Housing shortage, soaring costs a major concern for voters this election year, polls show – PBS NewsHour

Alex Horowitz:

That California duplex law hasn’t worked yet, and it often takes more than one try to get a state law right.

California enabled duplexes. They’re technically allowed, but they left jurisdictions lots of ways to block them. And, again, we’re talking about at this point individual homeowners looking at duplexes. And so it doesn’t add enough to the housing supply only to allow duplexes. That’s not a viable solution, but really it’s local regulatory barriers to those duplexes that haven’t been fixed in the state law.

When California first legalized accessory dwelling units — so that’s a basement apartment, a backyard apartment, a garage conversion — they didn’t get many. And it took until 2017, after they started trying in the ’80s, until they started getting serious building of accessory dwelling units.

Now more than 100,000 of those have come online in California, but they needed a very strong state law in order to produce them.