Latest / ADU Adventures: Building in Your Backyard / Willow Glen ADUs: Porch Lights and Backyard Homes in San Jose, CA | ADU Adventures EP023

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Willow Glen ADUs: Porch Lights and Backyard Homes in San Jose, CA | ADU Adventures EP023 · ADU Adventures: Building in Your Backyard

• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to ADU Adventures Building in Your Backyard.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I'm James, and I'm glad you're here.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Today's episode is a little different because for once I'm not visiting anywhere, I'm going back home.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: For several years I lived in a neighborhood in San Jose, California called Willow Glen.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't live in a house.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: I lived in an ADU.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: A backyard home, a short walk from downtown Willow Glen, on a street with big trees and front porches, and neighbors who actually knew my name.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: And every year on the last night of October, that neighborhood turned into something I haven't seen matched anywhere else in the city.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Halloween.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: And Willow Glen is not a holiday.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's an event.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking thousands of kids.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Whole blocks decorated like movie sets.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Parents tugging along takes on radio flyer wagons and sipping at their coffees.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you've ever been, you know what I'm talking about.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: And if you haven't, you might want to put it on your list.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: So that's today.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Willow Glen, the neighborhood that was once its own town.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: We'll dabble a little bit into the Halloween story of Willow Glen because, you know, it's the season.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And how it actually gives you a sense of what the community there is really like.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then we'll get on to the practical part, specific strategies for an ADU project in the Willow Glen neighborhood, because Willow Glen has its own quirks, and those are quirks that are often shared by a lot of the communities that we love throughout all of the state of California.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Plus, I've got a personal connection to Willow Glen because of those quirks, I experienced many of them.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: So let's dive in.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Willow Glen has a founding story that explains almost everything about it.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: In the 1920s, according to the San Jose Public Libraries Archive, the Southern Pacific Railroad proposed running a track straight through the community.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Willow Glen at the time was an unincorporated neighborhood of orchards and homes organized loosely around a school district that went back all the way to the 1860s.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: No city hall, no mayor, just people living their lives.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the people said no to the Pacific Railroad.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: They did something you almost never see.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: They incorporated themselves.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: In 1927, Willow Glen became its own city.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the San Jose Spotlight's reporting on the episode is clear about why.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Residents wanted the legal standing to keep the railroad from cutting through the middle of their neighborhood.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Not for a tax break, not for a civic kind of ego, but so that the train wouldn't run past their kids' bedrooms.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: The city of Willowgland lasted about nine years.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: In 1936, according to the library, residents voted to join San Jose mostly, the spotlight notes, to connect to the city's sewer system, practical people.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: They'd made their point with the railroad, they got what they needed, and then they moved on.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: But think about what that nine year city tells you about the place.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is a neighborhood that organized itself to protect its own streets, that decided what belonged there and what didn't, that was willing to do something hard and unusual to keep the character of the place intact.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And almost a century later, if you walk Lincoln Avenue or turn down any of the side streets, you can still feel it.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: The lots are old.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: The houses are from the 1920s, 30s and 40s, a lot of them are.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: The trees are enormous because nobody ever cut them down.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's a neighborhood that got to grow up on its own terms before the city even arrived.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the connection I want to make because it's going to matter in Act Three of this podcast.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: Willow Glen is not a neighborhood that says no to everything.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: It said no to a railroad.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: It said yes to a sewer.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: The difference was whether the thing fit.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: But before we go any further, I want to talk just a little bit about Halloween.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like I said before, it is the season.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to be clear what kind of claim this is because this is my opinion from living there and experiencing it myself year after year.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Sunset Magazine, in a 2019 roundup of Bay Area Trick-or-treating, pointed to Willow Glen as one of the San Jose neighborhoods to really look at.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's about as official as it gets, okay?
