ADUs seem like a bandaid solution for lack of housing supply in desirable areas. Not that I think they shouldn't be legal, but we're talking about paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for what amounts to a shed in someone else's backyard just because you want to live in Seattle, SF, etc.
It's so bizarre, and if this solution is taken to its logical end, you literally have cities full of single-family homes with a class of SFH owners, and their second-class ADU "owners" who live in the fancy shed behind their home. I'm curious how the inevitable legal disputes between these two classes of owners will be treated in the coming years.
They are absolutely a bandaid for the politics of homeowners and their rule of housing supply.
Homeowners can see themselves benefitting from ADUs, so they support them. Apartments, townhomes, etc. only weaken their market power, make homeowners think about traffic, etc.
The politics of housing is completely broken because the incentives are broken, and so is the political discourse, which is dominated by creationist-level magical thinking that vacancies, or foreign buyers, or AirBNB, or "financialization" or literally anything could be the cause of the problem rather than a shortage of housing stock.
ADUs are one relatively small tool for providing additional supply of housing in places where it is politically hard to do so. There is no way they will solve the problem on their own, but they do help, and we need all the help we can get.
As far as being "sheds", plenty of them are quite nice and well done. Small yes, but small units are perfectly appropriate for, say retirees, or students, or many other demographics.
In a different time, they were called "Granny units". A place where someone who doesn't need much can live, and remain local to their entire support system and social network.
> In a different time, they were called "Granny units". A place where someone who doesn't need much can live, and remain local to their entire support system and social network.
Yah, but this is different from when we have a separate marketplace of these units. They're going to end up unbundled from the nearby house pretty quickly.
It's an odd political outcome, but serves as a model for other housing shapes.
The state defined specific things a city has to approve and a timeline they have to approve it in. Poof, we have ~100,000 new homes and a cottage industry building them that didn't exist beforehand. It's hard to blame the housing shortage on anything other than NIMBY municipalities.
We already have townhouses (that share a wall but own their own land) and condos (which share land and the building). There are also well-established legal precedents for things like easements (e.g., for access, water, sewer, see [1]).
I'm not saying this is a good idea, but is it really that different?
In Seattle, ADU/DADU are built in Single Family House zone, you can tear down a single family house, build 1 main + 1 ADU + 1 DADU which is total of 3 without zoning change, then you can sell all 3 of them as Condos, require buyers share something like water bill.
Townhouse has to be build on the areas that are up zoned by the city.
> and their second-class ADU "owners" who live in the fancy shed behind their home
The primary home is not upper class; it’s the worse of the two units. It just becomes two houses without backyards. I’ve seen such houses for sale in Seattle. An old house with a big yard on a 5000 sqft lot turns into an old house + a new house, both without backyard. The new unit is not second-class; it is a nice house but just without backyard.
I’ve resigned myself to the fact that California has signed a suicide pact with real estate speculators that can’t be revoked because of the political consequences of enacting policies that cause prices to go down or even stabilize.
Like with the homeless crisis (which is the direct result of the housing crisis), the state will waste billions doing anything and everything to look like they’re working on the problem, while actually doing nothing meaningful because the meaningful things would cost said speculators money. This ADU law is the perfect example. More opportunity to speculate while doing nothing to make housing more affordable or available.
This is why individuals being able to ask "cui bono?" is sorely needed in a democracy, unfortunately the population votes largely based on tribalism and sentiment. Proposition 13 was passed under the guise of not pricing grandma out of the house she grew old in while largely benefiting corporate interests. I'm sure whenever such legislation is introduced there's a massive asymmetry of information since big money that stands to make big money can spend big money on drowning out dissenting opinions.
Absolutely not. Areas with higher levels of addiction or mental health issues do not have out homelessness problems.
There may be a small causal arrow where homelessness causes some addiction or mental health issues, or a very small arrow where addiction or mental health causes some to be homeless, but the bulk of the problem is high housing costs.
> The homeless crisis is better described as a mental health and substance abuse and addiction crisis.
It is not always like that. I met people who are homeless and living in the car, they don't have mental health, substance or addiction problem. They are homeless because they couldn't afford the housing cost (including apartments).
