In recent years, the increasing pressure on urban areas to accommodate new modes of living and working has sparked innovative approaches to land use and housing. One such solution, Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), has reshaped how we think about adding residential density to our cities. While ADUs have become a common tool to address housing shortages, there is now an opportunity to extend this thinking to workspaces. Accessory Coworking Units (ACUs) present an adaptable, incremental way to bridge the gap between home and work, creating opportunities to reduce commutes, encourage local walking and biking as part of our every-day lives, and foster local economic development in car-centric areas like Southern California.
1. The Evolution of Accessory Dwelling Units
What Are ADUs?
Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) are secondary housing units located on the same lot as a primary residence. They can take the form of converted garages, backyard cottages, or even additions to an existing home. ADUs have gained popularity in states like California due to their potential to increase housing supply without significantly altering neighborhood character.
Policy Shifts Supporting ADUs
Over the past decade, many U.S. states, especially California, have passed legislation making it easier to build ADUs. These changes were driven by a need to address severe housing shortages, affordability issues, and the desire for more flexible housing options for multigenerational families. In California, laws were passed to eliminate certain zoning restrictions, streamline the permitting process, and reduce parking requirements for ADUs. The result has been a notable increase in the construction of ADUs, helping to alleviate some of the housing pressure and provide more diverse living arrangements.
Outcomes and Challenges
The push for ADUs has been largely successful. They offer a cost-effective way to increase residential density while maintaining neighborhood character. However, challenges remain, including neighborhood resistance, concerns over parking, and the slow pace of adoption in some areas. Despite these challenges, ADUs have set a precedent for flexible land use, and this model can be adapted to create small coworking spaces—Accessory Coworking Units (ACUs)—that meet the needs of the growing remote and freelance workforce.
2. The Movement Toward Proximity: The 15-Minute City
Proximity and Urban Life
In cities around the world, urban planners and policymakers are increasingly advocating for the 15-minute city model, coined by urban theorist Carlos Moreno and first adopted by the city of Paris. The concept centers on the idea that essential services—work, shopping, healthcare, education, and leisure—should all be within a 15-minute walk or bike ride or public transit ride from home. In North America and Australia, this has been adapted into the "20-minute neighborhood" framework.
This is not a new concept. Rather, it is how humans have always lived up until the 20th century.
Why Proximity Matters
As Moreno writes, proximity is "an essential determination of urban quality of life." Why? There are many reasons, including environmental concerns (reducing carbon emissions), a desire for improved quality of life (walking and riding a bike is healthy), and the changing nature of work. Reducing commute times not only cuts down on carbon emissions but also enhances mental well-being and community engagement. Time slows down when you move slower, and you see more and interact with more people and things and nature when you are both moving slower and outside of your car. In addition, proximity-focused urban planning encourages local economies which, in turn, promotes social cohesion. Moreno sums it up, writing, "Proximity offers opportunities for chance encounters, spontaneous exchanges, and solidarity. It fosters the creation of meaningful social connections, the development of support networks, and the strengthening of a sense of community." (The 15-Minute City, p. 51)
The Southern California Context
How can these ideas possibly apply in Southern California? We are a megalopolis with countless car-centric neighborhoods (often exclusively zoned for residential use) and regions. Our strength as a city and region lies precisely in the abundance and diversity of people and places, all within a relatively short drive (it used to be 20 minutes when I was a kid!). This, in tern, allows for specialization and excellence. Basically, what makes Southern California so great is "if you want it, you can find it." But this necessarily requires freedom of movement to to travel often long distances to be able to get to these different places. As the father of teenagers who are athletes, I often think about this in the context of sports. My kids are able to participate in great sports programs precisely because these programs have large catchment zones that draw on huge pools of talented and competitive athletes. I cannot imagine being able to find the same quality sports programs for my kids within a 15-minute walk of our home, nor can I imagine lugging all of our equipment on a 15-minute walk every day back and forth to the sports facilities!
Yet even Southern California presents opportunities for embracing at least some of the 15-minute city concepts. In particular, as work patterns have shifted, especially with the rise of remote work (work from home and work from anywhere), there is a growing opportunity to rethink our hyper-zoned urban model where we separate residential from office and retail. Southern California's neighborhoods and suburbs are ripe for incremental changes, like what we have already seen with ADUs, such as the introduction of ACUs, which can bring workspaces closer to home without requiring large-scale infrastructure investments.
So we do not need to have everything within a 15-minute radius of where we live (and hence don't have to give up on the freedom that comes from living with our cars in a dynamic region), but certainly some or even many of our daily needs can be met within a 15-minute radius, particularly in relation to our daily movement patterns for work.