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: The rest is just me telling you what I saw.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: So here it is.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Starting in mid-October, the houses start to change.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: Not a pumpkin on a porch, but full installations.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Graveyards, fog machines, projection screens on garage doors, that smell of candles cooking the inside of all of the pumpkins.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's a competitive streak in Willow Glen too that comes out in every holiday, but in October is where it first emerges in the year.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then on the night itself, the streets are full.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean full.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Families from all over San Jose drive in and park wherever they can and walk the blocks around Lincoln Avenue with their kids.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: You see three generations on the sidewalk together, grandparents on the porch handing out candy, parents in the street with wagons, kids running ahead, having fun, laughing.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: It felt like the whole neighborhood had agreed to throw a giant party for every kid in the city, and the price of admission was a cute costume.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now here's what I noticed from inside the EDU.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: I was a renter at the time in a backyard, and I lived in the backyard of a family who had their own little kids who enjoyed a lot of these festivities.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I got to see it come to life every single year and have that connectivity with the rest of my neighborhood.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's the thing about Willow Glen, and that's the thing about Willow Glen Halloween.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: It really is visible.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's a neighborhood built for families in a city that has become very hard for families to afford.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: The Census Bureau put San Jose's median owner-occupied home value at$1.23 million.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the median household income is at about$146,000.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you from experience, Willow Glen is not the cheap part of that equation.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's the part people drive across the city to visit one night a year because they can't live there for the other 364.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, the census says 20% plus of San Jose residents are under 18.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's one in five.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Those kids need somewhere to go when they grow up.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And the grandparents handing out the candy on the porch needs somewhere to go when the stairs start to get hard to climb.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: So the Halloween crowd on the sidewalk is actually two different ADU conversations walking past each other.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: The first is the young family, the couple with the stroller who want their kids to grow up on a street like this and can't buy a house.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: For them, an ADU's the way in.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: It was for me.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: A backyard home in Willow Glen was how I got to live in Willow Glen.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: I could walk downtown, I could walk to the park.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: I knew the people on my block and they knew me, which in a city of nearly a million people is not a small thing.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: None of that required me to buy a house I couldn't afford.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: It required someone else to have built a second home on their lot.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And for the homeowner who builds that ADU, think about what you're actually doing.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: You're not just adding rental space.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: You're deciding who gets to live on your street.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: A teacher, a nurse, a young couple saving for their own place, someone's grown kid who wants to stay close.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: The neighborhood that incorporated a whole town to decide what belonged on its streets now gets to make the decision one backyard at a time.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's how you keep Willow Glen from turning into a place where only people who bought decades ago can afford to stay.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: The second is those grandparents on the porch passing out candy.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: The ones who've lived there 40 years and whose kids move to Morgan Hill because that's what they could afford.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that's if you're lucky, a lot of people move out of the state.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: For them, an ADU is how the family gets back together on the same lot.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: The grandparents move into the backyard home more times than not, which is a single level and ten steps from the kitchen.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the kids move into the house they grew up in.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the Halloween candy gets handed out from the same porch.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: It always was.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: That's family integrity planning.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we call it.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Keeping the family rooted in one place while the branches grow and the investment grows along with it.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: In Willow Glen, you can watch it happen from the sidewalk on October 31st every single year.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not all there is.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: So let's talk a little bit about strategy.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: This is the part that I actually lived.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing to understand is that San Jose has made the permit side of this about as fast as any big city in California can.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: The city has a pre-approved program, according to the city's own page.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's a list of standardized plans that have already been reviewed, and if your site plan and documents are accurate and complete, permits may be issued very quickly.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: That saves you enormous amounts of time and energy and design and gives you options that are ready almost out of the box as long as they fit on your property.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: You still need a site-specific plan, of course, showing where the unit sits on your lot, and the city recommends having a contractor, builder, or architect handle the permitting for you.