Suburban Boardinghouses: ‘Illegal Conversions,’ ‘Granny Flats,’ and the Marketization of Single-Family Homes in Los Angeles, 1970-2008

Luis Flores, University of Michigan

For much of the 20th century, metropolitan landscapes came to reflect a separation between the domestic sphere of residential life and the market of industry and commerce. A collection of zoning codes, licensing regulations, and neighborhood associations enforced this domestication of the 19th century household—previously a site of production, commerce, and tenanting. However, recent decades have witnessed a reintegration of market and home. One example can be found in the rise of the practice of renting out converted garages, basements, and spare bedrooms from single-family homes since the 1970s. One scholar estimated the shadow construction of 50 thousand to 100 thousand “secondary units” within single-family homes between 1973 and 1980, the lowest figure in this estimate would have accounted for one-quarter of all net rental housing stock growth over that seven-year period. A 1986 estimate in Scientific American estimated that a full 40 percent of very-low-income housing added since the 1970s was part of this “shadow housing market.” This paper traces the conflict and slow incorporation of this contested practice in Los Angeles. In the late 1970s, Los Angeles experienced a moral panic over accessory dwelling units in immigrant neighborhoods. Persecuted as “slumlords,” immigrant households were subjected to “zoning blitzes”—property-by-property inspections in search of “illegal conversions.” By the 1990s, however, the stigmatized accessory unit was beginning to be moralized as the “granny flat” or “in-law unit,” reframing the marketization of excess space as a natural extension of the nuclear family. The rise of short-term rental platforms like Airbnb have contributed to the expansion of this practice among white and higher-income households and have motivated efforts of regulatory incorporation in recent years. This paper explores the intersection between labor market change, adaptive economic practices, regulatory conflict, and the role of race and class in the diffusion of “economic informality.”

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 91. From LA to Detroit