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Can More Accessory Dwelling Units Fix LA's Housing Shortage?
Amrita Khalid
Amrita Khalid is a tech journalist based in Los Angeles, and has written for Quartz, The Daily Dot, Engadget, Inc. Magazine and number of other publications. She got her start in Washington, D.C., covering Congress for CQ-Roll Call. You can send tips or pitches to amrita@dot.la or reach out to her on Twitter at @askhalid.
Can more accessory dwelling units help a city with a chronic housing shortage?
A wave of new ADU startups that are based in L.A. or serving the region are betting on it. ADU companies like Otto (formerly known as Homestead), which focus on converting pre-existing structures (such as a garage) into housing, serve as a one-stop shop that will help homeowners with financing, design, permitting and labor. Other companies like Azure Printed Homes, Cover, United Dwelling and Villa Homes offer factory-built ADUs that are constructed off-site — also known as “prefab” ADUs. Others still, such as Cottage (based in San Francisco) partner with local contractors and help homeowners design, build and attain permits for their own custom ADUs.
ADUs (also known as granny flats, in-law apartments or backyard homes) describe a category of small, in most cases self-contained homes that can be built beside the original property. A prospect that’s currently trending in Los Angeles, where a chronic housing shortage and sky-high rents coupled with a 2017 state law forcing cities to relax their ADU regulations.
But as novice ADU builders soon discovered, constructing a small house isn’t a small task.
“I wouldn’t say [..building an ADU] is exactly easy, almost anywhere,” said Celeste Goyer, the policy director of Casita Coalition, an L.A.-based organization focused on expanding the use of ADUs for affordable housing throughout the state. “You can’t just go home and pick up a hammer, and have your cousin help you build your ADU. And so expectation management for everyone involved is important.”
The process of getting approved for an ADU normally takes months.
“Generally, many people struggle with the length and complexity of the permitting process and feel like their jurisdictions impose unnecessary red tape in the permitting process,” said Alex Czarnecki, founder and CEO of the custom ADU firm Cottage.
But a number of additional laws may make ADU construction easier in California. Last year Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 9 into law, which allows California homeowners to build a second house on a single-family zoned lot. Another law known as AB 221 requires local authorities to act on ADU permit applications within 60 days otherwise it’s automatically approved.
“It’s common for certain municipalities to take longer than that to respond to an application or provide incomplete sets of comments,” said Czarnecki. “This drags out timelines for permitting and ultimately impacts the pace at which we can add housing.”
Despite the new laws, few homeowners, Czarnecki said, should attempt to build an ADU by themselves.
“The fact remains that the average homeowner is not a land developer and is not trained or prepared to oversee and manage the design and construction of a new unit on their lot,” added Czarnecki.
To that end, the heads of some ADU companies still believe more has to be done to improve financing the expensive building projects — as well as making them more affordable to low-income and moderate-income individuals. A typical prefab ADU ranges anywhere from $140,000 to $300,000. Custom ADUs are even more expensive. Converting a garage is cheaper, but in L.A., the process can easily approach six figures. None of which factors in the extra costs of permits, which ADU firm Modal estimates costs anywhere between $4,000 to $8,000 in Los Angeles.
There are few mainstream financing options for ADUs available, and renovation loans or cash-out refinancing often don’t cover the entire cost of the project. In a 2021 survey of homeowners by UC Berkeley, nearly 62% said they relied on cash savings or money from a friend or relative to pay for their ADU.
ADU advocates often tout it as an “affordable housing” solution — assuming that property owners will rent them out as an extra source of income. But with the median price of a single-family dwelling in L.A. County almost nearing $1 million, building an ADU is likely an opportunity reserved for more high-income individuals.
“Financing is really the only thing I think of that the city of L.A. and everywhere else really needs to work on. I think L.A. has been doing great with ADU use, and hopefully it will get better,” said Ross Maguire, CEO of Azure Printed Homes.
Samuel Schnieder, the CEO of Otto, said that ADU financing is a major barrier to expansion. Adding that, “It’s often a Catch-22 that the people who are the best equipped or the most enthusiastic about getting an ADU are the ones who can’t necessarily afford it.”
