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| Brandon Baunach is an architect with 17 years of experience in designing multi-family projects. |
This post appears courtesy of Brandon Baunach,
an architect with 17 years of experience
Out of pure necessity, I've stumbled into a
lifestyle that is not only supportive and rewarding for my entire family, but
also is incredibly affordable. This might sound impossible living in the
San Francisco Bay Area, but I've discovered a new housing typology that
can make this happen.
In 2007, my wife and I, living in San
Francisco at the time, had our first son. Although we owned our home and
had a very reasonable mortgage, we couldn't see ourselves living in a 600-square-foot
one-bedroom condo for much longer. We also discovered that we both needed
to work to continue supporting our family. We quickly started childcare
with our son, and found that the two thousand dollars per month that we
spent was absolutely debilitating. We could not sustain our San Francisco
lifestyle any longer and sought alternative solutions. That’s when we
came to the very strategic decision to buy a house with my mother, and she
would help with the childcare.
As it turns out, we were not alone in this
decision. In fact, the National Association of Realtors reported
that 14% of all homes sold in 2013 were to households
of two or more adult generations. This is a massive and enduring demographic
shift.
As we set out to buy a home together, we made
many assumptions on how we wanted to live and decided to buy either a duplex or
a home with an accessory dwelling unit, or “granny flat” as it’s often
referred.
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| Stock Image |
We initially looked to buy a home in San Francisco. After all, my
wife and I had spent the past fifteen years in our Mission District
neighborhood, and had no intention of leaving. My mother loved the
neighborhood, as well, because it was very walkable which she loved. We also
had a fairly good budget based on our collective multigenerational buying
power.
Problems
Although our budget was good, when we started
looking we saw reoccurring problems that went well beyond budget issues. Nearly
every duplex we saw would have required us to make a heartbreaking eviction for
us to be able to occupy the home. In one instance, we went to an open house
where there was an older tenant with an oxygen tank waiting in a bedroom for
realtors and their clients to leave.
We also saw many homes with illegal granny flats
built into the ground floors. Until very recently all granny flats were illegal
in San Francisco. We didn't mind buying a home with an illegal granny flat, but
we definitely felt that because of San Francisco’s previous ban, the quality of
construction did not give my mother much confidence if she were to be an equal
partner in this home.
Our defiance to evict long term tenants from
their homes or accept badly constructed accessory units left us with little choice
of inventory. After two years of searching, we eventually gave up and decided
to move to Berkeley, CA, where we found cute duplexes and multigenerational
neighbors in greater supply.
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| This multigenerational home, designed by Deltec, has a 2,000 sq ft living space with a 500 sq ft "granny flat." |
Solutions
Our experience made us wonder how any family
with multiple generations could survive in San Francisco or any dense urban
area. This led me into studying how we live as a family and how developers,
city planners, and financiers could respond with novel solutions for families of
multiple generations.
In future posts, I’ll explore different
designs developers could implement that would be attractive to
multigenerational buyers, I’ll suggest planning strategies that would loosen
the grip planning codes have on multigenerational housing innovation, and I
will suggest mechanisms for financing multigenerational projects from an
individual buyer level and a development financing level.
Brandon
Baunach is an architect at BAR Architects in
San Francisco, CA. He lives in Berkeley, CA, with his wife, mother, and two
sons.
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