The ADU strategy tends to click when someone stands inside one behind a garage

The accessory dwelling unit strategy has a way of making sense only once a person stands inside one. Picture a backyard barbecue where about halfway through the host points at the back of his lot and says his mother-in-law lives there. The guest assumes he means the house. He means the 500 square foot cottage behind the garage with its own little porch and its own mailbox slot. Walk back there with him. It is one room, a kitchen along one wall, a bathroom, a bed, a small window over the sink looking at the fence. She has been in it four years. When she eventually moves on he rents it, and he already knows what for, because two neighbors on the same street have units and both are leased. A person can spend months reading about strategies and arguing with themselves about which one fits, and none of it lands until they are standing in a room somebody's grandmother lives in. It is a small building on land you already own where a person pays you rent. That is the whole thing. Someone who does not own a house yet is nowhere near doing this. But it is usually the week they stop reading about six other strategies.