KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The Knoxville City Council met on Tuesday to discuss a contentious topic — Accessory Dwelling Units.
These kinds of buildings are effectively smaller, secondary buildings built on the same property as a home or organization. They are often rented out on a short-term basis, such as on apps like Airbnb. A proposal from Bentley Marlow, a developer who previously ran for city council, would have loosened rules surrounding how and where they could be built.
The version city council passed changes the legal dimensions of ADUs and how they can built, but preserves a rule requiring owners to live on the same property where an ADU is built.
The original proposal would have removed that requirement. Andrew Roberto, a council member, said the original rules were implemented to guarantee that people would be able to build spaces for aging parents or other family members while preventing large developers and companies from using a large amount of property to build ADUs.
"There's already a great interest from investors in buying homes in Knoxville, as there is across the country. Removing owner-occupancy provides an enhanced incentive for investors to buy our limited supply of housing," Roberto said during the meeting. "ADUs are not cheap. They are expensive to build. They will not be affordable, they will be market rate. That's not affordable ... This is about profits, it's not about families and opportunities."
He said developers would focus on buying affordable housing and renovating it without the owner-occupancy rule, making it more expensive and further tightening Knoxville's housing market.
Seema Singh said she felt like there were neighborhoods in Knoxville looking for special privileges. A component of the proposal would have allowed ADUs to be built only in specific areas. She said a process already exists if people want to build ADUs at their homes.
Lauren Rider said she was not specifically concerned about the owner-occupancy rule, but also said the city does not apply similar owner-occupancy rules to rental homes, triplexes or other kinds of property. She said she believed the city's ADU rules were too complex. She also said she disagreed with the proposal to restrict ADUs to specific areas.
"I have this issue talking about renters the way we do," she said. "There's a former county commissioner that served his eight years, and he lived in the poorhouse of a very famous, well-known Knoxvillian. There are people of all walks of life who live in Accessory Dwelling Units."
She also said since ADUs are smaller, she believed they were cheaper and wouldn't necessarily make Knoxville more unaffordable.
Amelia Parker then spoke and said she felt the council was merging different issues together with the proposal, and believed the short-term rental ordinance applied to all properties — not just ADUs. She also said Roberto's thoughts echoed a lot of the thoughts she had about Middle Housing proposals.
"This housing crisis that we're in, this housing market that we're in, is not the time to implement changes to our zoning code that could attract more investors into our community," she said. "When you build relations and commit to the community, you do have different outcomes — and that doesn't mean whether you're an owner or a renter."
She said individual landlords and smaller companies tended to treat renters better than large corporations. She also said the city council has consistently heard from people poorly treated by large corporate landlords. But, she also said she did not know if there was a commitment from the city to enforce ADU and short-term rental rules, and said there could be state-level implications for changing the short-term rental policy.
"My concern is that we need to focus on the enforcement piece," she said during the meeting. "For me, it's unfortunate that we've mixed up the ADU conversation with the short-term rental conversation."
Tommy Smith said cities that tend to have more ADUs usually saw more built due to incentive policies for homeowners. As part of those policies, he said homeowners would need to base rent prices on income levels to guarantee they would be affordable.
Later in the meeting, Knoxville Mayor Indya Kincannon said she believed it would be a good idea to collect community input before passing Marlow's proposal. She also said the city needed to put time, money and energy towards housing issues in Knoxville.
Smith proposed changing Marlow's proposal to keep the city's owner-occupancy rule in place while allowing other changes in the zoning code and then said the council should consider passing the amended ordinance.
Rider said she felt the amended rules would let the people split their homes into duplexes to charge rent, but would not be allowed to build another unit on their property to rent out. Parker said she wanted to postpone the proposal as amended.
The amended ordinance passed on its first reading Tuesday. It will be voted on again in two weeks before it can go into effect.