A Small Fix for the Housing Crunch Is in Your Backyard

Alexis Rivas opens his Mac laptop and zooms in on a 3D rendering of a house in Echo Park, a hip neighborhood in Los Angeles. Set off from the main house, there’s a small, modern structure that his company, Cover Technologies Inc., hopes to build. “You’ve got the kitchen here, a little stovetop, fridge,” Rivas says as he navigates around the 502-square-foot unit with his cursor. “And then we can take a walk around and go into the bedroom.”

It’s the kind of design that would typically cost a few thousand dollars in architecture fees, says Rivas, who co-founded Cover Technologies in 2014. The Los Angeles outfit can put together a proposal for just $250, using software to determine whether a specific property meets local and state requirements for adding a backyard unit. If building is allowed, the company designs one of its modular, factory-built structures to fit the plot. Homeowners often hesitate to take on a project like this, Rivas says over the whir of a drill in his company’s workshop, because “they’re expected to put a lot of time or money into the process without really getting a clear picture of what they can build.”