Accessory Dwelling Units: A Creative Answer to Home Ownership
- Golden United
- 46 minutes ago
- 2 min read
By Marshall Moore
Some of our favorite neighbors over the years have lived twenty feet from our back door.
Specifically, in the accessory dwelling unit (ADU) on our property.
When my wife and I were trying to buy our first home, the math wasn't working the way it does in the standard playbook. We had savings. We had income. We still couldn't make a conventional mortgage pencil out at the prices we were looking at without stretching ourselves thinner than I was comfortable with as a financial educator.
So we got creative. We bought a property with an ADU (an accessory dwelling unit, basically a small second living space on the same lot). The rent from the ADU offsets a meaningful chunk of our mortgage every month. That changed everything about whether we could actually afford to live where we wanted to live.
The conventional path to homeownership doesn't pencil out for a lot of people right now. And often, that just means the path looks different than it did for your parents.
ADUs are one creative answer. There are others. House hacking, multi-generational living, co-buying with siblings or close friends, tiny home configurations, condo conversions. None of these are magic. They all require more thought and more work than the standard "buy a single-family home, live in it alone, pay the mortgage" model.
In my financial wellness work, I see how the standard model has become a ceiling for a lot of people who actually have the resources to own. They just don't have the resources to own the way the default script tells them to.
And here's the part I didn't expect.
The community has become what I love most about the whole setup. We've had engineers to teachers to trail builders live in our ADU. Each of them brought something to our little corner of the neighborhood. There's a different texture to a property where you know the person next door because they're actually next door. Sharing a driveway. Waving across the yard.
Being a landlord this way is real work, I won't pretend otherwise. There are boundaries I've had to set to make it sustainable. There are conversations I've had to have that weren't fun. There's maintenance and turnover and paperwork.
But there's also a kind of connection I didn't get from previous living situations. My tenants tend to stay a while because we treat them like neighbors. And we get the benefit of being closer to the people we share a lot line with than most homeowners ever are with theirs.
One of my tenants was a young guy who saw our hobbies and thought mountain biking looked so fun he picked it up, and we’d go on rides together!
Many ambitious, successful young people are trying to figure out homeownership in the current market and the math isn’t working for them. The more we can support creative solutions through policy, the more we bolster the strength of our whole community.