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: But the design review that normally takes weeks and months is sped up significantly.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Acton ADU has pursued several pre-approved plans over the years with San Jose, and just recently submitted the first of several new Build Ready pre-approved plans from our Build Ready Library, which take that ease of use much further.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: Not only is the plan pre-designed and approved by the city, but the plan also comes with a variety of interior selections so that you can get the beautiful home that you need to fit in the lot that you have for a great price and a solid investment long term.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: The city also has what it calls the ADU universal checklist, which is a tool for figuring out whether your property qualifies before you spend money on anything.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's a good place to start, but we also recommend speaking with a professional who can do wider research on your individual property.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's usually called feasibility.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now for the Willow Glen specifics, because these are my observations from actually living there and from the projects we've done in the past.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: They're not regulations specifically, they're strategies associated to the place.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: The first one, respect the trees.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Willowglen's trees are the neighborhood.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: They're also the first thing that shapes where your ADU can go.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Before you fall in love with a plan, find out where the roots and the canopy are because a mature tree will decide your footprint for you.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: In my experience, the right answer is almost never remove the tree.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's move the ADU or adapt the ADU.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: A design build team that visits the lot before drawing anything will spot this.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: A plan picked off the website won't.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: The second is use the back of the lot like the 1930s did.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now here's what that means.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of Willow Gled homes from that era were built with detached garages in the rear, down a long driveway.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: That pattern is actually a gift.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: The driveway already exists, the utilities often run that direction a lot easier.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: The sight line from the street is already broken by the main house.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: And a garage conversion is potentially an option, though my experience with Willow Glen is that a lot of the garages are not up to snuff in terms of habitability, and you're very likely going to have to remove the garage and replace it with a new detached unit to meet all of the parameters and make sure you're not spending too much money on a structure that may not be worth the investment.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: The third is matching the main house, not necessarily the catalog.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Willow Glen said no to a railroad because it didn't fit and it bothered their way of life.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Your neighbors will feel the same way about a flat-roofed glass box behind a 1928 Spanish Revival, I can guarantee it.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: San Jose's pre-approved plans are a starting point, but they're not the finishing line.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: The exterior, the roof line, the window proportions, and the color all matter in Willow Glen.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's where an ADU either belongs or doesn't.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: This is exactly what Acton ADU's Build Ready Library was meant to address, so that there would be a variety of options for your exterior that would get you more than halfway to matching the exterior of your home and the feel of your neighborhood.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: You start from a plan that's already been reviewed, and then designer curated exterior packages make it look like it belongs there.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Fast permit and the right house.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: The fourth is to think about a porch.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: This is the Halloween lesson.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: If grandparents are going to live in the eighty, give them a front facing door, a covered entry, a place to sit outside.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Not just because of October thirty first, it's not like you're gonna have trick-or-treaters in the backyard.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: But something to think about is that connectivity, the outdoor connectivity between the main house and the small house.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because the thing that makes Willow Glen work is people on porches.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: And an ADU with a blank wall facing the yard takes someone out of the neighborhood instead of putting them in it.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it takes them out of the family connectivity instead of creating more of it.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Number five is to build at once.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Willow Glen homes are eighty and ninety years old and still standing because they were built right the first time.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: Your ADU should be the same bet.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: The pre-approved program gets you speed, but it doesn't necessarily get you quality.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Quality is the part you choose.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: One design build company team from the site visit to the final inspection.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: So the plan that was reviewed in the building department that gets built and the details that make it fit the neighborhood and the finish that makes it worth it don't get lost in the handoff.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Number six, make sure you sequence it right.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the order I'd follow because I've watched families do it backward and pay for it.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I've done it myself with my own ADU on my parents' property in San Jose.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Run the city's universal checklist first.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't give you everything, but it gives you some sense of what's going on on your property.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Then reach out to a qualified design build company or ADU specialist that can provide you some options and walk you through what is called feasibility.