The homeless crisis is a direct result of the housing rising costs. Los Angeles and San Diego in Southern California have increasing homeless population due to housing cost. I remember 12 years ago, LA downtown have a smaller homeless popultion and they are usually out of the way. I visited my friend this year who lives in LA and homeless people are in every block of downtown which is barely a thing 12 years ago. This is the result of the housing cost crisis.
You might be wondering why the homeless couldn't move to somewhere else? The thing is they can't because metropolis cities have a better social services they can provide for homeless populations and larger access to facilities within a block than a suburban or rural cities. Majority of them don't have access to transportation that they can afford.
30 years ago, the homeless are a result of mental health, substance abuse and addiction crisis. Now, that changes because of other factors such as rising housing costs which is a bigger factor.
…is what you say if you’re a real estate speculator trying to distract from root causes. Housing affordability and homelessness are directly correlated:
> A large body of academic research has consistently found that homelessness in an area is driven by housing costs, whether expressed in terms of rents, rent-to-income ratios, price-to-income ratios, or home prices. Further, changes in rents precipitate changes in rates of homelessness: homelessness increases when rents rise by amounts that low-income households cannot afford. Similarly, interventions to address housing costs by providing housing directly or through subsidies have been effective in reducing homelessness. That makes sense if housing costs are the main driver of homelessness, but not if other reasons are to blame. Studies show that other factors have a much smaller impact on homelessness.
Housing is expensive in desirable places. These areas are also traditionally quite affluent and liberal -- because you need to be relatively rich to live there. As a result, they tend to be much more accommodating to the homeless and addiction. That doesn't mean housing prices in LA/SF/Miami/NYC are the reason homeless people gravitate there but it does explain a correlation.
These are just unsupported assertions unless you can disprove the wide body of research I linked to that demonstrates rates of homelessness and housing affordability are strongly correlated. Many “red” cities and states have higher rates of drug abuse, mental illness, and crime, but less homelessness. Why? Because housing is affordable in those places so people do drugs and have mental illness while sheltered. It’s honestly not that complicated. It seems like you’re trying to obfuscate these documented realities to suit your own narrative.
It's both. The homeless that are most visible in large cities definitely have some of the above going on, but a good chunk of the population is living in a car just because they got priced out.
I am also confused by this statement. The most generous interpretation I have is that this number is quite high, and therefore, the bar to being more 'affordable' than this is 'low' in that selling, say, a $500,000 ADU appears quite affordable in comparison. I don't know though, it obviously all seems quite absurd. The other interpretation might be that SFH are far more than this, but one would think you would include the average price of SFH when making such a point.
Yes, think of it like this. Prices are super high. A house costs one dump truck full of money. The goal of a program like this is to create something that costs, say, half a dump truck of money instead of a whole dump truck. It's affordable, in a relative sense. Or less unaffordable if you prefer.
In normal circumstances (with prices that aren't super high), you wouldn't be able to call $610,000 affordable. But here, you can. So the bar is low. The label has loose criteria.
Yes, the bar for affordability is low, meaning high prices are still considered affordable in that market. The bar measures what is considered affordable, not the price.
As in "this 748 square foot property was deemed 'affordable' when priced at $610k" - the implication being that it's a low bar to call something affordable, not that it's a low bar to _actually be_ affordable.
edit: sorry, this was already said by multiple other people - apparently had an outdated thread in the browser, those comments weren't there when I hit reply!
The problem with San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver (BC), and other cities with housing issues is simple, Americans seem to hate apartments, everyone wants houses, so most of the cities are zoned for SFH (Seattle and Vancouver for sure).
If you built 10 floor buildings everywhere, with 2/3 bedroom apartments, even at 1 apartment per floor, housing stops being an issue in 5 years.
However, go to Seattle, San Francisco and Vancouver, out of their downtowns, houses everywhere.
Housing is a solved issue, cities in Asia and Latin America with the same surface area as SF, Seattle and Vancouver fit 3x to 4x more people, but they build up and increase density.
All these housing threads are frustrating because of this, just build buildings.
> The fetishization of single-family housing comes from planners
From what I read, the fetishization comes from already homeowners who want to have their cake (a house) and eat it too (making it an asset that appreciates).
Since voting is non mandatory in USA, voters tend to skew old and/or homeowner, both of which like to maintain the status quo, hence favoring policies that keep it.
Polling shows that there's only a slight preference for single family homes. Yet the land usage is absolutely dominated by bans on apartments.
