Poway might not be as restrictive as the city of San Diego… so you’ll have to check into this. San Diego has the most restrictive interpretation of the state laws for “companion units”. Here’s the rules for San Diego:
* lot size must be double what the minimum is for your zone. In our hood minimum lot size is 5k SF… so we needed at least 10k lot. In north park, where the lot size can be smaller, the lot only needed to be 7k SF.
* maximum SF of the companion unit is 700 SF. Since we were designing a wheelchair accessible place this limited us to a 1 br in order to have rooms that were big enough to have room for the wheelchair to manouver.
* San Diego required that we sign a deed restriction saying at least one of the houses would be owner occupied. In other words we can only rent one or the other house… not both.
* San Diego has a weird “street wall” rule for the offstreet parking spot for the companion unit. I doubt Poway (or any jurisdiction other than San Diego) has this. It basically requires that there is room in front and to the side of your house for an extra parking spot.
* San Diego requires that the companion unit be on the back part of your lot. For us that pushed us into hillside development, expensive grading, etc.
