Sweating the Little Things

The freedom to build in-law suites and home additions is crucial, even if it doesn't get us all the way to housing "abundance."

Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free.

Looking back over the stories this newsletter has covered over this past year, much of the focus has been on bigger-swing reforms aimed at meaningfully increasing aggregate housing supply as a means of reducing overall housing costs.

That's important work. As the name might suggest, the much-in-vogue "abundance" agenda is focused on boosting aggregate levels of supply of housing, along with infrastructure, medical innovations, and all other good things.

The big-picture improvements that can come from robust reform are, of course, important. An exclusively macro focus can, however, undersell the benefits of making it easy for everyday property owners to carry out a million micro projects on their own land.

A triplex reform here or an impact fee reduction there might not do much for overall rates of housing construction. But they do return to property owners a little bit more freedom to use their land as they see fit.

A little more choice and ease of doing business is important all by itself, even if it doesn't move the top-line numbers on housing costs and housing supply.

So, to make up for this newsletter's perhaps excessive focus on those big swings, this week's issue includes a few smaller-scale projects that ran into their own absurd obstacles.

First, we cover the case of a Maryland woman who went through permitting hell just in an effort to add a bathroom to her family's detached garage. Second, we have a story on a Florida homeowner being asked to fork over half of his front lawn to the government as a condition of adding a few rooms to his house.

Lastly, for some good news, we cover a Kansas business owner's successful lawsuit against a town ordinance saying he couldn't paint burgers on the side of his burger shop.

Also, today is the last day of Reason's Webathon. If you've enjoyed this newsletter, please consider donating here to support our work. Just like with ADUs, every little bit counts.

Anyway, on with the newsletter.

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A Story of ADU Development Hell

Baltimore County homeowner Marly Milic and her husband had a pretty simple goal of converting their detached garage into a livable suite for her mother-in-law.

The physical demands of the project were all pretty straightforward. The most difficult part was adding a bathroom to the garage. Milic assumed the permitting requirements would be pretty straightforward too.

Instead, she describes a process so complicated and exacting that she's given up on the project entirely. "The county just won't let us do it. It's been absolutely impossible," she tells Reason.

Milic says she spent several months attempting to get clear answers to basic questions from county staff about what specific permissions she'd need and which requirements she'd need to meet.

The big question mark was whether the addition of a bathroom to the garage counted as a simple home addition or the creation of an "accessory apartment."

County staff, she says, would demand she come in person to ask questions and then decline to give definitive or on-the-record answers about what she'd need to do. A contractor she hired to deal with the permitting issues ran into the same roadblocks.

Eventually, Milic said she was told that adding a bathroom to her garage would qualify it as an accessory unit project. This meant she had to go to the zoning board to get approval, which in turn would require hiring a lawyer and a structural engineer to produce all the necessary designs and paperwork.

Any permit she'd be given would also be temporary, meaning that she'd have to renew it every two years. Because Baltimore County has an owner-occupancy requirement that prohibits non-family members from living in accessory apartments, she'd also have to prove that her mother-in-law lived in the unit rent-free and alert the county if that changed.

Milic describes that last requirement as "kind of a crappy thing to think about. They're saying when your mom dies, you have to tell us."

This past year, Maryland enacted a new law requiring counties to allow accessory dwelling units (ADUs) as a permitted use on properties that already sport a single-family home.

However, Maryland counties don't need to update their own ADU policies until October 2026, meaning the law comes too late to help Milic.

The bill is also a rather modest reform that still allows localities to attach conditions that could make technically legal ADUs impractical to build, says Tom Coale, a Maryland-based land-use attorney with the firm Perry Jacobson.

Baltimore County is not necessarily unique from other jurisdictions when it comes to unnavigable permitting processes, he says. A lot of the problems can be sourced to inconsistent definitions between overlapping state and local regulatory definitions. Compliance with one set of rules can often make it difficult to comply with the other.

Additionally, Coale says that ADUs are a relatively new product in Maryland. Where they fit in the regulatory framework is often unclear to local permitting staff, let alone homeowners, despite the recent state-level efforts to streamline their construction.

Coale says counties that want to make ADUs both legal and practical should create a simplified checklist for prospective ADU builders to follow.

"Have a checklist, make it as cookie-cutter as possible," says Coale. "The gap between something being legal and being practical needs to be closed."

ADU reform is one of the lowest-hanging pieces of fruit in the YIMBY ("yes in my backyard") playbook. State legislatures looking to boost housing supply typically start with a bill encouraging in-law suites and granny flats.