If preferences really were so strong for single family homes, there wouldn't have to be a legal ban on other forms of housing.
This stranglehold on the housing problem, by a few politicians and a small number of homeowners banning others from living their preferred way of life, is the true cause of the shortage.
> Polling shows that there's only a slight preference for single family homes.
So, 51% vs 49% ? That's still half of the people wanting houses.
I agree that regulations are to blame, and most of the voters vote against housing, because people in the us who vote are mostly the boomers, who are mostly homeowners, hence increasing the value on their home.
I think it's more like 60% with a stated preference for single family home over a walkability to amenities.
But this is stated preference, not the true preference as revealed by having to put money on the line. And markets prove time and time again that opinion polls do not match up with actual behavior. IMHO, I would suspect more people would choose walkability over SFH than the polls suggest, but I could also be wrong and maybe it would swing the other way.
In any case, the market is not allowed to meet consumer demand because of the ubiquity of apartment bans in cities.
I have a feeling that if we did more voting rather than backroom deals with a veneer of "public input" where the only people who provide input are busybodies, then we would not have apartment bans at 90% of land area in most cities. (I say "busybody" as a busybody myself, I had to start being one to push back against the housing policy that was causing so many of my friends to move away!)
"Housing" might be a "solved issue" in "Asia" but that's absurdly reductionist. Quality of life is not solved. Breathing your neighbors vape and cigarette smoke is not solved. Hearing pounding bass through every adjacent wall is not solved. Lack of your own yard is not solved. There are thousands of human problems that arise in condensed compressed living.
No, these totally are solved problems. What apartments are you living in ?
Why is your neighbors smoke entering your house ? In my country, everyone cooks highly aromatic food, and even then I can't tell what my neighbors are cooking....let alone smell their vape or cigarettes.
Why can you hear pounding bass from our neighbor ? Sound isolation is a solved problem. The thin-walls problem is one I've experienced only after I arrived in the US.
Not sure why lack of a yard is a problem at all. What is a yard, except empty green grass ? If it is a communal space to host events, then lots of condo towers have common downstairs areas that can be reserved for free. If it is a garden, then you can easily have patio gardens. Hell, I've seen more gardens in apartments back home (since home cooking is the norm), than I have in yard in the US. If is a backyard, ie. ourdoors private space, then large patios facilitate the exact same outdoors privacy. If it is a playground, then you'll be pleased to know that most apartment complexes in Asia have playgrounds. And guess what? It comes with the community you need to actually form a team to use the playground.
It would be one thing if every time I visited the suburbs, if I saw yards being a communal source of activity, happiness and personality that people claim they are. On the contrary, I find that it is miles upon miles on completely empty plots with consistent green grass that has not been stepped on for days.
My current apartment in downtown US city has a massive common lounge area and a massive rooftop with a view of the city. We have a large enough patio and I have never heard sounds from my neighbors because it uses bricks rather than dry-wall. (And I live in the THE SPOT for young rich spoiled 20-something). It does everything you get from an SFH, but better. (assuming similar capital investment)
Thanks for validating my point, in America it's more a cultural issue I think, everyone is still hung up on getting a house with the yard and the white fence with a car like the 1950s, unfortunately that was 70 years ago.
This comment is literally the point I was trying to make, thank you very much, I couldn't ask for a more typical american answer.
If you want to live in a city, and not pay sky high rent, these are going to be some small issues you will have to work with. I say small, because the alternative is not having housing, or paying half of your salary in rent/mortgage.
The bass is solved, have the HOA or condo board apply fines for loud noises, which grow exponentially with each infraction.
Lack of your own yard? Go to a park, I lived in Vancouver in an apartment, and I had a ton of parks nearby, same in other cities I've lived in.
Having a house in a city is luxury, not a need, a home is a need, but that can be an apartment.
Yeah, it’s unlikely that San Francisco’s current majority at the Board of Supervisors would opt in to this program. Both because they are hostile to housing in general and because they have a special aversion to condominiums (which they likely conflate with an unrelated displacement issue when existing apartments are converted to condos and the tenants are evicted).
To be fair, however, they did pass an ordinance that allows up to 6 units per lot and condo subdivision, but the catch is that the extra units are rent controlled, making them less appealing for unsophisticated buyers (https://sfbos.org/sites/default/files/o0210-22.pdf).