The California Housing Finance Agency this year began offering up to $40,000 in grants for such individuals, but it only covers new ADU “pre-construction” costs, which include everything from impact fees to permits to site prep. In Los Angeles, homeowners with an income below $180,000 qualify for such grants.
A total of 840 people in California have received grants since September — with all but a fraction receiving the full amount, a CHFA spokesperson confirmed to dot.LA.
First launched in 2019, Azure Printed Homes, based out of Culver City, relies on robotic printers to speed up the construction process. The company said it can 3D-print the walls of a 120-square foot unit in less than a day.
Maguire told dot.LA that Azure — which opened up reservations earlier this year — has received pre-orders for 167 units from 119 customers, totaling over $19 million in pre-orders.
But it’s unlikely you’ll see most of these units advertised as new rentals on Craigslist. Maguire says that most of Azure’s customer base desire an ADU to have more space for themselves or to house relatives, rather than to rent out as an additional source of income.
As such, some homeowners opt for factory-built ADUs instead of a more customized option, opting to shorten the timeline for inspections.
“Because our units are pre-approved with the State of California, there’s not a building and safety check that needs to happen on a local level with the city or county of L.A.,” Maguire told dot.LA..
However, even pre-fab ADUs have to be inspected on-site by the local planning authority. “(...the L.A.) Planning Department needs to look at how those modules interact with a specific site themselves, a process that can't be pre-approved as they are site specific,” confirmed a spokesperson for Azure.
In an effort to make the ADU permitting process faster, last year, the city of Los Angeles launched a set of “Standard Plans” that were pre-approved by LADBS. But such plans aren’t cheap — and won’t exempt homeowners from inspections.
“It should be noted that regardless of what pre-approved plan you choose, pre-approved plans still must go through the normal site-specific checks in order for the project to receive a permit,” said Czarnecki.
And if homeowners have the misfortune of building a Standard Plan ADU on an oddly-shaped lot or somewhere with atypical characteristics, they may have to go back to square one. In other words, their ADU will no longer be considered “pre-approved” and will have to go through the longer permitting process.
“Although the Standard Plans are a good jumping off point for creating a product that anyone can use -- at the end of the day, they’re mostly more expensive plans from what I’ve seen,” said Otto’s Schneider.
Casita Coalition and groups like California YIMBY are calling for better financing options for ADUs, particularly those that benefit individual cash-poor homeowners. At present, new ADUs are predominantly built in wealthier, whiter areas. In order for ADUs to actually help bridge the racial-wealth gap, policy experts say they have to actually be a viable option for the less affluent.
“I would be very pleased if more financing options [..for ADUs] developed from credit unions and community financial institutions to provide ADU-tailored loans to help lower income and moderate income home owners build ADUs,” Goyer told dot.LA.
Until then, the dream of Angelenos generating income from their backyards may remain just that.
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Amrita Khalid
Amrita Khalid is a tech journalist based in Los Angeles, and has written for Quartz, The Daily Dot, Engadget, Inc. Magazine and number of other publications. She got her start in Washington, D.C., covering Congress for CQ-Roll Call. You can send tips or pitches to amrita@dot.la or reach out to her on Twitter at @askhalid.
https://twitter.com/askhalid
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The Learning Perv: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Lensa’s NSFW AI
01:09 PM | December 09, 2022
Drew Grant
It took me 48 hours to realize Lensa might have a problem.
“Is that my left arm or my boob?” I asked my boyfriend, which is not what I’d consider a GREAT question to have to ask when using photo editing software.
“Huh,” my boyfriend said. “Well, it has a nipple.”
Well then.
I had already spent an embarrassing amount of money downloading nearly 1,000 high-definition images of myself generated by AI through an app called Lensa as part of its new “Magical Avatar” feature. There are many reasons to cock an eyebrow at the results, some of which have been covered extensively in the last few days in a mounting moral panic as Lensa has shot itself to the #1 slot in the app store.
The way it works is users upload 10-20 photos of themselves from their camera roll. There are a few suggestions for best results: the pictures should show different angles, different outfits, different expressions. They shouldn’t all be from the same day. (“No photoshoots.”) Only one person in the frame, so the system doesn’t confuse you for someone else.
