How the ADU Finder works

Type an address, and it reads your parcel and your town’s adopted code back to you — what you could build, how big, and what the rules actually say. Two minutes, no account, and every figure names where it came from.

Run your addressQuestions answered

Three steps

Type the address

Start typing and pick your property from the list. The finder matches against the county’s own address records, so the suggestion you choose is a real parcel rather than a guess at what you meant.

If your address does not appear, it usually means the property sits outside the jurisdictions we have read. The finder says so plainly rather than answering anyway.

Read the lot

The finder draws your parcel from the county’s boundary and lays your zoning district’s setbacks over it. The shaded area is roughly where a detached ADU could sit.

It is an envelope from the standards we hold — not a survey. It does not know about easements, utility lines, drainage or trees, and any of those can take space the drawing shows as free.

Read the rules that decide the project

Below the drawing are the rules your town actually adopted: how big an ADU may be, whether an owner has to live on the property, whether you owe an off-street parking space, and how tall it can be.

Every figure names the jurisdiction and the section it came from. That matters because these answers change street by street — the same question has different answers in towns ten miles apart.

Keeping your answer

There is no account and no sign-up. Two ways to find your reading again:

Copy the link

Every property has its own link. Copy it and you can come back to the same reading later, or send it to a contractor, a lender or a family member without them retyping the address.

Email it to yourself

If you would rather not keep a link, the finder will email it to you. That is the version most people actually find again six months later, when the idea comes back around.

What it will not tell you

Worth reading, because the limits are the reason to trust the rest.

It is a first pass, not an approval

Nothing here is a permit, a determination or legal advice. It is the reading a good designer would do in their first hour, done in a couple of minutes so you know whether the idea is worth an hour of anyone’s time.

Before you spend money on drawings, confirm the figures with your building department — and take the citations with you, because they are the fastest way to get a straight answer at the counter.

Where a rule turns on something we cannot see, it says so

Some answers depend on facts no map holds: what your neighbors actually built, whether your existing house has a sprinkler system, how far a structure sits from a line that has never been surveyed.

The finder names the rule and tells you which fact would settle it, rather than filling the gap with a plausible number. A confident wrong answer is worse than an honest question.

Coverage is deliberately narrow

We only answer for jurisdictions whose codes we have read end to end. That is why the list is shorter than it could be — an answer for a town we have skimmed is not worth having.

If your town is not covered yet, tell us. Requests are how we choose what to read next.

Try it on your own address

It takes about two minutes and costs nothing. If the answer is no, you will know that too — which is worth having before you pay anyone to draw something.

Run your addressADU rules by city

First-pass feasibility, not an approval, and not legal advice. Confirm every figure with your building department before you rely on it.

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