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Feasibility is basically the process of doing real research that's far deeper than the universal ADU checklist to tell you what can be done on your properties so you have a sense of what your budget actually needs to be.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not just talking about the box of the ADU itself because that's not where the surprises are.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about all the site work.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: Site work is really critical to an ADU project.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: These are the things like utility hookups, sewer hookups, trees in a Willow Glen that can significantly alter your plans.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Then once you've chosen a partner, see what kind of library of ADUs they have already.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's a lot less expensive to choose a pre-designed, pre-curated plan than it is to build a custom plan.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's also a lot less expensive to modify an already designed plan.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: The last thing you'll need to do is make sure that you have exterior options that match the home, and that you have a team that can represent you in the city to get that permit as fast as possible with as little hang ups as possible, because permitting an ADU is no easy task.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: It takes experience.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: The last part is building it, making sure that you have a production team that's skilled, experienced, and capable of having an attention to detail that's going to give you the ADU that you desire.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: One more thing the city allows that I want to mention honestly, and I'm jumping to this, but San Jose's ADU page says tiny homes on wheels are permitted on single family properties, with a simpler and lower cost permit process.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: But it should be noted that tiny homes and ADUs are very different from each other.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: An ADU is a permanent structure that has the same fit and finish and feel as a single family home.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: A tiny house on wheels is far more temporary, not built to the same standards, and can't be expected to weather the same 80 to 90 year footprint as a main home in Willowglen.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: For some families, it's the right call, but I'll give you my opinion ultimately.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: In a neighborhood where the homes are 80 to 90 years old, and the whole point is permanence, a home on wheels is kind of a different bet.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: It solves this year's problem, but it's not a long-term solution.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not going to be standing there for you 30 years from now.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the Willow Glen playbook.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: Trees first, back lot, match the house, face the street, build it once, and your lot is the thing that determines your budget more than anything else.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now you got me thinking about this now that I've been discussing this Willow Glen experience.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: I want to tell you what I remember about living in the ADU.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the Halloween crowds, honestly, though that was fun every single year, but it's the walk home.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: Downtown Willow Glen was a few minutes on foot.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: Lincoln Avenue, coffee, dinner, the bookstore, Hickleby's, the hardware store.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'd walk home at night down streets where every house had a story, and every tree was older than my parents, and I'd turn down the driveway, past the main house with its lights on, and I'd let myself into a home that was mine, a neighborhood I could never have bought into, at least not yet.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's what an ADU did for me.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't just give me a place to live, it gave me a place to belong, and it gave me a community.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what I understand now that I didn't exactly then.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: The homeowners that built that unit didn't build it for me.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: They built it for their own reasons, years before I showed up, and then life changed.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that unit was there.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it became the way a stranger got to live on their street and build relationships with my neighbors and walk downtown, or to hand out candy to the kids.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's what you're building when you build an AVU.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: You're building the next 30 years of someone's life, and you don't fully know whose.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe your mother's, maybe your kids, maybe grandpa, and maybe for a while just a regular guy who will never forget living there.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: The people of Willow Glen incorporated a whole town to decide what belonged on their streets.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think a backyard home that lets a family stay or lets a new one arrive belongs in Willow Glen.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I think everybody that I live next to would think so too.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for spending this time with me today.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for letting me go home for an episode, and thank you for being a part of this conversation.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you're in San Jose, California, or if you're in Willow Glen, or in the Bay Area, and you've got a backyard, a long driveway, and a family that's getting harder to keep around, I'd love for you to take one step.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: Give us a call.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: Acton ADU has been designing and building here for more than 35 years.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: We're based in Campbell, which means Willow Glen is our neighbor.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: We have pre-approved plans with the city of San Jose and more in the works.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: And we know what it takes to make one of them look like it belongs behind a Willow Glen home.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: No middlemen, no surprises, just one team.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: From the first sightwalk to the day someone turns down your driveway and lets themselves in.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: So visit actinadu.com or give us a call at 408-539-1908 anywhere in California, and we'll set up a free consultation.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're thinking about timing, here's a thought.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: The families who start this fall are the ones handing out candy from a new porch next October.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm James.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: This has been ADU Adventures, Building in the Backyard, and I'll see you next time.