May 2019 Update

A number of simultaneous developments are converging to make the case for accessory dwelling units (ADUs) as a serious alternative for senior housing in the near future.

A study published recently by the widely respected journal Health Affairs disclosed that more than half of seniors in the “middle income” range will be unable to afford private pay senior housing by the year 2030. The annual cost of assisted living plus medical expenses, set at around $62,000 currently, would be beyond the reach of any but the most well-off seniors.

In fact, as I’ve noted before in this blog, annual costs of supportive housing, including independent-oriented developments, already go well beyond the resources of average middle-income Americans who don’t have high-priced homes to sell. The urgency of this was endorsed recently by the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing and Care (NIC), just starting to educate its real estate and financial investment members on middle-income housing needs.

Indeed, the days of “big box” senior housing are just about over, said senior care trailblazer Dr. Bill Thomas at the recent BUILD conference sponsored by Senior Housing News. He highlighted the Minka ADU experiment he launched as an answer to this a few months ago in Pennsylvania (see, Bill Thomas’s Small House Approach to Dementia, below).

Pertaining specifically ADU legislation, the Seattle, Washington city council opened the door to more permissive ADU-related coding to allow easier development on existing properties that have been heretofore restricted to single family homes. And the online newsletter Accessory Dwellings (see Resources) reported on a flurry of activity creating new financing tools to expedite ADU construction. Financial markets adopting these will be a major factor in jumpstarting the ADU trend.

Finally, in one of the quirkier new developments, a product called U-Build would enable would-be ADU creators to assemble a modular timber structure out of a flat-pack kit of parts, with no construction experience needed. The creator, called Studio Bark, claims “it reduces the scale and complexity of conventional offsite techniques, enabling the building shell to be assembled by people with limited skills and experience using only simple hand tools.”

The build-your-own ADU—what a moneysaving concept.