afford.

Accessory apartments are also a boon to the elderly. A 1989 survey by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) found that seniors are virtually unanimous in one desire: 86 percent never want to move from their present home. Aging in place, however, is expensive. Those seniors who own theft homes can rent to younger occupants who can provide them with money or exchange assistance around the house for rent. Conversely, forty-something couples can move their parents in, saving the sizable cost of another house or the huge expense of a nursing home when it is not medically necessary.

"It's affordable housing that requires no subsidy, with below-market rates, and integrated into the neighborhood," says Patrick Hare, a Washington-based planner and author of Accessory Apartments: The State of the Art. In spite of the hostile reception that usually greets proposals to allow accessory units, renting out part of a house, according to Hare, is hardly a revolutionary idea: "You're not talking about a social experiment."

Try telling that to civic associations, the best-organized interest groups on matters of local housing, and consistently the most ardent opposition to accessory apartments. The problem generally is that these folks have a hard time distinguishing between a stable, young, home-owning couple looking to bring in some rental money and a band of crazed dealers selling crack.

Home grown

"The great attraction is how flexible they are," says Peter Calthorpe, a planner and architect who is building accessory apartments in the Laguna West development outside Sacramento. He has helped convince local jurisdictions to allow the units, after the government realized they are less disruptive than high-density apartment buildings. "It creates great diverse neighborhoods, and it adds enough density to support transit systems and local shops. If you work with small-lot, single-family homes, it avoids the condo landscape we seem to have fallen into. It tightens the feeling of neighborhood."

The neighborhood feel is precisely what attracted Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the innovative architects who have been building neo-traditional communities Georgetown-like row houses within walking distance of a town center--with accessory apartments. "It's a great source of affordable housing without grouping together lower-income housing in a single location," says Mike Watkins, town architect of a Duany/Plater-Zyberk community in Gaithersburg, Maryland. "There's less chance the tenant will pile up the garbage or play the radio loud when the landlord is living fight there. It allows different types of people to live in the neighborhood--a single person, a young couple-people who wouldn't ordinarily be buying a five-bedroom house."

Which, of course, is precisely what scares the civic association crowd. To them, additional units are antithetical to the idea of suburban, detached housing, because they introduce comparative transients to the neighborhoods. Breaking up the homogeneity of the suburbs is a frightening prospect for suburbanites, and not just for xenophobic "there-goes-the-neighborhood" reasons; the mix of income levels and races brings the possibility of a decline in the value of houses in the neighborhood.

Even advocates like Patrick Hare understand this wariness. Changing zoning laws, he says, is "like the doctor saying, 'This won't hurt a bit'--it's not the doctor getting the shot. Most housing advocates don't understand this. People are not rational about shots or surgery."

But there is no evidence that granny flats reduce property values or cause neighborhoods to deteriorate. And there are signs indicating that home prices may even rise to reflect the opportunity for rental income. Certainly they are far less disruptive to a neighborhood's character than boarding houses, which are legal in many areas where accessory flats are not. Seattle, for instance, allows up to eight people to live under one roof, but inexplicably does not allow accessories.

So if accessory flats are such a good idea, why aren't there more of them? First, most people don't know they exist. There is no big money behind them. There is no American Association of Accessory Apartments to lobby for them, and no political pressure to demand them. There is no lobbying on the grass-roots level of zoning boards. The prime exception is the AARP, which has advocate volunteers pushing the idea in 32 states.

You wouldn't guess it from the reaction they usually get, but these advocates are not trying to systematically break up neighborhood enclaves. They just want to level the playing field by removing zoning barriers that favor neighborhood zealots over the homeowners whose well-being can depend on renting out an accessory unit.

But rationality doesn't always sell, and in the absence of a proven and widely publicized model program, few policymakers will be willing to make the leap. "The difficulty is that there are no outstanding models in this country," says Leo Baldwin, a former AARP executive who is a consultant on senior housing. "You can point to Australia, England, France, and Sweden, but it's not here, so people think there's something wrong with it."

There have been attempts to spread the word in the U.S., but most have suffered from a lack of follow-through. A few years ago, Fannie Mae started offering special deals for accessory apartments, but there was little effort to advertise them to bankers or homeowners. In 1991, Montgomery County--which has become home to 425 accessory apartments for renters and 210 for relatives and hired help in the nine years since they were legalized--printed a snazzy booklet to encourage others to join in. But before it could be mailed out, a budget crunch hit; county officials feared that if they solicited more homeowners to build second units, they would never be able to pay for the staff to approve and inspect them.

California had a sensible idea: It made accessory units a statewide, not a local, mandate by passing a law in 1981-82. But it left a gaping loophole that allowed municipalities to restrict the circumstances under which they can be built. As a result, the approval process for a zoning variance can be harrowing. Municipalities may mandate standards so stringent--including extensive regulations that require expensive remodeling or extra parking spaces--that the cost is boosted far out of reach of most homeowners. One locality charges $3,500 simply to apply for a permit, and the fee is non-refundable even if the permit is never granted. The joke now is that California has more laws about accessory apartments than it has accessory apartments.

The good news is that the Department of Housing and Urban Development will soon begin operating two federal demonstration programs on accessory flats. One project offers counties and cities seed money to encourage homeowners to build the units. The other encourages non-profit organizations like charities and advocacy groups to own and operate accessory units across a region. The latter program might be particularly helpful if local groups--which are plugged into grass-roots social-service networks for seniors--possess enough goodwill in the community to overcome Not-In-My-Backyard sentiments.

Policymakers here can look to Canada for inspiration. Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal have all committed themselves to extensive accessory apartment policies. Like California, Ontario found that local zoning boards blocked construction, so the Ministry of Housing raised the ante and began stumping for a wide-ranging law which, if passed, will take effect this fall. Vancouver figured out a way to bypass the zoning boards; they put the issue to a referendum. In each neighborhood, every owner and tenant cast ballots on whether they wanted to see accessory apartments legalized. In the end, 47 percent of the neighborhoods decided they did.

If zoning boards and civic groups continue to stand in the way in this country, the inexorable pressures of demographics may soon mow them down. Americans over 65 now account for 13 percent of the U.S. population--they'll be 20 percent within four decades. And these seniors will live longer, which means they're more likely to have disabilities that make homes designed for younger people harder for them to navigate. Meanwhile, the price of buying a home gets more prohibitive by the year. Median prices have increased by 53 percent in 10 years, and the National Association of Realtors projects an additional 11 percent increase by 1995.

Deborah Lind, an interior designer in Woodland Hills, California, points out that many folks simply won't be able to afford not to build accessory units: "People are going to do what they need to do regardless of what the law says." If the past is any indication, chances are that measures to allow this housing solution won't get attention until we're out of other options. By then the choice will be either to legalize, even to encourage, accessory units, or to prepare to pack the jails with grannies.