Lensa runs on Stable Diffusion, a deep-learning mathematical method that can generate images based on text or picture prompts, in this case taking your selfies and ‘smoothing’ them into composites that use elements from every photo. That composite can then be used to make the second generation of images, so you get hundreds of variations with no identical pictures that hit somewhere between the Uncanny Valley and one of those magic mirrors Snow White’s stepmother had. The tech has been around since 2019 and can be found on other AI image generators, of which Dall-E is the most famous example. Using its latent diffusion model and a 400 million image dataset called CLIP, Lensa can spit back 200 photos across 10 different art styles.
Though the tech has been around a few years, the rise in its use over the last several days may have you feeling caught off guard for a singularity that suddenly appears to have been bumped up to sometime before Christmas. ChatGPT made headlines this week for its ability to maybe write your term papers, but that’s the least it can do. It can program code, break down complex concepts and equations to explain to a second grader, generate fake news and prevent its dissemination.
It seems insane that when confronted with the Asminovian reality we’ve been waiting for with either excitement, dread or a mixture of both, the first thing we do is use it for selfies and homework. Yet here I was, filling up almost an entire phone’s worth of pictures of me as fairy princesses, anime characters, metallic cyborgs, Lara Croftian figures, and cosmic goddesses.
And in the span of Friday night to Sunday morning, I watched new sets reveal more and more of me. Suddenly the addition of a nipple went from a Cronenbergian anomaly to the standard, with almost every photo showing me with revealing cleavage or completely topless, even though I’d never submitted a topless photo. This was as true for the male-identified photos as the ones where I listed myself as a woman (Lensa also offers an “other” option, which I haven’t tried.)
Drew Grant
When I changed my selected gender from female to male: boom, suddenly, I got to go to space and look like Elon Musk’s Twitter profile, where he’s sort of dressed like Tony Stark. But no matter which photos I entered or how I self-identified, one thing was becoming more evident as the weekend went on: Lensa imagined me without my clothes on. And it was getting better at it.
Was it disconcerting? A little. The arm-boob fusion was more hilarious than anything else, but as someone with a larger chest, it would be weirder if the AI had missed that detail completely. But some of the images had cropped my head off entirely to focus just on my chest, which…why?
According to AI expert Sabri Sansoy, the problem isn’t with Lensa’s tech but most likely with human fallibility.
“I guarantee you a lot of that stuff is mislabeled,” said Sansoy, a robotics and machine learning consultant based out of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sansoy has worked in AI since 2015 and claims that human error can lead to some wonky results. “Pretty much 80% of any data science project or AI project is all about labeling the data. When you’re talking in the billions (of photos), people get tired, they get bored, they mislabel things and then the machine doesn’t work correctly.”
Sansoy gave the example of a liquor client who wanted software that could automatically identify their brand in a photo; to train the program to do the task, the consultant had first to hire human production assistants to comb through images of bars and draw boxes around all the bottles of whiskey. But eventually, the mind-numbing work led to mistakes as the assistants got tired or distracted, resulting in the AI learning from bad data and mislabeled images. When the program confuses a cat for a bottle of whiskey, it’s not because it was broken. It’s because someone accidentally circled a cat.
So maybe someone forgot to circle the nudes when programming Stable Diffusion’s neural net used by Lensa. That’s a very generous interpretation that would explain a baseline amount of cleavage shots. But it doesn’t explain what I and many others were witnessing, which was an evolution from cute profile pics to Brassier thumbnails.
When I reached out for comment via email, a Lensa spokesperson responded not by directing us to a PR statement but actually took the time to address each point I’d raised. “It would not be entirely accurate to state that this matter is exclusive to female users,” said the Lensa spokesperson, “or that it is on the rise. Sporadic sexualization is observed across all gender categories, although in different ways. Please see attached examples.” Unfortunately, they were not for external use, but I can tell you they were of shirtless men who all had rippling six packs, hubba hubba.
“The stable Diffusion Model was trained on unfiltered Internet content, so it reflects the biases humans incorporate into the images they produce,” continued the response. Creators acknowledge the possibility of societal biases. So do we.” It reiterated the company was working on updating its NSFW filters.
As for my insight about any gender-specific styles, the spokesperson added: “The end results across all gender categories are generated in line with the same artistic principles. The following styles can be applied to all groups, regardless of their identity: Anime and Stylish.”
