Alameda County is building a pilot program meant to let older homeowners stay in their neighborhoods by moving into a new backyard cottage and selling the main house to pay for it, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Sunday.
The senior ADU pilot is part of the county Housing and Community Development Department's Scalable Housing Infill Funding Toolkit, known as SHIFT. Outreach to find homeowners who want to take part is expected to start in early 2027, according to the Chronicle.
How it is supposed to work
As the Chronicle described it, a senior who owns a single-family home would build an accessory dwelling unit on the lot and move into it. The owner would use Proposition 19 to carry the home's low property tax basis to the new unit, split the lot under the state's SB 9 lot-split law, and sell the original house.
The sale would pay off the construction loan and leave the owner with some cash in reserve.
County Housing Director Michelle Starratt told the paper the idea grew out of an ADU workbook the department was preparing several years ago, when many interested homeowners turned out to be seniors with valuable houses but limited income who could not qualify for ordinary construction loans.
Renting out a backyard unit did not suit many of them, she said, because of the training needed and the work of managing tenants.
Starratt's goal is 10 units in the first phase and 50 finished within the two years after that, she told the paper.
Questions raised
Karen Chapple, a UC Berkeley professor emerita of city and regional planning who now directs the School of Cities at the University of Toronto, told the Chronicle she was glad to see a program aimed at fixed-income seniors.
