Living Detached

When you move to Seattle you rent a room in a communal house that you share with a bunch of freaks who explode if you store meat in the fridge but can't bring themselves to wash the chai crust out of a mug. A couple jobs later and you're ready to grab someone sane who you actually know outside of Craigslist and move into a daylight basement. If you're lucky up to three of those exterior walls won't be underground. It's nice living for awhile, but ultimately a falling out over a bunch of calls on the shared landline to Europe and/or a promotion at work will inspire another move, this time upgrading to the glorious detached mother-in-law in some family's backyard. With housing prices as they are you may be paying that guy's mortgage indefinitely. Better settle in.

Such is the state of rental housing in north Seattle, by which we mean Capitol Hill, Eastlake, Montlake, University District, Wallingford, Fremont, Ballard, Greenlake, etc. Barring the Hill, the majority of the residences in all of these neighborhoods are single family homes. What's a renter to do in this situation? Detached housing, of course, and there's plenty of it. Mother-in-laws, rooms above garages, carriage houses--it's all there. Seattlest had a friend live for eight months in what was rumored to have been a renovated chicken coop and we didn't see anything to make us disbelieve that.

Imagine our surprise to read in the P-I today that these residences might not be strictly above board!

City planners last year proposed legalizing "detached accessory dwelling units" -- smaller living spaces physically separated from a main house -- in single-family zones across the city.

They cited a number of benefits of the minihomes -- from helping homeowners bring in extra income to accommodating households with elderly parents, caregivers or communal living arrangements.

But opposition from some of the city's more affluent neighborhoods prompted the planning department and Nickels -- usually a champion of urban density -- to quietly abandon the plan.

Those are great benefits, yeah. They did miss the obvious one of allowing non-executives to live in a city comprised almost entirely of single family homes, but elderly parent storage is a good one too. The article also cites a number of drawbacks to "detached accessory dwelling units" such as parking problems (true), erosion of neighbor's privacy (true, get blinds) and their tendency to take up backyards (who cares - no one has kids anyway).