New York lawmakers have introduced a landmark bill to legalize Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) across New York State. ADUs are smaller homes on the same lot as a primary residence — including familiar home types such as “in-law units,” garage conversions, and basement apartments. If passed, the bill would create hundreds of thousands of units of affordable housing, while giving homeowners new opportunities to earn income.

Legalizing ADUs will be a huge victory for tenants, homeowners, and local governments that badly need new revenue. That is why the New York Accessory Homes Enabling Act is supported by a broad coalition that includes advocates for homeowners, tenants, immigrants, and seniors.

Send a letter to your representatives in Albany and to Governor Hochul urging them to support the New York Accessory Homes Enabling Act (S. 4547A / A. 4854A) and ADU legalization as a part of the state budget. After providing your information on this page, you'll find a sample letter (see text below) and an easy tool for sending it to key government contacts. Remember: if you have time, personalizing your letter makes it more likely to get noticed!

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SAMPLE LETTER

I write to urge you to enact the New York State Accessory Homes Enabling Act (S. 4547A / A. 4854A) or legalize ADUs as a part of the state budget. This historic legislation would give New York homeowners the option to create small accessory units, known as Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), on portions of their properties. Across the country, states are enacting similar legislation to promote ADUs based on a growing recognition that allowing homeowners to create safe, habitable accessory homes is a boon to property owners, local government coffers, and renters who desperately need new housing options.

For homeowners, ADUs offer the chance to earn a new source of income from a rental, create a small apartment for family and friends, or provide space for a caregiver to live close at hand. For families stretching to afford their mortgage, and seniors on fixed incomes who wish to age in place, ADUs can be the difference between sustainable homeownership and displacement. Likewise, because ADUs increase home values and bring in new taxpaying residents, ADUs provide new revenue to local governments, and do so without significantly altering the built environment of New York communities. Indeed, ADUs like garage and basement conversions can add new housing in ways that are practically invisible from the street.

ADUs also offer the opportunity to add a substantial amount of new, affordable housing at a time when New York’s housing crisis continues to worsen. According to a study by the Regional Plan Association, legalizing ADUs could create hundreds of thousands of new homes in the New York metropolitan region alone. And as New York's existing basement and garage apartments demonstrate, ADUs are a tremendously important source of affordable housing, especially for working families, communities of color, and first-generation Americans.

Unfortunately, at present, a patchwork of outdated state and local rules often make creating ADUs impossible or cost prohibitive—especially for the small homeowners who lack experience navigating complex regulatory and permitting processes that were designed with developers and development professionals in mind. The result is that New York has far fewer ADUs than homeowners and renters desire. And the ADUs that New York does have—such as the tens of thousands of basement apartments in New York City—are frequently unpermitted and are rented in a shadow market where tenants lack the safety and other legal protections that they deserve.

To fix this problem and unlock the potential of ADUs, the New York State Accessory Homes Enabling Act would require local governments to create a streamlined process for homeowners who wish to create an ADU, and would establish a basic framework to ensure that ADUs are available to the typical homeowner by clearing the most common stumbling blocks to ADUs. The bill preserves the broad flexibility that local governments have to write ADU ordinances, and to tailor those ordinances to fit local needs—from design and construction rules, to height and aesthetic requirements, and safety regulations—but it ensures that local rules do not make it impossible or cost prohibitive for most homeowners who wish to create an ADU to do so. The bill provides for a new financing program, to ensure that ADUs are accessible to low-and-moderate-income homeowners who will find it difficult to finance ADU creation through traditional financial institutions. The bill provides important tenant protections to ensure that renters in ADUs are shielded against arbitrary evictions. And to make sure that ADUs address the continued and widespread problem of discrimination in the housing market—as documented by a recent report by the New York State Senate, as well as a groundbreaking investigation of Long Island’s housing market by Newsday—the bill protects ADU renters against discrimination on the basis of race, gender-identity, and other protected characteristics.

For these reasons, I strongly urge the passage of this important legislation.

Thank you,