Jay Blake and his wife purchased their home in North Park in 2018. A big selling point was the privacy — their house sits next to a canyon with dense vegetation, and it's set back roughly 80 feet from the street.
Blake has never found any use for his front yard, however, and he's had to spend about $5,000 to maintain it. So he was happy to learn he could split off the yard from his property and sell it, thanks to a California law passed in 2021 called SB 9.
Blake was even happier to learn what the yard was worth: $250,000.
"We've had student loans that have plagued us since about 2010," Blake said. "I think a large chunk of this is going to go to paying those off."
SB 9, or the California HOME Act, allows homeowners to split their lots in two and build up to two homes on each parcel — even if local zoning restricts the property to a single detached house. To make use of the law, Blake turned to BuildCasa, a startup that was founded in 2022 after SB 9's passage.
BuildCasa handles securing the permit for the lot split — which is still ongoing in Blake's case — then either sells the land or partners directly with local architects and contractors to build the new housing.
"I realize that I might be leaving a little bit of money on the table, and I'm not bothered by that because I don't have to be bothered by all the logistics of property development," Blake said.
Ben Bear, BuildCasa's co-founder and CEO, said SB 9 is too complicated for most homeowners to navigate on their own. And of course, many people prefer their homes just the way they are.
"You have to be open to having a new neighbor, and certainly that's not something that everybody wants," Bear said. "Where we have seen a lot of interest and uptake is particularly among senior citizens who are house rich and cash poor, and want to age in place and bought their home a long time ago."
Bear said BuildCasa currently has 97 new homes in development across California, including a duplex on Blake's property in North Park and eight townhomes planned for San Diego's Stockton neighborhood. The townhome project is making use of another law, SB 684, that allows properties to be subdivided into as many as 10 lots in neighborhoods where apartments and condominiums are already legal.
BuildCasa declined to share how many homes it had constructed or sold, but said it had successfully subdivided 15 lots and that the permit process typically takes 8-12 months, depending on the jurisdiction. San Diego is an attractive market for SB 9 projects, Bear said, because there's a high demand for housing, lots tend to be large and building costs are lower than in Los Angeles and the Bay Area.
SB 9's passage in 2021 was hailed by housing advocates as a watershed moment in the state's efforts to build more housing. California has undergone major economic and population growth over the past several decades, yet homebuilding has failed to keep pace, in part due to restrictive zoning laws. The state's housing shortage, particularly in high-demand coastal cities like San Diego, has driven up rents and pushed homeownership far out of reach for many working- and middle-class households.
Muhammad Alameldin, policy associate at UC Berkeley's Terner Center for Housing Innovation, agreed SB 9 was a big political achievement because it took on single-family zoning, long a third rail in California politics. But a study he co-authored last year found the law's impact on housing supply was negligible, at least in its first year.
"It does take a while for the general public to know about the law, and for planning departments to adjust to state laws," Alameldin said. "Planning departments are just overworked all across the state and they have to keep track with maybe 100 new California housing laws per year."
Some cities have also sought to block SB 9, such as the wealthy Bay Area suburb of Woodside, which declared all its single-family neighborhoods a mountain lion sanctuary to exploit the law's exemption for endangered habitat. The move was short-lived, and the legislature has since passed a clean-up bill that closes some of SB 9's loopholes.
Alameldin said the emergence of companies like BuildCasa and competitor Yardsworth shows the market is ironing out the kinks in SB 9, and that small-scale infill development is slowly returning to California after being decimated by the Great Recession.
Zonda, a firm that tracks the housing industry nationwide, recently found the number of U.S. companies that build at least 10 homes per year had fallen from 14,000 in 2005 to 3,100 in 2023. Alameldin said much of that business went to home flipping, and that after a long period of consolidation, the building industry is ripe for more competition.
"Having more developers build housing, especially small-scale housing like this, is very healthy for the housing industry," Alameldin said.
Jay Blake said his experience with BuildCasa has been good so far. And he's glad the new housing in his front yard will fit in with the neighborhood, which is already full of duplexes and triplexes. Most were built decades ago, before San Diego's zoning laws made them illegal.
