{"id":8400,"date":"2025-10-17T15:40:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T15:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/8400\/"},"modified":"2025-10-17T15:40:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T15:40:10","slug":"small-backyard-apartments-for-affordable-housing-could-be-coming-to-cape-coral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/8400\/","title":{"rendered":"Small backyard apartments for affordable housing could be coming to Cape Coral"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>CAPE CORAL, Fla. \u2014 Cape Coral&#8217;s Affordable Housing Advisory Committee will meet Thursday to discuss allowing Accessory Dwelling Units (ADU), small apartments that homeowners could build on their property to help address the city&#8217;s housing concerns.<\/p>\n<p>See what the potential requirements could be to build an ADU in Cape Coral:<\/p>\n<p>Cape Coral housing committee considers allowing backyard apartments to address affordable housing concerns<\/p>\n<p>The committee is reconsidering the idea after the City Council advised staff not to move forward with it in July 2024.<\/p>\n<p>Thomas Senatore, vice chair of the Affordable Housing Advisory Committee, said the units could help bigger families but some people have expressed concerns about potential misuse.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The fear is they&#8217;re going to use them for rentals. They may become Airbnb. They&#8217;re going to bring in people that we don&#8217;t want in our neighborhoods,&#8221; Senatore said.<\/p>\n<p>However, he believes the units could serve a beneficial purpose for families.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;What I would hope they&#8217;d be used for, is for your elderly parents or your grandparents, where they can&#8217;t afford their rent anymore and they need a place to live,&#8221; Senatore said.<\/p>\n<p>Senatore says the proposed requirements would limit where these units could be built. While the average single-family home property in Cape Coral is 10,000 square feet, the proposed ordinance would require 40,000 square feet to build an accessory dwelling unit.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;You need to have a minimum of 40,000 square feet, which would be the equivalent of four buildable lots, or a total of eight lots, in order to put in an ADU, which most homes would not qualify,&#8221; Senatore said.<\/p>\n<p>He says this means the units would mainly be seen in northwest Cape Coral, where larger lots are more common.<\/p>\n<p>On Thursday, the committee will decide whether to send the recommendation back to the City Council for reconsideration.<\/p>\n<p>This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CAPE CORAL, Fla. \u2014 Cape Coral&#8217;s Affordable Housing Advisory Committee will meet Thursday to discuss allowing Accessory Dwelling&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8401,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[8645,8646,8647,7923,3862,209,263,211,210,832,8648,264,8649],"class_list":{"0":"post-8400","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cape-coral","8":"tag-accessory-dwelling-units","9":"tag-adu","10":"tag-affordable","11":"tag-apartment","12":"tag-bella-line","13":"tag-cape-coral","14":"tag-cape-coral-florida","15":"tag-cape-coral-headlines","16":"tag-cape-coral-news","17":"tag-city-council","18":"tag-committee","19":"tag-fox-4","20":"tag-granny-flat"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}