With escalating home prices in the Los Angeles County region, including the Santa Clarita area, many homeowners are turning to illegal garage conversions to add extra living space.
While this may seem like a great idea, it's actually not a safe choice. Garages are not fire safety-rated for living quarters and include extra hazards like water heaters, furnaces, washers and dryers.
In the City of Santa Clarita, standard 2-car garages cannot be legally converted into living quarters. Space for the third car in a 3-car garage can be legally walled off in some cases, but generally not for living quarters. A common use for the third car bay would be for a home gym.
Homeowners with these illegal garage conversions can be cited for various reasons, including creating a public nuisance, violating parking laws (too many cars), or for creating a visual nuisance in the area. Once reported, the City Inspector will request that the situation be corrected. If there is no response to this by the 3rd citation, then the case gets passed to the City Attorney for prosecution.
Cases of overcrowding that don't include illegal garage conversions are handled by the Los Angeles Department of Public Health.
For more information on the Santa Clarita Valley area, visit http://HoneyStartPacking.com/ and http://SantaClaritaRealEstateBlog.com/.
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Once again proof of how area specific real estate issues are. On Long Island it is very common to have garage conversions. It is never an issue, other than legalizing it before closing.
In Queens, the county just west of Nassau, it has been an issue in the past.
I think part of it concerns local building codes - here, garages are considered unsafe living spaces. And the most common residents of the converted areas are children. The City doesn't want to see more deaths of children that could have been easily prevented.
The second part of this is the neighborhood nuisance issue - if there are too many people living in a home, then it becomes a nuisance to the neighbors with the extra cars and all. Often it's a neighbor who reports the situation as a nuisance call rather than as an illegal garage conversion.
I am running into a similar problem out here on the East coast with people who turned their single-family into a multi-family home, but forgot the check with the county for zoning. I have had 4 properties where the property was not zoned correctly and extra kitchens had to be removed before they could continue.