But as Milic's experience makes clear, making even these simple projects feasible for the average homeowner requires far-reaching deregulation and streamlining.

It took California decades of effort before state-level ADU legalization started to yield actual units. Hopefully, Maryland will catch on quicker.

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Miami Wants To Take Your Yard for Free

In the 1987 case Nollan v. California Coastal Commission, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for California officials to force a pair of homeowners to grant the government an easement across their land in exchange for a building permit for a home expansion.

The thrust of the Nollan ruling was that the government couldn't use the permitting process as a mere opportunity to extort property from permit applicants. Permitting demands had to be related to mitigating some impact the proposed project would have.

Despite that ruling coming down four decades ago, and a subsequent decision in the Dolan v. City of Tigard case clarifying it, local governments still struggle with the limits of what they're allowed to ask for during the permitting process.

See the city of Miami, which has for years now been demanding that homeowners turn over their front yards to the government as a condition of receiving building permits for simple home expansions.

One homeowner, Chad Trausch, was asked to turn over half of his yard in order to get permission to build a two-bedroom, two-bathroom home extension.

Trausch is now suing the city of Miami, claiming that the city's demands are the exact kind of extortion that Nollan prohibits.

"Frankly, it doesn't appear that Miami has heard of Nollan or Dolan," says Suranjan Sen, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, which is representing Trausch. "They seem to think the land-use process is their opportunity to demand whatever they want."

Miami's purpose for demanding the front lawns of Trausch and other property owners is to acquire land for a future expansion of the public right of way.

Acquiring land for that purpose would require either voluntary purchases or eminent domain, which requires compensating property owners.

Instead, the city is trying to get that land for free via the permitting process, a tactic Trausch's complaint describes as "systematically extorting" permit applicants.

One Miami official estimates that it has demanded hundreds of homeowners turn over land for expanded rights of way in recent years. By the Institute for Justice's estimate, roughly 1,000 additional homeowners would face similar unconstitutional demands should they try to pull building permits today.

Cases alleging the government has attached "unconstitutional conditions" to a building permit usually deal with more peripheral issues—like whether demands for in-lieu fees count as demands for property, or if "legislative exactions" created by city councils should be treated the same as ad hoc exactions demanded by local bureaucrats.

Miami's demanded easements are contrastingly almost identical to the permitting condition that was ruled unconstitutional in Nollan. The fact that the similarity didn't stop the city from imposing those conditions, or property owners from submitting to them, is evidence of just how coercive the permitting process can be.

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Court Upholds the Freedom To Paint Burgers on Your Burger Restaurant

Back in 2023, town officials in Salina, Kansas, told Steve Howard that he had to pause painting of a burger-themed mural on the side of his burger-serving restaurant, The Cozy Inn.

The town was concerned that art depicting a product that Howard's business sold converted his mural into a sign. And signs in Salina, like in most localities, must comply with a lot more rules about size and dimensions than murals.

With the help of the Kansas Justice Institute, Howard sued the town in federal court. His mural only ran afoul of town regulations because of the images it showed, which he argued was a pure content-based restriction that violated the First Amendment.

Late last month, a U.S. District Court Judge for the District of Kansas ruled in Howard's favor.

"It would seem illogical to argue that a hamburger-based display on a building housing a hamburger restaurant implicates interests requiring prohibition whereas that same display across the street on a building housing another business, perhaps a pizza restaurant, implicates none of those concerns," wrote District Court Judge Toby Crouse.

Surprised as you might be to hear it, cases like Howard's are not unprecedented. Arlington, Virginia, has forced pizza restaurants to cover up pizza murals and dog groomers to paint some other animal.

Earlier this year, a donut shop in Conway, New Hampshire, successfully challenged that town's order to cover up its own donut-themed mural.

Letting businesses paint murals of stuff they sell on the side of their buildings might not push out total factor productivity by much. But it does make regulations a little more sane and the world a little more colorful.

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Quick Links

• The Institute for Justice has released model single-room occupancy legislation. Read Rent Free's coverage of the fall of rooming houses here.
• The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has approved a citywide "family zoning" plan championed by Mayor Daniel Lurie. Read Rent Free's past coverage of the family zoning plan and the state pressure that led to it.
• The House has officially stripped bipartisan housing reforms from a must-pass national defense policy bill. Those reforms passed out of the Senate as part of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. Read more about what those housing reforms would do here.
• The National Association of Realtors says the typical age of first-time homebuyers is 40. No one else seems to think that's right.
• There's a new challenge to inclusionary zoning out of Massachusetts.