And rather than overhauling entire cities, ACUs offer a more feasible, incremental approach to bring workspaces closer to home. They require minimal changes to existing infrastructure and can even be integrated into current ADU policies with slight modifications. For example, codes can be tweaked by allowing ADUs to be used as office spaces. HOA rules, which often allow for home offices, can similarly be tweaked by allowing the sharing of home offices with others in the community. Simply put, cities and neighborhoods can enable this transition to ACUs without the need for large-scale rezoning or new construction.
3. How ACUs Can Help Achieve Proximity
ACUs and the 15-Minute City
ACUs can be a key tool in advancing the goals of the 15-minute city, particularly in regions like Southern California where distances between home and work are typically long. By creating small-scale coworking spaces within residential neighborhoods, ACUs would allow people to work near where they live, reducing the need for car travel and fostering a stronger connection to the local community. People who work from home still crave in-person human interaction, and local small-scale ACUs can satisfy this need.
ACUs offer a flexible, low-cost solution for providing local workspaces. They could be set up in backyards, garages, or other underused spaces, allowing neighborhoods to adapt to new work patterns without major disruptions. They can even be created from existing ADUs.
These ACUs can also foster local economic development, as people spend more time and money within their own communities, supporting local businesses and services.
5. Addressing Concerns: Reasonable Limits on ACUs
Reasonable Restrictions
To address concerns about ACUs, local governments and neighborhood HOAs could place reasonable limits on their use. These might include:
Size limitations: Restrict the size of ACUs to ensure they remain secondary to the primary residential use.
Traffic and parking controls: Implement rules that limit car usage, encouraging workers to walk or bike to the ACUs.
Time restrictions: Restricting use of ACUs to certain times of the day.
Design standards: Maintain neighborhood aesthetics by requiring ACUs to match the architectural style of the primary residence or coming up with a unique ACU style that stands out from and is visually distinct from and yet complements the primary residence.
6. Technological Feasibility of ACUs
One of the major questions people might raise is whether it is feasible to have a small coworking space in the size of a structure no bigger than a garage? The answer is yes.
One of the major innovations in the coworking industry is the use of technology to enable small, self-service coworking spaces. This includes digital platforms for booking, security, and access control. With these technologies, ACUs can be managed remotely without needing a full-time on-site staff. This makes it technologically feasible to establish a network of micro-coworking spaces across a neighborhood, allowing workers to access them as needed. One might imagine that different staff people can rove around the network to check up on each space, or even people from within a networked coworking community can perform these tasks.
7. Envisioning a Network of Small Coworking Spaces in a Neighborhood
Imagine a neighborhood with multiple ACUs dispersed among residential properties. Each space could be shared by local workers, offering a place for quiet work, meetings, or collaborative projects. This decentralized model would provide flexibility, reduce commuting, and strengthen the neighborhood’s social fabric. One might also imagine different nodes servicing different types of workers - artists, professionals, digital creators, etc. Or different nodes having different themes, allowing workers to experience different micro themes and environments. One might imagine that workers within these spaces, walking or biking from just a few houses or blocks away, might be more inclined to collaborate and do business with each other, coming from the same local neighborhood.
But thinking even more broadly, ACUs could also serve as nodes for other proximity services. For example, they could host food distribution points (for example serve as spots for food trucks or food delivery robots or drones, or automated vending machines), pop-up cultural events, or community meetings, becoming multipurpose spaces that enhance local life beyond work.
As the network of these ACUs grows, and neighborhoods and communities become increasingly comfortable with them, they could branch out into other essential functions of the 15-minute city, such as providing spaces for education, wellness, and cultural activities, including by linking to home gardens converted into community gardens.
Some of these activities can occur at different times of the day and/or week, allowing for ACUs to become multi-use spaces that offer versatility and flexibility that is synched with the unique rhythms of the community.
It is also possible that by allowing more people to work within a short walk or bike ride from their home, we would free up even more office space that can, in turn, be converted to residential and mixed use, thereby creating proximity communities within traditional commercial districts or suburban office parks.
Conclusion: A Path Forward for ACUs
Accessory Coworking Units (ACUs) offer a practical, flexible way to begin transitioning car-centric areas like Southern California toward the 15-minute city model. By adapting current ADU policies, allowing for coworking uses, and leveraging new technologies, we can create vibrant local workspaces that reduce commuting, foster community connections, and support local economies. While challenges remain, incremental changes in zoning laws and HOA covenants, coupled with thoughtful restrictions on ACUs, can make this vision a reality.
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