Rent control (and to a lesser degree below market rate units) itself seems to be a huge problem that's impossible to unwind, since all it does is arbitrarily grant exemptions to the rising cost of housing while exacerbating the overall problem. There are plenty of affluent people who have a have a rent controlled pied a terre in SF that they've had for 20 years while spending most of their time in their house in Sonoma.
If we had high speed rail, areas along the rail line would be better suited to have people live along the route, and distributing housing affordability across a larger area. See the Shinkansen in Japan as a good example.
https://hir.harvard.edu/high-speed-rail-affordable-housing/
US standard of living is decreasing and will never come back. Many economic anomalies can be observed to prove this: inflation is just one. But I think the most dangerous anomaly has been real estate.
In, what is ostensibly the most progressive, most prosperous state in the union, you can build a "mini house" (accessory dwelling unit) on your property and rent it out. The ideal target market would be my generation (millennials) and the next (Gen Z), bc we can't afford homes in CA.
And now, you can even "monetize" your ADU...sometimes the free market does bizarre things.
Question - how long will this last before the young say "enough" and vote for politicians that just redistribute assets? Bc that historically has not worked well.
Well, they also support property rights, not just freedom.
"Selling" your ADU would either require dividing up the parcel (which I am guessing is nontrivial in most places) or somehow itemizing improvements on the parcel so that the ADU owner can pay taxes for their unit separately from the main home on the property.
No reason to figure out a solution to any of this when housing isn't much of a problem there.
> Question - how long will this last before the young say "enough" and vote for politicians that just redistribute assets? Bc that historically has not worked well.
The NIMBYs: they don't pay their fair share of property taxes (because prop 13). They oppose building new housing to drive up their property values, but this doesn't increase their property taxes because prop 13
A start would be this: repealing prop 13 and forcing the NIMBYs to pay their fair share of property taxes. Make them sleep in the bed that they've made for themselves
What's the problem with being able to sell your ADU? Wouldn't this possibly incentivize more ADU building thus supplying more housing units to the market?
> What's the problem with being able to sell your ADU?
There is nothin "wrong" or "right" about free market economics bc there is no concept of morality in free market economics. It is what it is.
But it is the clearest of signals of what is going - US standard of living has peaked and is going down.
> Wouldn't this possibly incentivize more ADU building thus supplying more housing units to the market?
Is that trend that benefits me? I do not think so, I do not want to live in a ADU nor do I want one on my property, nor do I want to live in a community that has ADUs.
Its not the only way to grow. You can grow through productivity too. Problem is that corporate shareholders "hoarded" the productivity value that was created with stock buy-backs instead of raising wages.
Since 2008, corporation buy back stock over investing in capex or raising wages. From my intuition, it is bc they were so scarred by the 2008-2010 GFC, that they have been anticipating another crash since, even though it was over 10 years ago.
Here are some instances of what CEOs do when they are flush with cash:
- A top Trump adviser’s startling response to CEOs not doing what he’d expect [1]
> "As Cohn sat comfortably onstage, a Journal editor asked the crowd to raise their hands if their company plans to invest more if the tax reform bill passes. Very few hands went up. Cohn looked surprised. “Why aren't the other hands up?” he said." [1]
> Make no mistake: The proportion of net income distributed to the shareholders of S&P 500 corporations is indeed high. From 2007 to 2016, the S&P 500 firms paid out $7 trillion to shareholders—$4.2 trillion through repurchases and $2.8 trillion through dividends—representing 96% of net income. Microsoft was one of the top cash distributors, paying out a total of $188 billion to shareholders. [2]
> In 2011, Senate Democrats, arguing against another repatriation tax holiday, issued a report asserting that the previous effort had actually cost the United States Treasury $3.3 billion, and that companies receiving the tax breaks had thereafter cut over 20,000 jobs." [3]
All of this signals pessimism in the upper ranks of corporate america.
If people can't own a home do they cease to exist? Weird how "overpopulating" comes up when discussing homes for people that are here already, but not other issues like jobs or office construction.
Grumpy NIMBYs. The state's ADU laws override local zoning requirements such as minimum setbacks, allowing their neighbors to build "horrible monstrosities" that "violate the spirit of the community".
The idea is degrading. A generation of people for which the only feasible path to home ownership is living in a mobile/kit home in someone else’s backyard.
