Gary Bric wants to increase the number of ‘granny flats’ in town. Good for him

Oldtime Burbank natives surely remember the good old days when our town was full of backhouses. At least that’s what we used to call them when we were kids. The fancier name they use nowadays is second-dwelling units, often more jocularly known as ‘granny flats.’

But it wasn’t just grandma who used to live in them. Back when Lockheed was going full bore they were mainly populated by single people who worked in either the overheated aircraft industry or at the local studios.

For years granny flats were a win-win for Burbank: they provided lots of cheap but high-quality housing for workers, and at the same time they gave the front house a great opportunity for some extra income.

When we say that “backhouses” were all over the place, we mean it. Every block up on the Hill had at least seven or eight scattered around, and nobody complained about it. Nobody.

Technically, after the war backhouses were illegal in Burbank, but people looked the other way. That is, people did until a new group of wannabees suddenly arrived in town around the mid-70s. This upwardly-mobile class of craven carpetbaggers must have thought that they were living in San Marino or Arcadia or some similar place, because these Newby Nimbies immediately started putting the pressure on officials to “crack down” on the longtime practice.

It wasn’t the oldtimers who were against granny, it was the smug new arrivals who suddenly had to pay $300,000 for house in Burbank, and then thought that because of this they should be living in complete privilege, as they had paid for the right to be jerks.

For the last 30 years Burbank has had an ambivalent attitude towards granny flats. The city’s philosophy has always been to look the other way unless the neighbors complained. Most of the time this has worked out, but a few years ago a panicked staff went out of their way to craft legal restrictions in light of a liberal state law that was passed by the Democratic majority and signed by Gray Davis.

The purpose of the law was to make it impossible for any city in California to completely outlaw second-dwelling units in their R-1 residential neighborhoods. They had always been legal in multiples (like apartments), but many cities, including Burbank, had for years been sitting on mean-spirited ordinances that completely forbid R-1 granny flats. The legislature saw a great need to increase the state’s housing stock and so second-dwelling units became the ideal solution.

Naturally, those same mean-spirited cities went nuts when this new law was passed, and like Burbank, they all immediately started writing emergency zoning restrictions to minimize its impact. [Technically, the law requires cities to approve granny flats ministerially rather than as discretionary, and they had to either develop their own rules about them or apply the state's looser requirements.] This counter-action got to be so bad that the same legislature soon passed another law forbidding the evasive tactic, but it was vetoed by a newly installed Governor Schwarznegger, which leaves us at the current crossroads.

So the other night Mayor Gary Bric casually asked the city council to put this granny flat issue back on the agenda. He made it clear that he wants to loosen Burbank’s strange “one unit per block” or 300-foot rule for backhouses, which is way too onerous and arbitrary, and deliberately so. By the way, we fought this change back when staff first proposed it in 2002, in front of the Planning Board, which placed our formal objection in writing– a necessary prerequisite in case anyone ever wanted to sue the city over the restrictions.

One of our main points was that no one in Burbank except the jerks has ever complained about granny flats, and we were once home to many more of them than is imaginable today (backhouses, not jerks). Staff’s response was that they didn’t want to be bothered by any future problems in case second units suddenly popped up all over the place, which they were sure was inevitable under the newer, more liberal allowances.

But what the staff and council did a few years ago was terrifically wrong and destructive. They went out of their way to restrict granny flats based only upon their selfish desires to avoid political hassle, as well as to suck up to the worst people in town. The rest of us lost out– the prospective renters and the out-of-luck homeowners who would love to have had a great source of a very necessary second income.

Granny flats provide much needed and high-quality rental housing. They do not create any problems in the R-1 neighborhoods and they never have. Their construction should be encouraged in Burbank, and Mayor Bric deserves a solid heads-up for placing this important issue back on the table.

**UPDATE**

A stickler for detail wrote this morning and corrected the record as to what Burbank’s SDU policy was before 2003. Rather than completely ban granny flats, the city only allowed them for family relatives subject to a discretionary review. And as soon as granny moved out they had to be de-commissioned. What this meant was that it was hard to get one approved– almost impossible, so few were added.

The state law changed this to allow SDUs ministerially, meaning automatically if they satisfied the conditions, regardless of who was living there. And the legislature also wrote in that each city was required to craft their SDU ordinances– if any– to encourage them and not block the idea.