That being said, I don’t think that is the case with ADUs. The homeowners who care for thier properties will also care for their accessory dwellings. After all, the ADUs are located in their yards.

How’s THAT for a thread jack?

Take my situation as an example. Our 4 BR, 3.5 BA house in a normal residential neighborhood will likely always have a family with children in it. I would have no desire to rent a theoretical studio/1BR ADU in my back yard to a bunch of fraternity guys or a death metal band. I’m not going to run a Section 8 housing operation. My kids play in that backyard and my family sleeps 50 feet away from that apartment. I would have full control and I would exercise judgement on what kinds of renters I would be comfortable with.

I imagine a garage apartment out back would be leased to a responsible Agnes Scott student or faculty member or some other single looking for convenience to Decatur’s offerings.

Do you guys get that? We’re not talking about rezoning so corporate rental agencies can build apartment complexes for credit-wrecked deadbeats and college party animals. We’re talking about allowing for one-off development of small single rental units that would be managed and maintained by onsite owners.

I wanna comment on the direction of the discussion in the hope of sharing my experience having gone thru this battle once before. While it makes for good “I’ll claw your eyes out” internet fun, this really is not about big government, that’s another “fight.” Well, it’s the same fight in a different context. Well, … I’m still drinking my coffee catching up, so forgive me wandering a bit.

TL;DR version: go grab coffee some Dancing Goats with Chris Billingsley, bring the proposals with you and talk thru some of them and see if you can develop a strategy to get a couple more people from your neighborhoods to come to the next one and figure out what works.

The issue at hand is one of balance and context. “What” is less important than “where, when, how, and why.” I saw this issue play out time and time again over the 315 issue – we went from “Look at this awesome development we got for you!” to accepted with 37 conditions and a repeat visit for any deviation from plan. It took a LOT of activity and meetings and discussions on the part of everyone — and I mean all sides, here — to come to some sense of reasonableness. Everything was all sunshine and bluebirds in our citizen participation meetings, as long as we were talking about what kind of trees and the paint color of the stucco. When we said, “OK, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: 220 units on that parking lot.” When we started wanting to ask the deeper questions – scope, scale, parking, street, traffic, infrastructure, and impact – you could feel the “psychic ghosts” rush across to the other half of the room as the energy and warmth of both the developer and the City QUICKLY retreated to their side of the room. Arms folded and. That. Was. That.

What types of property – rental, single, mutli, condo, whatever…. is not enough to make any kind of decision … renters are fine! I rented in Decatur, too, before moving there 15 years ago. My wife did, many people did. And do. Nobody hates renters, or if they do, they’re on the wrong side of that argument. The first thing to be pulled out is the whole “NIMBY” slur — I always found that funny, since the ironic thing is that it is just the opposite view of the same short-minded problem. NIMBY in itself may be an absolutely valid response – “my” back yard is not the right place for a 24 hour Wal-Mart Supercenter or an 80′, 220 unit dwelling”… or it might well be, if the plan addresses the other factors that mitigate the impact to the community and the transition is part of a larger _plan_ that is well-articulated and well-conceived and well-executed and not a franken-process of folks’ pet peeves and tax base opportunities.

The context of the neighborhood is a big part of the difference as to whether it’s “total BS in a bucket” or the “cost of progress”. The question is then about who gets to arbitrate that decision. Reading between the lines on other threads and other channels, it seems that after the 2am marathon session over 315 and who knows how many more, there would be a move to further extricate the political process from this process. That makes NO sense to me – – and yet I can hear some folks in my mind’s ear “win-win!” like it was just last week. Oh, PTSD, how I loathe thee…. Perhaps that is why we have a discussion about whether or not “big government” should be in or out of that process.

IMNSHO, there can be absolutely no question that in a city like Decatur that the elected officials must be IN the arbitration process and must be actively involved it. To do otherwise forces the individual home-owner or business owner to shoulder the burden of deciphering all the code(legal, tax, building, etc.), strategy, communication, figuring out what alternatives should be explored by the developer…

So, saying that, I would be very careful about being led into the debate of whether renters are good neighbors or whether government should be telling property owners their business… The answer is “sometimes” … and the harder, deeper question is “OK, when, how, why, and what?”

These new shared parking and other ordinances are an effort to codify something, and they need to be examined very closely and thought thru carefully by residents with either a well-articulated, specific plan from the City or an inferential one created by residents and taken back to the City saying “This is the City we see that will be created by these rules, we don’t like it, here’s why.” and get the one that you want.

There are a lot of smart folks in Decatur. I never knew how truly brilliant some of them were until we started going thru, unwinding all of the insanity that came our way. But it all started with 6 of us looking at what must have passed at least someone’s muster as a grand plan to double the size of our neighborhood and going “Huh? WTF” over some coffee at Dancing Goats.

Rather than argue on here, maybe you and Chris Billingsley should, as neighbors, go grab some coffee and talk face-to-face about this stuff.

Good luck!