Santa Rosa still struggling with limits on granny unit rentals

Santa Rosa wants to make it easier to build granny units to boost its stock of affordable housing, but it’s still not sure it wants them to be rented out to tourists.

The city hopes relaxing the parking and setback rules for such units can boost its stock of full-time housing.

To address the tourist issue, its streamlining effort also calls for preventing such units from being rented out for less than 30 days. That will effectively prevent them from being used ?as vacation rentals through increasingly popular services like Airbnb or VRBO.

The idea, however, is bumping up against property owners’ desire to generate rental income from their properties, which they argue could help finance the very construction of units the city seeks.

The city’s Planning Commission was downright stumped on the subject last week.

Three planning commissioners supported restrictions on short-term rentals, citing the need for long-term housing, and three suggested the restrictions were either unnecessary or misplaced. There are normally seven commissioners, but one seat is vacant.

“I just fundamentally think that somebody should be able to rent ?out their accessory dwelling unit, should they want,” Commissioner Peter Rumble said. “I mean, it’s their property.”

The commission fine-tuned some of the provisions for exemptions from parking rules, as well as the required setbacks from property lines.

But the short-term rental restrictions generated the most debate among commissioners, leaving the board deadlocked.

Rumble said if the city wants to regulate vacation rentals, as other communities have, then it should do that separately instead of tacking it onto the issue of streamlining granny units. Chairwoman Patti Cisco agreed.

“I guess I see it as trying to solve a problem that doesn’t even exist yet,” she said.

Others, however, saw the streamlining effort as directly related to the affordable housing crisis, and supported the prohibition on vacation rentals.

“I don’t think the goal of the legislation is to provide for a new type of investment for people who own homes,” Commissioner Casey Edmonson said. “It’s to create affordable housing for people to live in.”

The deadlock means the issue will have to be decided by the City Council.

The city still does yet not have a plan for dealing with 2,000 to 3,000 unpermitted units in the city. ?Existing granny units could be grandfathered as vacation rentals if they could demonstrate they were currently legitimate businesses paying their taxes.

Several residents noted that reducing the fees to build such units, which can run into tens of thousands of dollars, is the best way to encourage people to build.

The city is planning to study that issue closely, but does not yet have a proposal.

One idea is to reduce fees for smaller units. Other proposed changes, prompted in part by a new state law, include increasing the size limits on granny units from 700 square feet to 1,200 square feet, eliminating the requirement that an owner live in either the unit or the main house, waiving the need for a parking space if the unit is within half a mile of a transit station and allowing units to have nontraditional foundations, such as trailers.

A date for the City Council to consider the revision has not been set.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 707-521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @srcitybeat.