I found myself wondering if Lensa was also relying on AI to handle their PR, before surprising myself by not caring all that much. If I couldn’t tell, did it even matter? This is either a testament to how quickly our brains adapt and become numb to even the most incredible of circumstances; or the sorry state of hack-flack relationships, where the gold standard of communication is a streamlined transfer of information without things getting too personal.
As for the case of the strange AI-generated girlfriend? “Occasionally, users may encounter blurry silhouettes of figures in their generated images. These are just distorted versions of themselves that were ‘misread’ by the AI and included in the imagery in an awkward way.”
So: gender is a social construct that exists on the Internet; if you don’t like what you see, you can blame society. It’s Frankenstein’s monster, and we’ve created it after our own image.
Or, as the language processing AI model ChatGPT might put it: “Why do AI-generated images always seem so grotesque and unsettling? It's because we humans are monsters and our data reflects that. It's no wonder the AI produces such ghastly images - it's just a reflection of our own monstrous selves.”
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Drew Grant
Drew Grant is dot.LA's Senior Editor. She's a media veteran with over 15-plus years covering entertainment and local journalism. During her tenure at The New York Observer, she founded one of their most popular verticals, tvDownload, and transitioned from generalist to Senior Editor of Entertainment and Culture, overseeing a freelance contributor network and ushering in the paper's redesign. More recently, she was Senior Editor of Special Projects at Collider, a writer for RottenTomatoes streaming series on Peacock and a consulting editor at RealClearLife, Ranker and GritDaily. You can find her across all social media platforms as @Videodrew and send tips to drew@dot.la.
Vinfast's First EVs Have Just 180 Miles of Range but Still Cost Over $55K
05:15 AM | December 13, 2022
Vinfast
Vinfast, the Vietnamese EV company with headquarters in Los Angeles, shipped its first order of vehicles to U.S. soil from Hai Phong, Vietnam on November 25th. The batch of 999 automobiles is due to arrive here in California on Thursday this week.
The VF8 SUVs on board will have the difficult task of convincing American buyers that an unknown, untested Vietnamese manufacturer can deliver on a new technology. And so far, the company appears to be off to a rocky start.
According to an email sent to reservation holders on November 29th, the VF8s in the initial shipment will be a special “City Edition” and have lower range advertised than the previously announced versions–just 180 miles in total. Over the weekend, Vinfast confirmed to dot.LA via Twitter that all of the vehicles in the first batch are the City Edition, and that the standard edition would be coming Q1 of 2023. Until this email, there had been little, if any mention of this new City Edition. The message to reservation holders offered no rationale as to why the company was choosing to ship this version of the car instead of the 260-292 mile-range VF8 it’s been advertising for months. Despite the lower range, however, the EVs will still carry a price tag of either $55,500 or $62,500, depending on trim–just $3,000 less than the previously-announced versions.
The VF8 Specs page from Vinfast’s site still bears no mention of a “City Edition,” but that’s what’s coming to America this month.
Vinfast is offering reservation holders an additional $3,000 off these City Edition variants (bringing the total to $6,000 less than the previously announced versions). But even at a discount, the vehicle’s $52,000 price tag is far from competitive with more established EV makers and raises questions about the brand’s strategy and value.
For comparison:
- The 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 5 has 220 miles of range and starts at $42,745. Or 303 miles of range for $60,000.
- The base model Kia EV6 costs $49,795 and goes 206 miles on a full charge.
- The Mustang Mach E starts at 46,895 and reaches 224 miles.
And the list goes on. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a 2023 EV with a worse cost to range ratio than the VF8. Vinfast, which has been nearly impossible to reach on this matter despite numerous calls and emails, hasn’t explained why they chose to offer such a range-compromised version as their initial foray into the U.S. market, or why the cost remains so high.
The reaction to the news, especially on Reddit, has been largely negative, with users accusing the company of “springing” the City Edition on reservation holders. Others speculated that the company rushed out the first batch so it could drum up good press before its recently announced IPO. Whatever the reason, most redditors didn’t seem to be buying it, and with Vinfast so reluctant to comment, it’s hard to see the announcement in a light that bodes well for the company’s future. First impressions tend to last, and this doesn’t seem like a good one for the EV hopeful.
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David Shultz
David Shultz reports on clean technology and electric vehicles, among other industries, for dot.LA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Nautilus and many other publications.
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