Monte Anderson opened a broom closet in the kitchen and pointed to the door handle near the mop and trash can. Somewhere on the other side was a small solution to the affordable housing crisis in America.
Anderson is a developer who rehabilitates commercial and residential buildings in and around Dallas, and has three salt roommates, including the ranch-style home he lives in for now. The 2,400-square-foot home is divided into four studio apartments. Each has an outdoor entrance, but connects to another unit via a door like his kitchen closet.
The connecting doors are locked and hidden because they are designed not to be used. The main reason for their existence is to allow Anderson to follow the local zoning code to claim he lives in a detached house.
“It's a suburban remodel,” said Anderson, 66, during the tour.
Economists estimate that America needs another 4-8 million homes. Their prescription is to build many new homes and apartments. It is a relief that both parties' politicians agree in principle, but that would take decades to achieve.
Buying land costs money and takes time to secure a permit. In the meantime, construction costs exploded. Therefore, most new homes tend to be luxurious rentals or high cost homes, rather than something that middle or low income people can afford. However, these low-cost units are the shortest supply units.
This imbalance has led policymakers and entrepreneurs like Anderson to the homes of around 145 million people that already exist.
Approximately two-thirds of American housing stock are made up of detached houses. Apartments are essentially prohibited from most parts of the metropolitan area, where most of the land is zoned in low-density areas. Anderson is trying to find a loophole by leading his detached house into a new multi-family life.
There was a time when the US needed large houses. According to the Pew Research Center, when Anderson's house was built in the 1970s, American mothers had an average of three or more children.
I'm shifting today. People are married at an age or not married at all. Fewer children (average two mothers in 2020 according to Pew) and are living more and more with other adults in their family. As a result, there is a discrepancy in housing where older people live in large houses with empty bedrooms, and single adults and families with fewer children are looking for smaller, more affordable places.
“The Roommate's House” – the name of Mr Anderson, his carved ranch house – is designed for this new world. Cereal rehab Anderson has put movie theaters and former wax paper factories in strip malls, including around 70 small businesses, including artisan mishmash, which sells jewelry and household items.
All of his projects are scattered across Dallas and the suburbs, the area where he spent his life. But in that field, Anderson remains on the move, often living in new things that he just built. For a while he lived in a boutique hotel and moved to a redeveloped apartment. Now he is in the carved house.
“Sometimes you have to do that for financial reasons, but most of the time I do it to see what I did right and what I did wrong,” Anderson said. “I have to live there to do the experiment.”
Roommate House units rent for $1,800, including utility. At that price, it is not affordable for low-income tenants. However, he provides shelter for the 27-year-old woman who works at a live visted driving facility, a 70-year-old bookkeeper and the 20-year-old granddaughter of Anderson, a real estate agent. And in his way of thinking, the building itself represents something: a proof of the concept of a way of life.
It changes without confusion
Over the past decade, cities and states across the country have sought to encourage ideas like Anderson by making it easier to add rental units to existing structures. Some have passed laws allowing backyard homes, garages and basements. Others encourage homeowners to break down their lots and sell some for development.
The goal is to add housing to existing areas without causing too much confusion or stirring up residents who don't like change. In many cases, this effort has more significant results than trying to rezone the entire city or add apartments to the streets of single-family homes.
Consider California, home to the nation's biggest affordable crisis. Since 2016, state lawmakers have proposed a Housing Act blizzard because they allow land authorities' cities to be stripped from forced suburbs if they don't approve housing more quickly. But looking at the number of units built since council began focusing on housing, humble backyard cottages, the term “accessory housing” of urban planners, are the main bright spots.
In 2016, local governments allowed around 1,000 people before California passed several laws that would facilitate the construction of ADUS. In 2023, the state allowed around 23,000, but the number of new detached houses and apartment buildings remained essentially flat.
The ADU Act created a boomlet for entrepreneurs. This is the literal cottage industry that helps homeowners obtain permission, build units and use software to identify the right lot. Bay Area Technology executive Phil Levin, who has become a co-living evangelist, recently began performing live near a company that helps people identify the ideal plot for multiple families to live in.
Ben Bear is the CEO of BuildCasa, an Oakland company founded in 2022, and is taking advantage of new California laws that allow homeowners to subdivide their property and sell their backyards for development. The company is a hybrid real estate play that develops several properties, but mainly serves as a broker connecting homeowners who want to add units with other developers.
Bear estimates that the state can add millions of units this way, while also unlocking the billions of value for homeowners. So far, he said many of his clients are parents who build homes for adult children or split a lot for aged homeowners in search of income.
“It's Boomers who bought it a long time ago, paid back their homes and owned the biggest lot,” he said.
Dallas' Anderson may rent rooms through Padsplit, an Atlanta-based company that is Airbnb's roommate version.
How households are reshaped
Living arrangements have always changed with culture and economy. During World War II, another shortage of crushed housing led Americans to carve out their homes and create Rooming hotels in major cities. The shortage was eased during the postwar building boom as developers built a mass of modern suburbs, often with modest two- and three-bedroom homes.
At the same time, household composition shifted from multi-generational groups to a mixture of nuclear and single-parent households. That trend began to reverse.
In her new book, Doubled Up, Hope Harvey, a professor of public policy at the University of Kentucky, documents how rents to care for older people and young children, the unstable job market, and the need to care for multi-generational families have made it much more common.
This shift is most common among low-income households, reflecting yawning inequality and a worn safety net, along with housing shortages. However, this trend has steadily increased the income ladder as rent and home prices expanded.
“The housing market is very expensive and the childcare market is very expensive, so these families feel that they have to double to pursue their goals,” Dr. Harvey said in an interview.
These are usually economic decisions. Dr. Harvey said that most of the people she spoke to for her book lived in someone else's house and lived as a temporary arrangement. Most people don't want to deal with the troubles like sharing a living room. Some people never like to be alone.
Anderson said his roommate's home was designed with this disgust in mind. He bought the house for $300,000 when the boundary was uninhabitable – a wrecked kitchen, drained pool, roof leaks – renovated about $1 million. He also added a backyard home to find a pool that has resurfaced. Wooden decks, gravel passageways and cactus landscaping give the grounds a medieval desert atmosphere.
“That's not where I want to live in myself,” he said. “I like that though.”
Rents will be brought in just over $9,000 a month, including the apartment where Anderson currently lives. This is enough to cover your mortgage and expenses.
Why build something with financial benefits? Anderson's hope is that the project will inspire others and show the city that multi-family life can coexist in detached-house neighborhoods. He argued that this would bring in more tax revenue, increase property value and encourage others to develop more homes like his company.
Plus, a small return may not seduce Wall Street, but he said, “If you have an older parent who can live here rather than helping you live, that's a financial winner.”
When we walked through a newly vacant unit (the consultant who lived there moved to North Carolina), Anderson said his purpose was to create a happy medium with low-cost units and a sense of community. But that community only works because people can close their doors and ignore each other.