To elaborate: this would be a fine policy IFF it were accompanied by other legislation that meaningfully improved the affordability of non-ADU homes as well.
Such as? Isn't the ADU going to be more affordable than the non-ADU home by definition (unless the ADU is actually larger than the house that was there first)?
First off, a lot of people jumped on the tiny home bandwagon in recent years, some seem to like them. Second, an ADU in a decent neighborhood would probably be a lot quieter than the various condo/townhouse/apartment options. Thirdly, it's not like they have to live in the ADU forever - if they could buy/sell it they'd actually have some equity built up for moving up to something bigger.
Plenty of new housing has been built-- luxury (mostly vacant) condos in downtowns and McMansions in the burbs. The real issue is affordability. Housing has been turned into a speculative commodity.
This is bullshit and lies.
Almost nothing has been built compared to the past. There are not mostly vacant luxury condos in downtowns.
As is this absolute canard "the real issue is affordability." Well obviously. But where does the unaffrodability come from? What gives landlords and home sellers the power to price far above average incomes?
It's a shortage of housing. If there was enough housing they simply could not price at unaffordable prices, because there would be no buyers.
The simple inability to see this is like some Jedi mind trick that landlords and real estate interests have played on the populace. We need to fully reject any ideology that has been saying that there's enough housing, because it's a bad and harmful ideology.
Again, absolute BS. No better example of this than LA. The type of new housing being built is small condos. Previously affordable housing is becoming unaffordable. That's not because of new units, that's because of a shortage.
Crappy little homes all over the city spiral up in price. Meanwhile a small number of apartments and condos are built downtown, and people publish fake studies about how there are vacancies, and the studies have to be retracted within days.
Everybody focuses on the new as if that's causing the problem, rather than seeing that there's massive massive overcrowding everywhere, lower income people are commuting massive distances, and what used to be working class neighborhoods have homes selling at prices that require household incomes of more than $500k/year.
The problem is a massive shortage. (And massive corruption in the permitting process, how many LA pols are facing felonies now because of denying housing so that they can take bribes to let a few things through?)
LA is indeed a great example. Your YIMBY laws at the state level are being used to override local zoning to build McMansions in the highest fire risk areas like the San Gabriel Valley foothills, along with bulldozing existing rent-controlled affordable housing near transit to build more luxury condos.
And yes, just take a drive into DTLA any night of the week and see the vacancies for yourself: 2/3 of the luxury condo units are dark, night after night after night. Good luck getting data from the parasitic real estate sector for a proper study. Those condos are bank accounts for foreign money laundering, which is probably why FINCEN recently announced that they're going to finally crack down on it.
The best part of your response was this though:
>how many LA pols are facing felonies now because of denying housing so that they can take bribes to let a few things through?
Huizar is the poster boy for this and he was taking bribes from the worst luxury condo developers of them all to build in downtown, razing the existing affordable rentals. Not to mention he went along with literally every big housing project that came his way for Boyle Heights (Vegas hotel/strippers/poker chips included or not), as detailed in "The Sellout".
I agree with you that there's a shortage, but the conversion of housing into a speculative commodity is a much bigger problem than a lack of construction, which is why there are well over 5 million vacant homes in this country (that we know of). AirBnB, Wall Street hedge funds purchasing single family homes, get rich quick flippers, are all driving the affordability problem.
Please do just a bit of thinking about vacancy. The idea that anyone would purposely let a unit they own sit empty for 10 years is ridiculous, and doesn't happen.
We need vacant units so people can move around. I guess in your perfect world there is 0% vacancy? Please, tell me, how would anyone move to a new city in that world?
yeah....
Also, rent control doesn't work. It never has. And never will.
> The legislation could be a major benefit to senior citizens on a fixed income who often can’t afford to move, whether because of high interest rates or capital gains taxes incurred by selling a long-time home.
A group that is extremely small - and we pretend like every grandma in the world lived in a little cottage in Hollywood that's now worth $3m - and whatever would she do if she had to 1031 into rental properties and live lavishly literally anywhere else in the world.
We have to think about all the poor multi-millionaire grandmas and not the current generation that can't afford to own a home and start a family - which is a looming demographic disaster.
