United Dwelling Makes Affordable Housing Look High-End

United Dwelling has given affordable housing a new look. By streamlining the design process, the Culver City-based startup has created high-end, quality ADU designs with an affordable price tag for homeowners. ADUs have become a popular way to bring more affordable units to market in California, which has been suffering from a severe housing shortage.

“United Dwelling has streamlined the process of building an ADU by using innovative techniques to find cost efficiencies in how we conduct site preparation, build the units, and install them,” Steven Dietz, Founder and CEO of United Dwelling, tells GlobeSt.com. “We don’t start construction until we can build 4-5 units within a 3-minute drive of each other, allowing us to drastically save in labor and material costs. Once we start work on a homeowner’s property the entire process takes four-to-six weeks and we expect to decrease the time of that work even more over time.”

The housing shortage in California was the biggest crisis in the state, before the onset of the pandemic, and the state had eased the ADU development process for homeowners, among other housing models, to bring more supply to the market. “Our country continues to face an affordable housing crisis,” says Dietz. “Supply has not kept up with demand and increasing costs have resulted in a quarter of people in the country spending over 50% of their income on housing. Los Angeles County follows the national trend: the 2019 Area Median Income was $73,000 for the area while average rents hovered around $2,500 per month or $30,000 per year.”