Tacoma Garage Conversions - ADU + DADU in Tacoma
As many of you know, the City of Tacoma adopted a new set of simplified regulations in 2019 allowing just about anyone to build a mother-in-law apartment, tiny house or ADU / DADU (detached accessory dwelling unit) right in their backyard. With the new regulations, Tacoma also made it much easier to convert an existing structure (think: garages, basements, etc) on their property without needing a zoning change, variance or any special permitting to make them legal DADU or ADU buildings. You can read more about Tacoma tiny home, ADU, DADU pricing and regulation changes in this post here. If you’re looking for a real estate agent to help you find a Tacoma property to build or convert a garage to an ADU / DADU we recommend you reach out to our favorite Tacoma Real Estate Agent Laura Anderson.
As a Tacomans, we were super excited when we saw the new moves the city has taken to make it easier to convert garages into legal ADU’s and DADU’s in Tacoma. In fact, we were so pumped that we have already converted our own garage in Tacoma’s Proctor district. Creating an easier and more affordable path for both builders and homeowners to do garage conversions makes it so more people have the ability to actually make it happen now. This has a ton of benefits for the city.
As we all know, rents have skyrocketed in Tacoma. Our awesome little city is no longer a secret. You can blame it on tech workers, investors flooding in, Seattle people moving down or you can just chalk it up to Tacoma’s housing market simply blowing up. One of the most important benefits of Tacoma’s new ADU and DADU regulations is that it will incentivize people to build more housing units, helping to fill the void in Tacoma’s rental market. These garage conversion units by nature are going to be smaller and more affordable to build then the huge new apartment complexes going in, so they will be cheaper for Tacoma folks to rent, which everyone agrees is a good thing.
Another benefit of making garage conversions, ADU’s and DADU’s easier, is that it will allow for the average homeowner to gain rental income to help cover their mortgage. Since most people are living paycheck to paycheck this extra passive income frees up money for people to spend on the other important things in their lives, and hopefully invest back here in the local Tacoma economy. It will also help to protect people from losing their homes in the eventual down turn in the economy, allowing families to keep their homes even if they were to lose their job like many people did back in 2008.
To sum it all up, we’re stoked on the direction the City of Tacoma has decide to head. Once we wrap up our own garage conversion we will be sure to put up a blog post (it’s done! check it out HERE) about it and share our firsthand experience work with the City of Tacoma. If you’re interested in doing a garage conversion, building an ADU or DADU on your property, we’ve put together a separate post to help answer some common questions here.