It's fine if your kids can't afford to live where they grew up. But it's not fine if grandma has to take a $3m windfall and move to the mountains, or Mexico, or Europe, or literally anywhere.
> We have to think about all the poor multi-millionaire grandmas and not the current generation that can't afford to own a home and start a family
I think it comes from a distaste for low-income housing.
California law requires a fraction of new developments to be low-income housing. Because Cupertino doesn't want that, but does want to build, they created low-income housing for seniors only. (Also you get priority if you've lived in Cupertino, famously-affordable Cupertino, for a certain number of years.)
TL; DR Think of the millionaire grandmas is a convenient way to dodge low-income housing requirements.
>1031 into rental properties and live lavishly literally anywhere else in the world.
That is an optimistic spin on a situation that can play out in several ways. What you describe is the best possible outcome. Another, pessimistic, way of phrasing that is that you're kicking out grandma because she is too poor to pay the taxes. Nevermind if it's the place where she raised a family, built a house, and had an entire life's worth of memories. She should be forced to move somewhere else to make room for Hollywood producer man and his mistress?
The economic incentive to build housing and lower prices already exists. I can buy a piece of land that has 1 house on it, bulldoze the house, and then build a multi-unit condo on it (easily quadrupling the number of people who can live on that piece of land). I will make a ton of money doing that because 3 extra families can live there and all pay me for the housing. If you let this take on a city-wide basis, prices will come down. However that incentive has been effectively killed because the city has something called "zoning". Which means the city mandates exactly what is allowed to be built on each parcel of land, in excruciating detail. If you don't believe me just google "FAVORITE-CITY zoning ordinance". The vast majority of housing in cities and towns in the US is zoned as "single family" which means that even if you own a piece of land and want to build more housing, the city will not allow you. To change this you have to go to the city zoning board and ask them to change the zoning for your land. Guess who the people on that zoning board are? People who own single family homes in the city. They do NOT want to see the character of their neighborhood change, they will deny your request in a heartbeat.
So we're prioritizing the "character" of our neighborhoods instead of the people who actually live in them? That seems completely backward.
Source: I have physically tried to build housing and been stopped by the city zoning board.
I wish reporters highlighted the stepped up basis tax loophole that causes the bizarre behavior, rather than claiming that grandmothers just can’t “afford” to sell. Many grandmothers would “afford” to sell their house if there were no tax benefit to holding it until death. Same with the “Buy, borrow, die” behavior that ProPublica reported on (https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...). Instead of advocating for an esoteric unconstitutional wealth tax, why didn’t they advocate for closing the loophole that creates the incentive?
1031 exchange by itself only defers taxes (which can be helpful for cash flow purposes). People combine it with the stepped up basis loophole to avoid taxes completely.
As for Proposition 13/58 inheritance, note that Proposition 19 (2020) restricted the inheritance benefit to only family homes and farms, so I don’t think inheritance is a widespread benefit anymore. Proposition 19 also made the property tax basis portable, so the increasing property tax is no longer an impediment to grandma moving.
(AIUI,) You can't 1031 exchange an owner-occupied property into a rental property. (1031 is a "like kind" exchange treatment and you can't take personal-use property and directly 1031 into business-use property.)
If I were facing that situation (as I might be 25-30 years from now), I'd surely not rob my children/grandchildren of part of their inheritance by paying capital gains while I am alive rather than passing it along with stepped-up basis after my and my wife's death.
"Whoa, hold on; we should change the law on that last point!" I hear you saying. And I might even agree, but unless/until we do, grandma is doing the obviously sensible thing by not selling while she's alive.
It turns out that there are thousands of problems various legislatures can choose to address. That they're addressing just a subset of the entire problem space with any given piece of legislation is a feature, not a bug.
In this case, the federal tax treatment of inherited property (problem 1) cannot be addressed by a California state-level legislature, but the latter can try to increase the supply of housing in CA (problem 2) by making ADU sales legal there.
> why is legislation moving forward that doesn't address the problem?
Helping multi-million dollar inheritances built on the housing shortage dodge taxation isn't the political winner it might have sounded like on first glance?
It's so bizarre, and if this solution is taken to its logical end, you literally have cities full of single-family homes with a class of SFH owners, and their second-class ADU "owners" who live in the fancy shed behind their home. I'm curious how the inevitable legal disputes between these two classes of owners will be treated in the coming years.